[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?

[mtrower]

Not only do you lose the community as already mentioned, but you lose the accumulated data (i.e. post content). This might not matter for a social community; it matters a lot if the community is of a more technical nature; i.e. repair/modding, analysis, etc. A lot of really great and useful content has been lost over the years due to forums going dark; lose a site like reddit and... my god. It's just really a huge step backward.

N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.

[fsflover]

Because you usually loose a large part of the community on the way?

[Eisenstein]

I'm fine with that. Massive popularity is a poison pill.

[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.