[tremere]

Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away.

This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.

[lyu07282]

I think the problem is really that we need platforms such as reddit on the internet, they are kind of part of its essential infrastructure. But running any infrastructure under the profit maximization scheme will always end up in self destruction. They are making enough money, they can easily go on keeping the API open, but there is no such thing as a sustainable business, they are forced to make more profit than they made more last year.

But I think in truth they can do a lot before really destroying themselves, closing 3rd party apps is going to be barely noticable. In theory we could have some sort of decentralized dApp alternative, but since everyone working on that sort of stuff is a borderline criminal scam artist I don't see anything real will ever come out of this grift.

[wintermutestwin]

>But running any infrastructure under the profit maximization scheme will always end up in self destruction.

That's why the parts of the internet that are "essential infrastructure" would serve us all better if they were non-profit (or a Benefit Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).

Watching the promise of the Internet get flushed down the drain, I have developed a healthy appetite for paying cash to eliminate surveillance, ads and general enshitification. I'd much rather donate that cash to an organization that is actively trying to provide a public benefit.

[pierat]

I still maintain that Usenet was the original 'reddit/digg'. And the webapps competitors have tried to cater, and fail.

I'd rather see a newer Usenet protocol... Say something that also integrates with the Fediverse. But there's no "money" for open protocols, even though companies again and again try to emulate "Usenet, but profitized".

This feels like a longer tail of the image hosting problem, btw.

[SirensOfTitan]

I don’t think you need to go full Reddit to replace it, just an interest in a niche and a desire to host a website.

The struggle is that it takes more than love of a subject to bootstrap a community. I could see someone broadly succeeding by building modern forum software alongside an optional discovery platform that links forums together. I know there are federated platforms out there, but I think a large portion of them have lost the thread of the user journey in attempts to meet the technical challenges of federation.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Reddit's charm is that you can easily discover brand new communities and it's zero friction to get involved, you find a new subreddit and start interacting. No need to remember the new site or set up new credentials. A bunch of different communities adds all that friction back in.

[dave-at-koor]

I agree with your first statement. For years, I have been working on a website/app/community platform to support learning and debate about the productive uses of nuclear energy.

My vision is more of a combination of the best of Reddit, online courses, blogging, photos, video, learning games, and simulations. More of a slice across many different types of app, tuned to the topic at hand that interests me. It's fun to work on, even if my progress is slow.

Reproducing r/nuclear seems like a nightmare scenario. Lots of arguing. Tough to control the tone and screen out-dated information. It's the classic problem with social media, discerning the difference between reality and myth. Plus, reading through screaming matches is not a fun way to learn.

Aggregating these smaller nightmarish sites, who wants to do that?

[makestuff]

Does Reddit actually make any money though or do they run in the red?

[ruleforty]

It’s looking like the answer to your question is probably blood red: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/fidelity-...

[makestuff]

Yeah so OPs point about "making plenty of money" isn't really true. Now, I'm sure they could pull a twitter and layoff 75% of the company and reach profitability.

[lyu07282]

No this is the entire point I'm making, they are not interested in creating a sustainable infrastructure for the internet, they want investors they want to IPO they want to grow and grow and grow. If they destroy themselves in the process it's a bet everyone invested along the way is perfectly fine with, demanding even. The entire structure of this is cancerous.

[makestuff]

Yeah I get your point now, I agree the entire grow at all costs is not good for building a sustainable company. Investors are never happy with normal growth rates, they want exponential growth which isn't possible after a certain point without ruining your product.

[danudey]

Let's be clear though: this is exactly what happened.

Digg was the place to go, and then they fucked it up and everyone migrated to Reddit. Now Reddit is fucking it up, and even if everyone migrates somewhere else, that new somewhere else is going to fuck it up too once they get to the point of "we need to be profitable at all costs".

What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use so that they don't start mining us for ad clicks as soon as they think they can get away with it, because as long as users are going to insist on everything being free companies are going to need to do shit like this to us at every opportunity.

[diablerouge]

Everyone says "users need to pay" but there's a second alternative that is, imo, much better: technical folk run servers for their friends and families.

This is how the fediverse works, and it's _vastly_ better than any subscription service (not least because it means that anyone, regardless of financial situation, can find a server to be a part of.)

There's a fedi version of Reddit (lemmy) but it seems to have been a bit of a half-cooked design, rather than something that could truly take over for Reddit anytime soon.

[becquerel]

In short, it's time to return to SomethingAwful. Everything old is new again! Do you have stairs in your house!

[radnor]

I am protected.

