I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.
Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
Reddit literally destroyed independent forums. That's such a huge swath of the internet and they effectively have a monopoly. Additionally, they top Google results for so many different subjects. I don't understand why they can't monetize that more.
They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at.
Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
I keep running into niche areas where the discussion group is on Facebook. Which annoys me to no end as I hate Facebook, but that's where the action is. It's not obvious to me that Facebook couldn't eat reddit's lunch.
I feel like every year in the past decade there has been some new Reddit clone. Reddit itself was open source for a while, so it used to be really easy. They never catch on.
I’m hoping some of these catch on but it seems those who are entrenched with power over social communications keep deplatforming these or character attacking them as some kind of extremist haven when most aren’t: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/oioeot/...
Tildes has been around a few years now I believe. I tried it in its early days, and checked it out again just now. Both times I’ve been impressed - it tends to have higher-quality comments and feel less… generally vapid that modern Reddit.
I used tildes for the better part of a year, unfortunately for me the cliquish nature and the fact that there are 12-15 power users with half the posts, who also congregate on the offsite discord, really ruined the website for me. I respect deimos and his goals greatly, but his community quickly became stressful to deal with.
It does sort of make me wonder what community need Reddit fulfills - discoverability/searchability? Single login? - because it's sort of a weird halfway house between forums (differing in that not searching, and duplicating an old thread is somewhat necessarily okay) and chat.
1. Relatively easy to create a subforum.
2. Someplace you can post [pseudo]anonymously.
3. Has a critical mass of people.
4. Is accessible to anyone on the web.
There's a subreddit for all sorts of topics, and if there isn't one, it's fairly easy to just start one. You don't have to deal with setting up forum software or paying someone for it, and if you want to you can create a post with a pseudoanonymous throwaway account. It's really easy to come and go, and there's enough moderation that it hasn't in general devolved into a *chan-style environment, but not so much it's alienating.
Pseudoanonymity is maybe underappreciated in social networking I think. It's really a key feature. Once you reach some mainstream critical mass, having that feature really moves things along.
If you could replicate those four things in a decentralized way, it might take off. But there's a chicken-and-egg issue with network effects.
What I mean is, Reddit to me seems a step closer to something like Discord. And yet Discord is apparently still necessary; so why Reddit, and not traditional forum + Discord?
I added 'single login' as an after thought, because it didn't occur to me at first, but I think that must be a big reason. But even then there's Discourse, with not single but much easier and OAuth (signup/)login.
The default state of a Discord is hidden. You need an invite link to join a "server." It is set up in a way that your meeting point is outside of Discord, usually real life, at least per their marketing material (irl groups are probably the most value in terms of ad revenue).
Reddit has a standardized layout, you don't have to learn a new interface. It has single sign on, so you don't have to create a new account to participate in a community (low friction) and it has the people. Also, it has the voting concept which helps filter content so you aren't having to do that yourself by scanning topics.
A "classic forum" trying to get off the ground would be competing with all of that. You could also argue, "why Discord? Why not IRC?" for much the same reasons.
But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.