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Comment by boredatoms | Hacker News Reader

Are there any clones of reddit out there that have a reasonable level of popularity?

Lemmy with apps like summit or https://old.lemmy.world/ are good for big topics like this https://Lemmy.ml/post/26020520

Reasonable level of popularity is hard to really gauge. There is no current Reddit replacement for everything it is. Federated services like Piefed, Lemmy, etc are trying and there's good content to be had on those. It's like an early reddit but not as mainstream. Checkout something like https://beehaw.org for one such instance and see if it's your thing.

It seems to me that a reasonable level of popularity is where you get into trouble, as there is regression to the mean. If Eternal September has taught anything it is that the average person is pretty bad.

Seems like there isn’t. But it’s weird, why not?

The audience and the posters are the content, not enough people want to start posting and commenting on a dead reddit clone to get it off the ground to entice more people

IIRC, Reddit created tons of fake users and posts early on to pretend to have a userbase.

Given the rise of competent sounding LLMs since that time, it should be easier than ever to replicate that strategy...

And also, there was less competition and a lot of lazy market leaders. Digg v3 facilitated reddit's rise in a week the same way that Skype's negligence and TeamSpeak's technical focus made is really easy for Discord to take over.

Those conditions don't really exist anymore.

I think user moderation is where the opening will be. Reddit as a whole is pretty heavy handed in banning anyone who says anything wrongthink, or worse, actively bans users who participate in subs they don't approve of.

You had Voat spin out but it had the same problem, with a vastly different opinion of what wrongthink was. It didn't last long.

I think the between that, the unpopular API changes, new Reddit that nobody asked for, and now paywalls, there is an opening. One challenge is that it's hard to actually make money from the idea, which I guess is why there haven't been a lot of entrants in the first place.

Can you build threaded convos on top of the AT Protocol? Subs->Topics, threads, users, tada!

Edit: @freetonik much obliged for the reference.

There was a post about that exact idea a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058285

Is Digg.com still around? This is a joke as back in the day reddit was the small fish.

Joking aside, Diggnation has returned and Kevin Rose has said a few times he wants to buy back Digg.com

No, but if this happens, there will be.

https://tildes.net/

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