We had something like that. It was called USENET. With the right reader and a decent ISP, it was great.

Usenet still exists though?

Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.

Yes Usenet is still around, it mainly for the downloading "LinuxISO's™"

> mindless nonsense

That's the vast majority of anything (aka Sturgeon's Law).

Soon to be "improved by AI".

Not really.

Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.

I don’t know about the better moderation part. With the right reader one could subscribe to a moderator of choice. That’s an elegant feature I’ve never seen anywhere since.

It's not even profitable _now_ with all their monetization. But their overhead is millions of $/year. There is precedent for non-profit sites of that size but it won't be easy.

Honestly with the amount of charity fundraising that reddit does, I bet they could pull it off. Just recently someone accidentally gave $15k to charity and in response, a bunch of users raised an additional $55k [1]. If they did intentional, annual fundraising with clear goals I wouldn't be surprised if reddit the non-profit organization could be self-sustaining.

But I'm just some guy on the internet who doesn't actually know anything about non-profits.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1456...

I also suspect their tech stack is a huge ball of bloated inefficiencies that costs them much much much more than the bare metal and the bandwidth would.

Python

Yeah, that costs a lot on a scale of reddit.

Thats actually the best structure for reddit because of its coopertive nature, and the difficulty of making money from it without compromising its essential nature.

are there lessons from Wikipedia ?

Yeah, that would definitely be close to the best model for reddit.

Considering how much money Wikipedia makes, that would be pretty amazing.

I'd feel a lot more comfortable giving my time to "the community" under an arrangement like that, too. The fediverse has its place, for sure, but I think a centralised platform run by a non-profit has the best chance of unseating Reddit in the short term.

It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.

I'd suggest raising money to buy Reddit from their investors, but this point I don't want Steve making a profit. I think it is basically possible to build a new Reddit that's run by a non-profit and (hopefully) stays off of variable cost infrastructure for stability.

I think Archive Of Our Own (AO3) solves a much easier problem (hosting bbcode text), and even then, after many years, they are unable to get enough volunteers to implement a direct message system. It's not quite apples and oranges, but I still don't think the same model could possibly work for Reddit. Yes, Reddit users have made some amazing tools for moderation, but they are still fully dependent on preexisting, complex engineering work by the Reddit employees, including the API. Maybe a better comparison would be Wikipedia, but again, much simpler problem.