[toomuchtodo]

Yeah, agree. I'm arguing for disintermediation of the community from the corporate entity attempting to squeeze as much value out of the community as possible (and in the process, being a hot potato from one company to the next). Communities deserve better (Stackoverflow and Wikipedia come to mind), and the technology primitives are stupid simple. Perhaps I've been reading too much Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow lately!

[SllX]

Philosophically? Sure. But with how the masses act and behave and take interest in, getting the critical mass of non-technical people you would need to make it work is a massive hurdle.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit will skate by with inertia for years to come no matter how suicidally they behave because they have mass appeal. Losing one audience doesn’t matter because they have millions of other audiences. You start up a social network that interests mainly technical people and the journalists that report on them, well it’s just not going to thrive because after the honeymoon period is over, the network just starts to look stale and slowly die off. E.g. Google+.

[toomuchtodo]

I concede these are all good points and I genuinely appreciate the discourse. Speaking only for myself, I see the challenges as:

1. Preserve the content and culture of these platforms for users and future historians (in the case of Reddit, Pushshift and the Internet Archive). UGC ("user generated content") belongs to users first and foremost.

2. Continue to find opportunities to reduce the moats of incumbents and the friction of standing up alternatives. If a site disappears, there should be little impact to anyone other than employees and shareholders.

3. Be ready to jump in and scale up when incumbents misstep (Signal and Telegram seeing huge membership jumps during Facebook's extended outage earlier this week, Digg's redesign helping Reddit's growth, etc).

[SllX]

That’s great but that’s an archival project, not a social network. There’s room for smaller networks to exist on the fringes but we’re unlikely to see a Reddit that looks like Reddit overtake Reddit on its own merits. The same for Facebook, or TikTok or Twitter.