Considering the valuation, remaining as an unpaid moderator for a reddit sub, is absolutely crazy. Hopefully all the mods up and leave, nothing like letting others get rich from your free efforts.
It's lamentable considering how simple the site is but there exist currently, no good alternatives! I suppose we can attribute that at least partly to the Network Effect. I've been tired of it since the front-end redesign; I grew weary of the dark patterns, the constant nagging to use their app when on mobile, the fact that my back button took me to the top of the page and (most of all, in fact) the overall quality of the threads, so my usage has decreased dramatically over the last 3 months. I suspect I we are no longer longer Reddit's target audience and they will do very well going forward but it's a shame for me at least, that something I've been using for over a decade is fading into background noise.
A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit with the goal of building a site that would actually be able to stick to its principles and address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it focuses on higher-quality non-fluff content and discussions, and gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one.
I'll remove that line, it was just me sighing and didn't add anything of value.
I have been using tildes for about 6 months so far. I love the technical side of the website. Its fast and its minimal and doesn't seem to be sucking up my data. I also love the interactions I have had while using it.
What its missing is the specialty stuff. On reddit I can find a whole community focused on one programming language. On tildes I'm lucky to see a programming post.
But this leaves me with an interesting problem, how can you have a website that has enough users to make up a group for specialty interests without it becoming big enough that it turns in to reddit. It almost seems like the only way is to have totally separate sites for every interest.
It's worth remembering that reddit didn't even have user-created subreddits until it was over two and a half years old, and only had a handful of admin-created ones before that. It takes quite a bit of growth and time to be able to support specialized communities.
Between the crushing "download our tracking riddled app" / "switch to our shitty new redesign" push recently and massive amount of engineered sponsored content, instead of paid-for advertisement, there's nothing there keeping me interested. This most recent funding round is just icing on the cake.
It's only a matter of time before they go down the twitter path and outright ban third party apps.
That said, I do go to Reddit first when I'm looking to answer questions like HDD recommendations or things to do in my city. That's because searching Google for it will give me nothing but awful content mill blog posts stuffed with affiliate links and SEO-optimized keywords ("Best USD Hard Drives in 2019"). On Reddit you actually get the feeling that the question is trying to be answered by actual people.
I don't care how it's designed. It can be used as a tool.