Their main advantage is the community, that's the hard part to replicate.

I don't think we're talking about the same reddit, in my experience their search engine has consistently been awful! On different occasions I was unable to retrieve a post I almost remembered the exact title of via the reddit search engine, but found it quickly through google with the "inurl:reddit.com/r/subreddit" option

Something must have changed in the last 2yrs or so since I was last active on the site. The search experience used to be notoriously bad and even non-existent ( If I remember correctly for a while the search box was just a link to a filtered google search). I've also come to look at voting as a negative feature. Nowadays I mostly use twitter for what I used to use reddit for - to keep up with current news. Twitter has its faults but one of its better features imo is being able to read tweets of every different kind of point of view with equal weight, without the filter of upvotes/downvotes by the majority mob.

*edit - I should say, without the filter of downvotes, since twitter has likes which is the equivalent of upvotes.

search has sucked from inception until now, if you want to find anything on reddit, even a post from today that dropped of the front page, you are better off using google and "site:reddit.com" to find it.

/r/celiac, /r/achalasia, /r/citypop, /r/deathgrips, /r/denver (and Portland, Austin, Santa Fe, Albuquerque... possibly some of these cities have bigger forums on FB, but it depends on your demographic. I can talk to 70 year olds about Albuquerque in the 60s on Facebook, but not necessarily what’s happening at Meow Wolf or with car thefts around Nob Hill or the electronic music show next week).

Reddit is the primary forum for obscure topics that don’t have large enough followings to support other communities, or have a demographic that overlaps enough with reddit that everyone just uses reddit.