I would joke that 9gag is the natural Reddit competitor, but I also want to point out that somehow 9gag is a YC startup.

9gag is a competitor for the “shitposting” part of Reddit, but not for the serious part.

And I can’t believe it’s YC!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4313644

I think this lack of competitor is the key. When. people talk about Digg dying, that was during the Reddit vs Digg period.

Now it's Reddit vs what?

Many people love a drama so will beef this event up, but I suspect they will be back to usual soon enough. At the same time I feel Reddit should respond to this with something positive for general goodwill as there is value in that for the day there is an alternative.

While never going to actually happen, I'd find it funny if people flooded to communities.win, the forum Trump supporters setup when they were pushed off Reddit. Would be great irony.

> Now it's Reddit vs what?

For tech news, you are looking at it.

For everything else there is YouTube + comment section, stack exchange, Discord channels, …

People don’t really need a “clone” replacement.

There’s a niche of medium lived discussions that are paced slowly and contextualized that the model of hn and reddit serve. The examples you gave don’t seem to fit.

People use Reddit in different ways. I suspect for many, those examples are perfectly good substitutes.

> Now it's Reddit vs what?

Nothing is an option. Separately from the API drama, I’ve been questioning whether Reddit is a net benefit in my life. Everyone can draw their own conclusion to that question, and I won’t try to convince anyone.

However, for myself, if I’m forced to use the official desktop or mobile app, I’m definitely not going to use Reddit at all, alternative or not.

Anecdotal feeling alert: I think some people won't need an alternate. I am just letting reddit go. I don't get enough value from it to care of it exists anymore. I let Twitter go after the free speech absolutists super sensitive filter flagged me for saying I hope Microsoft burns for what a nightmare they've made their os (trying to help a non savvy user use a local account), I did the automated appeal assuming context would clear the time honored practice of telling businesses to go to hell, when it didn't I just let it go. I'm not deleting that tweet just to participate in that trash hole.

Reddit was a convenient insomniac doom scroll. It can go.

This is a good take. I’m getting nothing out of Reddit. It’s time to touch some grass.

Using less social media is probably a good idea in general. Plus HN and lobsters can replace the technical reddit communities.

HN is way too generalist to even replace /r/programming (I'd say that only ~25% of the main page is technical stuff), not even talking about subreddits dedicated to specific technologies.

I never used Reddit the way you describe. I use it as a forum for niche interests and it’s decent for that. Similar to php based forums but it’s one login and plenty of participants.

Tech can go elsewhere. The niche interests can't. At least not as easily.

The obvious competitor for those is still Facebook, but FB's algo is actively hostile to the long-list-of-active-forums UX that makes Reddit work so well.

There absolutely have been exoduses from reddit before, and many of the resulting sites still exist.

However, in general, these were driven by Reddit banning some sort of abhorrent content, so they were kinda self-limiting; few normal people would want to use a reddit clone that was 90% populated with the denizens of r/fatpeoplehate or the upskirt people or whatever other sort of horrible weirdos were impacted by reddit's bans.

This is really pretty different, in that it impacts the average user (or at least the average power user) so might potentially lead to more reasonable breakaway communities.