They are also the reason I think people stick around on Reddit.
Users show up for popular stuff like memes and videos. But they can get that anywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are all finely tuned infinite scrolling content machines. They stick around on Reddit because they find out that their "niche" interests have whole communitues of 20,000 other people there to talk about them.
Sadly this is also something I don't think many of the competitors can accurately reproduce in any kind of short timescale. It took over a decade for Reddit to build these organically, and they are really only sustainable because of the sheer size of Reddit's userbase. 20,000 users on a niche subreddit represents a microscopic fraction of Reddit's 430 million active users, so when you scale that down to an alternative with 2 million users (almost 20x Kbin's population) you end up with only a handful of users.
Some of these communities are going back to forums, but that isn't a real replacement either. A user subscribed to 5 niche subreddits no longer gets one place to see all their stuff, they have 5 separate forums they need to follow, and all the usability problems that come with them.
Users show up for popular stuff like memes and videos. But they can get that anywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are all finely tuned infinite scrolling content machines. They stick around on Reddit because they find out that their "niche" interests have whole communitues of 20,000 other people there to talk about them.
Sadly this is also something I don't think many of the competitors can accurately reproduce in any kind of short timescale. It took over a decade for Reddit to build these organically, and they are really only sustainable because of the sheer size of Reddit's userbase. 20,000 users on a niche subreddit represents a microscopic fraction of Reddit's 430 million active users, so when you scale that down to an alternative with 2 million users (almost 20x Kbin's population) you end up with only a handful of users.
Some of these communities are going back to forums, but that isn't a real replacement either. A user subscribed to 5 niche subreddits no longer gets one place to see all their stuff, they have 5 separate forums they need to follow, and all the usability problems that come with them.