Every time you upset your user base, you give them an opportunity to leave. Or, you turn your advocates into neutral. They stop being willing to do free work for you.

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.

Not only does it rely on the labor of mods and dealing with a lot of bad behavior. However, the admins also enforce a "code of conduct" on the mods and threaten the loss of the sub for lack of compliance.

Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site?

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.

The issue is also that the right people need to come.

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.

That's why I suggested piggybacking on HN's karma points.

Do you visit niche or speculate topics? They have far better communities than any of the default communities. My observation is comment quality scales with complexity of the topic.

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.

Yeah. A new platform needs to offer something fun or interesting in its own right to attract users. Otherwise it's going to be an island prison for the worse members of the old community.

A golden rule of using Reddit has been to unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and subscribe to niche interest ones. /r/politics etc are huge but they’re dumpster fires.

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

The internet is still young, but full of once successful than failed social media sites. Myspace, digg, Friendster, Orkut, Google+, Vine, LiveJournal, etc..

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.