[smolder]

I agree that we should be better off in a world where people paid for things with money and not their privacy. But paying with privacy happens even for paid-for products, e.g. "smart TVs" and phones, Windows, internet connections, driving your car in public, digital cable.

First they said no one had to pay, and they subjected us to ads... Then, they said, well, you'll have to pay, if you don't want to see our increasingly annoying ads... Then, they got our money. Then, they decided to subject us to ads, again...

[sgift]

No, what we need is someone who is just happy with a business that pays for itself and gives a healthy profit for the owner, not "omfg, shitloads of money". Reddit is - as far as I know - profitable. All employees are paid, all costs are paid, and the owners get their share. That's a stable arrangement. Greed is what's unbalancing it. And despite what some people think: Greed is not good. And Gordon Gecko was the villain.

[lubesGordi]

My recollection of the great migration to reddit was because Digg was crashing. That's probably the only reason Reddit has stayed up as long as it has, it's back end eng has held up. I'm open to being schooled here.

[Dah00n]

>What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use

Yes and that will most likely work great the same day that communism will. If users pay X the corporation wants X + Y. It is an age-old problem from way before the internet. Can you name one company that is okay with a healthy profit that doesn't get better over time? For example if they take costs and have X profit, will anyone still say X is fine with 100 times more users? After all it should become cheaper per user and theres zero reason the profit should go up. In my opinion the only way that will happen is with governments doing this - and not a government like in the US but more like Norway.

[c7DJTLrn]

There have been challengers, but they're always swarmed by undesirable vagrants kicked off of reddit.

[6D794163636F756]

Folding ideas has a video on vidme that goes into this. A competitor that can't sell itself on features will inevitably gain traction most with those banned from the original platform. Currently that means a new platform will have very angry, very extreme voices. That is a terrible way to start a platform.

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI

[johnnyanmac]

A quote that ringed in my mind for years after wondering why this keeps happening.

>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

For the most part, people are fine as long as the boat does rock TOO much, and for the most part Reddit's boat hasn't rocked to the extent Digg did back in the day. It may not even be possible for that to happen with the current population of users. Digg's exodus happened in 2005-6 right before the big boom of social media in 2008-10. The users were generally pretty saavy back then.

These days? Everyone uses social media, and inevitably with any mainstream, most people will only use it very casually, perhaps amongst a small friend group or for very casual browsing. They never comment,they may never even check comments. As long as the content comes, they won't even be aware of the sausage underneat from power users. But they are also the real lifeblood of the site.

These sorts of sites may be too big to fail now. You can't promote a site based on "hey we're not X". It just needs to have the right content at the right time a la TikTok. Sadly, one big incentive of that may include monetizing people for making posts and participating, and that sort of goes against the whole premise of the classic internet forums of the 90's/00's

[bazmattaz]

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US.

I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul.

If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes - (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content

I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself

[JKCalhoun]

> I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US.

I don't think traffic is indicative of whether a site has outstayed its cultural relevance (or efficacy).

I imagine HN readers can list off any number of sites that were in the top 10 traffic-wise and then suddenly were gone.

[fathyb]

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps?

Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?

> invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is

They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss.

> try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content

They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that.

I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.

[marginalia_nu]

> Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?

Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.

It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.

The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.

It's not because the issue hasn't been reported either. https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1

The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.

[giantrobot]

> The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.

A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.

[almenon]

I've never had that bug, although I'm on chrome.

[marginalia_nu]

I've definitely gotten it with chrome (and chrome-based browsers), Safari's apparently affected as well, although it seems worst on firefox. Depends on what you paste. Seems to be some unicode in Chrome, vs anything in FF.

[toyg]

> Mostly ads

3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app.

Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's happening a bit more every day) while not quite managing to be the other thing.

The social space is obsessed with "competition by copycat", instead of focusing on their core strenghts. Maybe because they all fear to be destroyed by this or that novelty feature, they all end up looking the same, regardless of whether it makes sense.

[rchaud]

The app I use is "Now for Reddit", and their ads (Google Ads) were very unobtrusive, a tiny strip of pixels at the bottom of the viewport. Reddit's ads are right there in the feed as you scroll, like Twitter or Instagram.

I paid $5 to get rid of the ads anyway.

[lelanthran]

ITYM Damp squib.

All squids are already damp.

[Semaphor]

> Mostly ads

Mostly features.

[raydev]

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps?

Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?

[mywittyname]

Not the OP, but yeah. If something is so bad that >1% of users go through the pain of changing it, then it's probably annoying many more users. Do those <99 % users do something else about the problem, i.e., use the app less often.

[danudey]

People are using third-party apps because they're not trying to be all things to all people, while also constantly pivoting to handle whatever it is that management thinks the business should try out next.

