Hi Deimorz, are you the same /u/Deimorz who used to be an admin on reddit? I'm very interested to read this perspective from you. Do you think there is a viable third way forward for companies like Medium and reddit?
A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
The site's been public to view (but still needs an invite to register) for a few months now, so anyone can have a look: https://tildes.net
Feel free to email me for an invite if anyone's interested, the address is in the blog post. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth under control while we keep building up a base site culture and features.
What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?
"Sustainable" is a much easier goal than needing to be worth billions of dollars to make your investors happy.
Basically a BitTorrent/Tor-like decentralized system for distribute DBs with a web front end.
The amount of server resources I consume from fora must be 1/10000th the excess CPU/HD/bandwidth capacity I have.
I’m sure some cryptocoin project is working on something like this.
I don't know how sustainable it will be or can be, if it will stay ok or devolve into a weird "4chan-like" mess, or go the same way as reddit (if it gets popular, gets money, or what). I'm not even sure who's really behind it (that probably isn't a good thing).
But - it's one option that I know of (and if you find out more about it or others, let me know if you can or want to).