I signed up, but wanted to look into the site's history and somehow found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1umrhpz...
Still, I do think Reddit definitely needs more alternatives because their moderation system is broken with power-tripping moderators, and the community admins don't want to do anything about it.
All the best!
There is something deeply wrong with Reddit's moderation system. In many subreddits, moderatos seem to ban or reomve content simply because it doesn't align with their preferences. To top that, the built-in filters can be frustratingly aggressive. The questions is surely how to improve the content moderation in a different way.
In niche subreddits it bothers me less, because if somebody cares enough they can go spin up their own. What really freaks me out is when it happens in a huge/important (from a societal perspective) community. For example, getting exiled from your local community subreddit (the sole online platform for discussion surrounding it) is a pretty serious situation.
It's weird for reddit clones to pretend they're anything but a small subreddit in scale. This site has a "discover" feature, "topics" (its own subreddits), "tuning" (huh?), user following, probably dms too, and it displays an extremely truncated version of every thread's top comment as you scroll by - so you don't waste your time going to the discussion page?
All of these features result in atomization of an already tiny content pool. This is the opposite of what you need to jumpstart a reddit clone. This is a mental exercise in "how much better could I make reddit if I had its user base?" You don't have the users though, so you're doing the wrong thing.
You want people to comment on each other's posts, right? Then you should basically show every post to every user... the bitter reality is that you need users to engage with content they didn't plan to engage with. That doesn't mean outrage farming, it can/should mean being a high quality source of info, questions, culture - all on one page.
Hackernews understands this, or - if it doesn't - it at least plays by the rule of "have ONE good frontpage." That's also how reddit started.
There are to date no alternatives to the subreddit /r/redditalternatives, even merely as somebody's informal project hosted on GitHub.
I don't think it would make enough ad revenue to be worth fending off scrapers, though.
- reddit mods need serious checks
- for starters literally all of them across every subreddit need to be fired
- all the banned people need to be unbanned
- a new system of voting moderators into existence needs to be brought about
- how exactly would such a system work? when you create a subreddit, you are no longer its default moderator for ever
- you have a grace period like a month or a year or something and then all the members of that subreddit get to poll who should be the moderator
- mind you i am writing this literally as a mod on reddit with a sub with more than 60K weekly visitors
- this is rotational in nature and every year repolls happen so no more powertripping
After a few weeks of that app stores, search engines and possibly even payment processors would block Reddit because of the egregiously inadequate enforcement against links to malware, piracy, rightly illegal categories of pornography and spam. Not that the current system isn't immensely terrible but mod abuse is the downside that comes with the upside: the only method that has been found for Reddit to have the trifecta of effective spam link removal at scale, legal good standing and finances in the black. Reddit is no Instagram to get away legally with automated removals having a 2% false negative rate.
What is needed is discovery of a better business model.
It seems like you want a different website than Reddit