[giantrobot]

The stupidest part of all of this is all Reddit's problems are self inflicted. Reddit the company produces almost nothing. Reddit the users make the site what it is. The users submit all the content, make all the comments, and moderate the site.

Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.

Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.

[dorkwood]

Well to be fair, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for all these users to go, right? So the executives do provide something.

[d4mi3n]

Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist.

It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc.

Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather.

I have to wonder why they didn’t just start off charging reasonable prices for the API and dial things up over time. Crummy either way, but less likely to alienate literally everyone they depend on to make the system work.

[matkoniecz]

> both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist

Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.

[beowulfey]

There are a lot of alternatives that replicate Reddit's functionality. I've tested out three or four of them over the years.

The quality differences are 100% due to the differences in the communities. They are social deficits, not technical ones.

[sebzim4500]

I think it would be pretty easy to make a clone, but everyone who tries seems to end up getting nerdsniped making something federated instead.

[fsflover]

Only federation defends from what is now happening with Reddit. See Freenode and Libera Chat.

[sebzim4500]

Reddit was great for a decade, why can't we just switch website every 10 years?

[sterlind]

Why use an alternative when you can use the real thing? Reddit was open-source until 2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

I think that qualifies at trivial.

[matkoniecz]

Running things like this is not exactly trivial, even if code works run well as-is 6 years later

[chrischattin]

Creating a decent Reddit clone is a weekend project. I've done similar stuff as a demo teaching an hour long 'Intro to Rails' class at the local code school.

[dorkwood]

I’ll admit I don’t know much about the back end. I’m not that sort of dev. Is anyone working on a reddit clone to deploy, then? If there was ever a time, it’s now.

[TheAnachronism]

There exists Lemmy, which is a fediverse alternative. From what I've heard, the development of it, is a bit messy, but it seems to work well enough and has potential.