Bit disappointing that we haven't seen a competitor pop up since the announcement. With the instant hardware access of AWS and the infinite money of Silicon Valley banks, it's a bit shameful that no one is rushing to fill the market need.
Fact is, they dont have the critical mass Reddit does, and never will until it is actually dead, not "dying" like it has been for half a decade.
Perhaps that is the better way forward than the aggregated approach of Reddit, going back to the old-school approach of separate forums with their own websites.
Yeah, this would be great if users move and the right entities sponsor it. Again, HN is a good example, as YC seems to have the right incentives to keep this place nice.
The problem with Voat and many of the others was that they either started in response to Reddit changes that most users didn't care about and that of those that did care the majority favored the changes, or if they already existed they were small enough that the people who left Reddit for them due to those Reddit change quickly became the overwhelming majority of their users.
Voat, for example either started because or got the majority of its users because Reddit got rid of /r/coontown and similar racist subreddits and got rid of a bunch of child sex subreddits. Those quickly reformed on Voat.
People did make Voat groups for mainstream things like movies and science, and some people tried to make those decent alternatives to say /r/movies and /r/science but it did't work. Any decent discussion on /v/movies or /v/science you could also find on /r/movies or /r/science. But on /v/movies or /v/science you'd also have a bunch of the racist and antisemite discussions too which weren't on /r/movies or /r/science.
For example see this Voat discussion of season 2 of The Mandalorian from /v/movies [1]. Here's an example from /v/science [2].
This time has a chance to be different because this time it won't be the dregs of Reddit leaving. It will mostly be decent people leaving. Those who remain might actually miss them instead of being happy they are gone, and so might consider actually following.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201225021055/https://voat.co/v...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201223123156/https://voat.co/v...
Was there some brief moment in time where there was any quality content on voat? why else would anyone volunteer to say they tried that platform and found it compelling :|
That is insane, it is like a screenshot of the old notorious white supremacist boards from the 00s. Yeah no wonder that reddit alternative didn't have a meteoric rise to popularity.
TBH, it seems like Discord is a natural alternative for many reddit communities, many of which already have one. And it tends to be more strictly moderated in my experience.
I fear Discord replacing Reddit, as its so siloed off and insular. There literally could not be an effort to "backup" Discord like this post if (and when) the decline begins.
You underestimate the staying power of a network.
Actually now that I think about it, I would argue that the limited beta (and weird invite program) of GMail slowed its adoption as well.
Once you cross the trust thermocline,[0] collapse is sudden and virtually irreversible.
[0] https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-bi...
Reddit has Lemmy, maybe, but they seem in a less mature place than Mastodon was when Twitter fumbled.
Naysay Mastodon all you want, but i think it gained a fair bit of traction from Twitter's event. Best of all, it's not trying to be Twitter. I'm looking for that with Reddit, currently.