The play is pretty simple, you just deprive the subreddits of experts. Someone has to have enough money to buy them.
Edit:
Maybe devs need to go a little underground to usenet and irc. Just for a change in seasons, I remember it feeling cool.
Usenet and IRC were never owned by anybody, what the fuck did we forget?
This is the problem for switching sites. It's very hard and usually requires a drastic failure of the site to get people to move off. Inertia is huge and most people don't care.
It took a huge effort by Musk to get people to use Bluesky.
There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.
The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.
Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.
We didn’t realize we gave up being owners.
Reddit is convenient. It's literally all your interests in one place. And for some interests, it's the best place to go.
Most people don't care who owns the platform. Someone always will. It's as abstract as someone telling them that they shouldn't be letting Apple or Microsoft control their OS. To a regular person, the "Linux alternative" isn't freedom, it's letting Canonical run the show.
Mastodon servers too have a very loose hold on their communities.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
It does not have as many users as Reddit, but a Reddit paywall might drive more users to Lemmy sites or other alternatives.
Only later might they care about what server they are on, but that's a great place to start.
- "Local" board admins/moderators run fiefdoms and act in capricious ways.
- The downvote is too powerful, too easy to abuse, and its overuse leads to echo chambers. Unpopular opinions don't need to be talked about or even seen, just hit that button, lol.
- Accounts are weirdly pseudonymous but retain a running post history and gain strength over time. Throwaway accounts are apparently encouraged but are usually penalized in a way that isn't obvious or transparent to the user. There's therefore a thriving market in "high karma" and old Reddit accounts, which are bought and sold in large numbers for small dollar amounts. This is widely abused by the marketing and astroturfing crowd.
- You can also buy upvotes and, crucially, downvotes. This, too, is widely abused.
...And I could go on all day. It's not only a bad site, it's a poorly-conceived site and a future competitor should not copy its mistakes.
These ideas need to be floated because it’s for everyone. No getting rich off this kinda stuff.
That said, Mastodon is sort of like that... It's a sort of partial implementation of a fundamentally similar idea.
Blockchain is “great” for distributed data. How many people do you know would want to run a node that hosts a few TB of data and requires equally copious amounts of bandwidth?
If you meant that you think we should have federated services that interact with each other using an open protocol, I’ve got great news for you! Mastodon uses ActivityPub to federate and is a Twitter replacement. Lemmy and KBin both implement ActivityPub as well and are more geared towards forum-style use like Reddit.
Regardless of the underlying technology that’s chosen, I think the real issue is that everything ends up being centralised. That gives individuals/companies too much power. If every community has its own subreddit, then each reddit policy change is going to offend/infuriate some part of the user base.
If a community forum decides they want to ban $content, it only affects that community and nobody else cares.
Every forum doesn’t need to be connected with everything else. There’s very little benefit from a scuba diving forum to see posts about tennis or sneakers. The only reason Reddit is popular is because instead of having aggregating clients that show a bunch of different topics from different interest groups, we let the servers be the aggregators.
I guess what I’m describing is usenet, where your usenet client just shows you the things you were subscribed to. Gah I’m old.
So a blockchain forum is doable in a similar way as NFTs. Would require caching on the read side, and unless your users are posting important enough stuff to warrant high xact fees, off-chain write batching.
The real obstacle is that like NFTs, it'd be solving a mostly theoretical problem. Barely anyone cares that a forum is owned by someone, and you need a ton of users to gain traction.
Other than that, there have been MANY times over the years I wrote out a useful comment (eg tech support type stuff) only for it to hit me with “this thread has been locked” or one of those automod things where I don’t have enough history in that particular subreddit or I didn’t flair or whatever else.
And you haven't noticed this is EXACTLY how HN operates too? Oh the ignorance is strong in this one.
Also the rules here are basically transparent.
On Reddit the downvote is far more powerful and frequently employed, and a lot of the rules are opaque/arbitrary. It's a terrible system for free discussion.
That our sector of people is likely now the minority on Reddit, and the dynamics required to replicate the e.g Digg migration today might not exist.