Max, would you be willing to evaluate Reddit alternatives? One is https://notabug.io/ after the Aaron Swarz quote, has seen hypergrowth since it started a few months ago using our P2P tech.
I call shenanigans on the hypergrowth, where the metrics you sent me imply ~1 million pageviews per month yet there is barely any engagement or new/original content on the site itself. (and the few comments there appear to be very Voat-esque)
Semi-related, I dislike straight-up Reddit/Hacker News clones, including the UI. If Reddit/HN has enough issue to warrant a competitor by cloning the UI, that just repeats the same problem.
So notabug itself is 2% of 1 million ~ 20k pageviews.
However, snew.notabug.io is a mirror of the corresponding Reddit posts w/o censorship, which makes it not an alternative! Shenanigans identified!
But the tech has real promise and that's the story here. Of course 'alternatives' get the scoundrels first so criticizing it on that merit is a bit generic.
There's value in federated systems with a p2p overlay even if they're not attracting the money driven crowds. You can't post sci-hub links openly on reddit. You can't even discuss how to handle DRM and bypass it.
Centralized systems are always going to go through the same lifecycle after they reach a critical mass requiring real money. It's not pretty. If anyone can self-host from home or even contribute hosting by visiting with a webrtc enabled browser it benefits a lot of groups pushed out for perfectly cromulent reasons.
Notabug.io is a P2P tech using the old Reddit UI.
http://k666.kr5ddit.com/ Is a free and open source version of http://kr5ddit.com made to look like the old Scoop and function like Reddit.