[maxk42]

I've lead two successful community "unbundling" efforts from reddit. Here are a few tips if you're thinking of doing the same:

(1) You HAVE to kill the original community. Otherwise momentum will keep your users using the old community. Our first launch saw a successful small website take off initially after it was launched only to have traffic slowly die down over the next several months. What finally got it off the ground and growing again was killing the original reddit community. There's no way around this.

(2) There WILL be resistance and/or a drop-off in users. The good news is now there are a lot more opportunities to grow your community: Advertising, cross-site collaborations, guest blog posts, etc.

(3) Do not strive for feature parity with reddit. Instead, strive to deliver MORE value. For instance changemyview could add categorization features. Maybe a search function that lets you search for posts that have been tagged as "view changed successfully!" or "view not changed".

(4) You have to have a business model. Selling advertising or taking donations are NOT business models. There was a time when it made sense but many online communities - reddit particularly - are averse to viewing ads. If you're not creating something, selling something, or taking a commission then you haven't got a business model. One model which can be successful for larger communities: Premium membership subscriptions. You just have to make sure the premium features provide sufficient value that people want to subscribe without making non-subscribers feel like you're just limiting features to be greedy.

(5) If you have multiple moderators - incorporate.

[mjmayank]

This is really interesting to hear about. Were you the creator of both communities that you unbundled from Reddit? Or did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan? Also how did the users react when you killed the community?

[maxk42]

> Were you the creator of both communities that you unbundled from Reddit?

In both cases I was not the original creator but was a longstanding moderator who inherited an active community.

> did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan?

They brought me on board with theirs.

> how did the users react when you killed the community?

Positively. Reddit as a corporation isn't actually well-liked by the majority of the community. Poor administration policies, poor design changes, slow UI - there's a lot to complain about.

There were, of course, a few who loudly complained. But there will be a few who loudly complain about any change or no change at all.

[mjmayank]

Nice! Would you be willing to share the new sites you operate?

>But there will be a few who loudly complain about any change or no change at all.

Totally agree

[BitwiseFool]

(1a) Wait for the target subreddit to get big enough so that the quality drops like a rock and gets filled with barely related content from astroturfers and karma farmers.

Jokes aside, it's such a shame to see subreddits explode in popularity and then get filled with low quality content that moderators don't even care to curate.