If I had the time I'd work on a Reddit clone without the new redesign and ads. Run it completely funded by Wikipedia-style donations, then turn it over to the community for governance.

Reddit's money grabs piss me off.

To bootstrap the thing I'd crawl Reddit and copy threads, users, subreddits, comments - everything. Users could prove account ownership or create any account that wasn't already allocated. If Reddit sues, they'd face backlash. Comments all used to be GFDL (then Creative Commons) anyway.

There is at least one established anti-reddit, Voat and there's an open source version of it.

Voat is a great place to go for people skeptical about Jews, non-whites, the overweight and transsexuals to freely share their... concerns.

So I don't think software is sufficient to compete, you need heavy community moderation.

Have you tried using some third-party app for Reddit? "Reddit is fun" works pretty great for me, no nonsense and good usability.

Apps are too risky.

The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.

There are good FOSS reddit clients for android. Build one then install it.

That may be, but how long do you expect them to allow 3rd party apps?

Once they can get 3rd party usage below a certain threshold of engagement, they'll block the API.

"Reddit Is Fun" is great and has been around for years, the unfounded belief that they may block access one day isn't really a valid reason to not use it.

They've been allowing for a good while so hopefully for a bit more at least.

TBH if they block third party I'm done with them. Def won't be accepting the default user experience.

I bought Sync for Reddit to get rid of ads. I've used it for maybe two years. Even if they block it tomorrow it would have been worth it because the experience has been tremendous. If I'm forced to go back to the official app I'll just stop using Reddit on my phone.

And also, they'll get third party usage below a certain threshold if people don't use it so... Don't help them!

> If I had the time I'd work on a Reddit clone without the new redesign and ads. Run it completely funded by Wikipedia-style donations

Already exists and made by one of the earlier reddit employees: https://tildes.net

Indeed. Anyone interested should check out the initial announcement on the blog: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

Privacy oriented, open source, user funded, focused on quality content, aiming to develop a user-centric moderation system like slashdot and stack exchange that puts moderation into the hands of the people who participate in each individual community.

If you have a reddit account, you can visit /r/tildes and leave a reply in the sticky invite thread to get an invite code within a day. Or, you can send an email to [email protected] to get one.

It's worth noting that Tildes is created and operated by Deimos, the same guy who created reddit's automoderator and subredditsimulator.

My impression is that Reddit, Twitter and Quora are completely broken on mobile. My only possible conclusion is that these companies don't care about mobile users. Or at least not about casual mobile users who don't have the app installed. (I'm certainly not going to install a separate app for every website I visit; I already have a browser for that.)

I find twitter to be quite usable in mobile safari. I have the app too, but usually find myself still browsing in safari.

Quora is just a broken site right now, mobile or not.

reddit OTOH still seems to work okay on desktop. For a plaintext discussion forum that I prefer to read anonymously, theyve reaaaally screwed the pooch on mobile. I aboid reddit links whenever possible now, which is... sad.

Quora is now working fine for me on mobile Firefox, but it was completely broken a week ago. Twitter refuses to show any content at all half of the time.

Some of this could of course be related to privacy settings in Firefox.