[vehemenz]

I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on creating good communities like the Reddit of yesteryear.

Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore.

We need to go back to purposely small communities.

[samtho]

I don’t think the lowering of the average age is necessary one of the problems, but the fact that some of the new users are posing this problem is a symptom of a bigger one. They tend to comprise of many of the armchair-experts because a good deal of them learned very early to value engagement and good messaging over accuracy.

Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.

The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.

Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.

I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.

[vehemenz]

I'd agree that age by itself isn't a problem. It's the correlates. Younger people are more likely to be using the mobile app, where the engagement is lower quality. They are less likely to have completed their formal education, let alone to have attended college. They are more likely to practice an intolerant form of politics and activism, which makes discussion on certain subjects nearly impossible outside of niche subs.

> Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality.

The karma system has other arguably worse side effects. It incentivizes people to downvote things they disagree with and upvote things they agree with. I'd wager many of Reddit's longtime users think this is the point of karma, rather than a signifier of a post's effort and/or quality.

I agree that the incentive structure needs to change if Reddit or any competitor can remain viable places for discussion.

[johnnyanmac]

Moderation isn't impossible. FREE Moderation probably is, yes. I wouldn't call myself a power user here on HN, but from my understanding the moderation here is done by one admin who is part of YCombinator.

I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.

>We need to go back to purposely small communities.

I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.

Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.

[randunel]

Communities used to be on specialised forums and blogs. I've watched my favourite specialised blogs turn off comments because of bot spam, and I've watched forums raise the sign up bar and browsing restrictions for similar reasons. Reddit's anti-spam measures plus moderation makes it a much more decent experience.

[omar12]

> Communities used to be on specialised forums and blogs.

Now these communities are on Discord, which is not the friendliest to look for archived knowledge. If Discord can solve the UX for knowledge share, I can see it as the product with the better chance of replacing Reddit.

[account42]

I hope not. Discord is outright hostile to the open internet and should not be considered an archive for anything.

[nazgulsenpai]

There was a little website called ruqqus that emerged for a while. It was mostly people fleeing reddit so it quickly filled with "far right" and "far left" extremes, but that kinda made it interesting. However after only a few months of having to moderate the creator noped out because no human should have to see the things a moderator of a public web forum would have to see.

Its going to be a tough road for anyone who wants to create a public web forum at any scale especially if they get brigaded.

[lubesGordi]

Before the migration from Digg, reddit was full of libertarians. Actually, same with Digg, in 2003.

[conradfr]

Coding a reddit-like website must not be too difficult, even if you need mobile apps, but if you're expected to host images and videos while combating GPT bots the infrastructure needs and cost are at a high level right from the start.

[dom96]

Coding it is easy, getting traction with users is the hard part. I'm honestly tempted to build one but I dread building it and having it be a ghost town because getting people to adopt sites like this is tough.

[justaman]

The trick seems to be keeping it targeted towards one unique and tight nit community. Then opening the doors for those users to branch out. Like if you had a "subreddit" for an MMORPG where community is already a key attribute.

[this_user]

It is a similar problem to YT. Coding the site would not be that hard, but running it at scale is. Moreover, it's expensive. That is what reddit has struggled with itself, because the platform doesn't monetise their users as heavily as Google or Meta, and has always had more open and laissez-faire approach.

The only way to launch a competitor that is profitable is by going the Google/Meta way, but then users will just stay on reddit. Otherwise you need deep pockets or lots of VC money, but why would they invest in reddit clone that will just end up in the same place that the original finds itself in?

As for the corporations, you need them and their ad money, unless you want to run a subscription model. But that doesn't work either, because the majority of users will just stick to the free sites if you try.

[stiltzkin]

There has been alternatives sites even some working with ActivityPub as Lemmy or some in development in Nostr, there is a sub r/redditalternatives which was created since the Ellen Pao fiasco.

[amykhar]

It would be good for users - not sure it would make sense for a company though. The third party apps stripped ads. You have to be able to make money. I think the actual mistake was having it open in the first place. You can't give away things for free from the start and then take it away.

A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.

[babypuncher]

Some challengers appeared in the mid-2010s but most were toxic cesspools like Voat.

[suddenexample]

Ironically, I think Google has by far the most to gain from spinning up a non-profit-seeking Reddit clone in house, as it implicitly benefits search advertising by increasing the value of search.

[roflyear]

A news aggregate site would be really cool. With news split to categories.

[holler]

> and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site.

Have been building an alternative at https://sqwok.im, the twist is that it uses realtime chat instead of comments, and no voting currently.