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Reddit matters, unfortunately.
When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.
Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.
Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.
It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"
From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.
What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:
It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many
It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong
It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs
The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.
I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?
The main problem with alternatives is that it only attracts people who even see the need for an alternative, people who consider Reddit being captured by one side of the culture war is a problem. That means you get for the most part people on the other side of the culture war (of which not all of them are high IQ either, that means you probably get flooded by people who just really want a place to spam the N-word) and the very rare few people who are on the side that captured Reddit but are actually principled enough to prefer a neutral platform. If you get a site whose members are all hyper aware of culture war topics, the best case scenario is that you get a website where culture war topics dominate (see: The Motte). Worst case scenario is something like poast.
Those you are missing out on is the large contingent of not terminally online people who don't care that much or are unaware of the culture war stuff online; a lot of my friends are like this. Those who don't see it as a problem that reddit is captured, because they still get enough engagement on their posts. While you might not care about their opinions on culture war topics, you might actually want to hear what they have to say about IT, about cars, about AI, about health, etc...
To make a viable alternative, you need normies too. Reddit is a natural Schelling point for communities on any topic, until you break that aspect of it. Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).
Reddit when it started was not full of normies. It was full of tech nerds who had some, um, interesting characteristics. Remember, "le Reddit army", "narwhale bacon", "r/jailbait", etc... The site had a weird, fedora-wearing energy.
The normies showed up later. When the normies first arrived it was probably the golden age of Reddit, say 2012-2020. But after 2016 right wings views were censored and the site gradually descended into what it is today.
So I do think it's possible for a new site to start that appeals to a niche and then grows to include normies. But obviously the initial niche can't just be a right-wing witches.
Yeah, but it was also technically superior to the incumbent (Digg) AND appeared at a time where the said incumbent had created a window of opportunity by going through a badly recieved overhaul (Digg 2.0).
If we assume the 90-9-1 rule is right (90 percent of people are only interested in lurking, 9 percent are "remixing", sharing or commenting, and 1 percent are creators), when Digg cratered, reddit almost immediately captured the 9%. It just turns out that until about the mid-2010s, that was mostly tech nerds, but as more and more normies became constantly online, that 9% started representing them. Normies were not participating in online communities on other websites than Reddit or Digg, they were not participating in online communities at all.
We have the iPhone to "thank" for that. The mobile VT-100 that a "smartphone" is becoming actually usable and cheap enough to be universal is what launched Reddit and Twitter (and to a point, Facebook) into the stratosphere. Phones before that were too slow, the screens were too small to sit in front of all day, and mobile data was too limited/expensive.
It's also why IRC had its resurgence [Discord is not meaningfully distinguishable from an IRCv3 implementation, complete with message persistence]- because you can be always online to answer questions in a way you actually had to be sitting at a computer to do before (which is why forums, then Digg/Reddit, took over from IRC in the late-'90s-early-'00s).
You can track the rise of the leftist moderator through that as well: if we assume that leftists are more likely to have fake office jobs, then the fact they're able to use their VT-100s at work bestows them a significant power advantage over rightists simply by being able to show up. Take that ability away and their advantage evaporates.
If you look at the kind of people that moderate the top subreddits, I'd say the amount of work they'd have to put to keep track of everything would mean they have no jobs at all, or this is their job, and they probably glow in the dark.
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