Which is funny because Internet forums used to be a software package you acquire and run on your own servers. No one really asked for a centralized system where you didn't have any control. It seems pretty straight-forward to go back to that original idea.

Anyone reading this can spin a discord namespace ("guild"/"server") and that's what reddit is competing with, even if they don't realize that.

I think youre right. People are always trying to imagine the next reddit and its not going to be some clone like voat or whatever. Hackernews is actually a lot like reddit used to be but its not going to scale to reddits size without subreddits, or the like.

I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.

Discord is tomorrow’s Reddit, except it’s even more siloed and it can’t be indexed.

Half of my reddit usage is "X review Reddit". Discord would never fill in that niche.

Yes, true. I'm not a defender or proponent of discord by any measure, but I do see them as the most serious competitor for the same kind of communities that hang out on the more focused subreddits.

That is irrelevant. They are offering a service. If you find value in it then pay for it. Otherwise use something else.

They don't really offer a service, though. They just built a toll gate and tricked people into needing to cross through it. An ever-increasingly annoying, crappy toll gate at that.

Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.

Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities