Still, I do think Reddit definitely needs more alternatives because their moderation system is broken with power-tripping moderators, and the community admins don't want to do anything about it.
There is something deeply wrong with Reddit's moderation system. In many subreddits, moderatos seem to ban or reomve content simply because it doesn't align with their preferences. To top that, the built-in filters can be frustratingly aggressive. The questions is surely how to improve the content moderation in a different way.
In niche subreddits it bothers me less, because if somebody cares enough they can go spin up their own. What really freaks me out is when it happens in a huge/important (from a societal perspective) community. For example, getting exiled from your local community subreddit (the sole online platform for discussion surrounding it) is a pretty serious situation.
It's weird for reddit clones to pretend they're anything but a small subreddit in scale. This site has a "discover" feature, "topics" (its own subreddits), "tuning" (huh?), user following, probably dms too, and it displays an extremely truncated version of every thread's top comment as you scroll by - so you don't waste your time going to the discussion page?
All of these features result in atomization of an already tiny content pool. This is the opposite of what you need to jumpstart a reddit clone. This is a mental exercise in "how much better could I make reddit if I had its user base?" You don't have the users though, so you're doing the wrong thing.
You want people to comment on each other's posts, right? Then you should basically show every post to every user... the bitter reality is that you need users to engage with content they didn't plan to engage with. That doesn't mean outrage farming, it can/should mean being a high quality source of info, questions, culture - all on one page.
Hackernews understands this, or - if it doesn't - it at least plays by the rule of "have ONE good frontpage." That's also how reddit started.
After a few weeks of that app stores, search engines and possibly even payment processors would block Reddit because of the egregiously inadequate enforcement against links to malware, piracy, rightly illegal categories of pornography and spam. Not that the current system isn't immensely terrible but mod abuse is the downside that comes with the upside: the only method that has been found for Reddit to have the trifecta of effective spam link removal at scale, legal good standing and finances in the black. Reddit is no Instagram to get away legally with automated removals having a 2% false negative rate.
What is needed is discovery of a better business model.
Totally agree. It was discovered that the main moderator of my local states sub Reddit actually lived in an adjacent state. When this was discovered, I found it very subversive as “how could a person living out of my own state moderate my neighbors opinions?“ Additionally, they would use posts history in a different but legally connected other subreddit as a main reason to ban you from their subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1umrhpz...
Still, I do think Reddit definitely needs more alternatives because their moderation system is broken with power-tripping moderators, and the community admins don't want to do anything about it.
All the best!