Ask HN: Why is there only one Reddit?

8 points·fyrejuggler··6 comments

Reddit is such a key element to my web usage, that I am surprised that there are seemingly no alternatives. I mean, Google has competition, AirBnB has, Amazon too.. why is Reddit the only site of its kind?

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There's a lot of reddit alternatives, and I happen to work with one:

1. http://snapzu.com (I work with this one part time)

2. http://getaether.net

3. https://stacksity.com

4. https://frizbee.co

5. http://hubski.com

6. http://empeopled.com

7. http://voat.co

8. https://piroot.com

9. http://www.linkibl.com

10. http://criticl.me

You'll notice that the entire source code for reddit is hosted publicly here (https://github.com/reddit/reddit) which makes your question that much more interesting.

And the answer?

It's the community and the centralization.

By making a subreddit, you have a chance at scoring some of the people who already visit the site, rather than having to look for them or advertise on your own. Discoverability aids the community, but it's only made possible by centralization.

Then there are things like global shadowbans and antispam and the fact that karma is shared across reddit.com. If you made a separate reddit, karma on your site would not be reflected to the original. Which would suck.

Reddit.com dominated the reddit market for just about everything.

There are tons of sites like Reddit. However, people need a reason to leave Reddit to go to one of these new sites.

Unless they pull a Digg, this probably won't ever happen. Reddit actually got really lucky that Digg collapsed when it did, or we might even be using it today.

Digg used to compete, but the redesign killed it.

Here's a Reddit-like site I found out a while back--the community is growing, too. [0]

[0]: (https://voat.co/)

A lot of people from Reddit consider Voat basically the /b/ of Reddit.

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