Reddit is dependent on free work. Moderators are a significant portion of that process, and they are the ones who depend on the API the most. If your moderators decide to do less work, your community starts going down in quality. If the community goes down in quality, they will make the decision that a smaller community is better than a poorly run community and someone else will capture that use case.

The question is if that will happen before an IPO. Given the climate, that IPO may be two years away.

To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments.

If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.

Generally speaking, the issue with new startup competitors for social networks is that the first people they attract a critical mass of are people who got banned from the other sites for spam or excessive toxicity, and once they’re there they spook potential new people. It’s the online version of the “Nazi bar” problem.

It’s extremely hard to rebuild most of these high quality communities elsewhere. Often, it seems only the troublemakers/outliers are willing to move to another platform. They simply become a stain on the alternative platform.

There’s essentially two reddits in one: the default one and the enjoyable one. You don’t get the enjoyable one by default.

I promise you, Reddit won't be around in 50 years. And it may not be much in 5 the way they're disrespecting their core audience.

r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.

Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?

bogleheads?

* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.

* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.

* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.

Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.

Way too complex to navigate that minefield, lawyer fees will be a big hit on the budget of any reddit challenger.

Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it?

Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?

What are those places?

Mastodon is a good example and counterexample of this trend. Gab was the biggest Mastodon instance, largely populated by the kinds of people pre-Musk Twitter banned or limited (and their followers.)

But the second (post-Musk) wave wasn't people who got banned, it was people leaving because they didn't like Musk and/or his changes to Twitter. And Reddit's own userbase came from Digg in much the same way.

Imagine if Mastodon had been easy to migrate to, Twitter would have collapsed like a popped balloon.

Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.

To the point that quite a number of subreddits that have been banned, or that have been voluntarily shut down, have already set up their own clones on their own domains. t_d, drama, and fds are three notable examples that I can think of off the top of my heads.

One already exists in Lemmy.

I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.

This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit.

> Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI.

It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative.

But anyway...

...AI really is going just great. /s

Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.