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.