I think a place like reddit should be a non-profit foundation rather than a business. The Archive Of Our Own community was able to do it, the reddit community can do it too.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable giving my time to "the community" under an arrangement like that, too. The fediverse has its place, for sure, but I think a centralised platform run by a non-profit has the best chance of unseating Reddit in the short term.
It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.
I'd suggest raising money to buy Reddit from their investors, but this point I don't want Steve making a profit. I think it is basically possible to build a new Reddit that's run by a non-profit and (hopefully) stays off of variable cost infrastructure for stability.
Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.
I don’t know about the better moderation part. With the right reader one could subscribe to a moderator of choice. That’s an elegant feature I’ve never seen anywhere since.
Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.
Thats actually the best structure for reddit because of its coopertive nature, and the difficulty of making money from it without compromising its essential nature.
It's not even profitable _now_ with all their monetization. But their overhead is millions of $/year. There is precedent for non-profit sites of that size but it won't be easy.
Honestly with the amount of charity fundraising that reddit does, I bet they could pull it off. Just recently someone accidentally gave $15k to charity and in response, a bunch of users raised an additional $55k [1]. If they did intentional, annual fundraising with clear goals I wouldn't be surprised if reddit the non-profit organization could be self-sustaining.
But I'm just some guy on the internet who doesn't actually know anything about non-profits.
I also suspect their tech stack is a huge ball of bloated inefficiencies that costs them much much much more than the bare metal and the bandwidth would.
I think Archive Of Our Own (AO3) solves a much easier problem (hosting bbcode text), and even then, after many years, they are unable to get enough volunteers to implement a direct message system. It's not quite apples and oranges, but I still don't think the same model could possibly work for Reddit. Yes, Reddit users have made some amazing tools for moderation, but they are still fully dependent on preexisting, complex engineering work by the Reddit employees, including the API. Maybe a better comparison would be Wikipedia, but again, much simpler problem.
It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.