Felt I should share this. There are a number of really good established alternatives with great mods and admins for those who wish to branch out and check out something new:

www.snapzu.com - Excellent content and friendly community. Has a unique XP/Leveling system and ability to post content into multiple subs.

www.empeopled.com - Gives you more influence based on the amount of up-votes you've received. Use influence to steer future of the site.

www.theneeds.com - Good content but a lot of it looks automated, possibly using bots. No discussion so you lose a lot of that community feel.

www.hubski.com - Classic alternative, been kicking it around for 4-5 years, but still little activity. Community is small but nice.

www.spreadit.it - A dark themed reddit alternative that is similar to reddit and easy to use. Content and community is lacking however.

Note: I didn't mention the voat boat because I felt they have a little too much hate/racism on there.

www.metafilter.com it's not free, but that's not a bad thing

They also pay their mods right?

Thanks for sharing those!

Snapzu gave me a db-error. Bad first impression...

spreadit address should be spreadit.io.

Hubski was the one I had the best impression of.

Another new forum site is www.yannect.com. Check out https://www.yannect.com/us/tx/austin

Thanks, I just got an invite for snapzu and it does look really nice.

I really like the design on Hubski. I'll have to try that out.

Reddit still has those subs about beating women and lynching black people, right? Get over yourself, voat is better than every single example you listed.

I have yet to even see what Voat looks like because every time there's a Reddit event and someone mentions it, Voat is completely unresponsive.

Voat runs a modified version of the reddit open source code.

Wait, I thought it ran on a completely different codebase? It's hung from an ASP.NET framework running on an IIS server.

https://github.com/voat/voat

I think I stand corrected. Thanks.

Trying to grow a site to Reddits size on IIS? That won't end well.

I think stackexchange are still running on IIS so it's probably close to doable - although I imagine they have some seriously smart people and resources way beyond what Voat will in the near future.

That said, does Azure play nicely with IIS? I bet it's expensive but can you scale that way maybe?

It's possible to scale, but you have to think about scaling ahead of time. Voat actually didn't and are now scrambling.

While totally forgetting sites like StackOverflow use IIS.

No, it's a clone, written from scratch in C#.

You keep telling yourself that, maybe some day the truth fairy will come along and grant you your wish.

I thought the super secret internet clubs era was over. How old are you? Most people on voat cross browse. There's even a plugin to put both aggregators in the same page. I don't get where this idea that voat is that "den of pedos and fat haters" is coming from.

Anyway, +1 for Snapzu.

You're saying that when the last drama didn't affect the site at all. Wait for two days and see how nobody will talk about this...