I genuinely cannot tell if this is satire.
A lot of subreddits are bastions of information for sometimes very niche topics. I frequently run into reddit posts that are 6+ months old but still relevant to what I'm seeking knowledge about. Outside of the programming sphere, posts from years ago generally still hold value.
Saving posts would imply that I knew what Future Me wants to look up, or praying that someone was interested and cached it. Writeups/insightful discussion would be completely wasted, and I would have to find -another- website for potential caches of things relevant to what I'm looking for.
It would be like IRC where people delve into the same topics and arguments ad infinitum.
If I wanted an ephemeral social network (like snapchat) I would use an ephemeral social network, like snapchat.
While I don't doubt that's the case, it's incredibly difficult to get at old content due to Reddit's horrible search experience. I never look up anything old there.
site:reddit.com or site:reddit.com/r/nichesubreddit <query> is how I actually find things. Lately I actually have begun to cache important things locally, but I wouldn't assume anyone else is doing that for the particular topics or niche subsection of a topic that I'm looking up.
This is what a * chan does. N pages of content max; anything more, and the oldest thread will be "dropped off" the site.
Combined with anonymous-by-default posting, it works fairly well.
>There's next to zero value in looking up old posts. I don't know why this hasn't been done.
This is not really true; there's tons of good information that gets lost. On most * chans, this was recovered by screenshotting the thread and sharing the image around; today there are auto-archiving sites for the larger * chans, and people just link to that. But the culture still prefers sharing (edited, MS Paint) screenshots around.
Or just get rid of the false binary between centralized control/data (silo model) and decentralized resource-consuming p2p apps (blockchain model).
Federation models provide a sane alternative and have proven scalable/maintainable in the long run (see email/xmpp).
For federated web protocols, see ActivityPub, Linked Data or WebSub. Outside the web, there's the old and wise XMPP.
A new Reddit
- but with the Wikipedia funding model
- with Snapchat's ephemerality
- an amazing API and all open source code
- all submissions cc-by-sa licensed
Since profit isn't a motive, it would encourage the proliferation of new frontends and clients. As well as really cool mashups (haven't heard that term in awhile - probably due to increasingly closed ecosystems.)
Without having to save user generated content you can save tremendously on servers. You don't have to scale other than enough to handle the fire hose. Everything could reside in memory. Just Redis and Rust.
The content gets scrubbed after a week. No sharded storage is necessary. But due to the license, others can persist content they like.
There's next to zero value in looking up old posts. I don't know why this hasn't been done.