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I initially thought this sounds doomed, but thinking it a bit more, I'm not sure. Reddit feels like it has gone from being worse than it used to be but still the incumbent so what are you gonna do, to something that has very little resemblance to what it originally was. A thing like that doesn't really exist now, and it doesn't need to be immediately huge to get going, so maybe there is a chance.
Stuff I'm roughly thinking, how did the original Reddit get to be like that? Why did it go bad? What's different now? The internet circa 2005 still operated on some sort of naive emergent elitism just on account of normies mostly not being there. The optimistic story in my head is that there's still a cohort of the sort of people who populated early Reddit around, but they don't have the internet in general as their watering hole anymore, so if you somehow got a critical mass of them in one place that could actually kickstart things. The optimistic story for Reddit going bad was that the owners sold out and had to grow the site and throw the original values overboard, so a replacement could keep its soul longer by staying a boutique operation.
What's going on now, you have a lot more bad actors around, and AI is likely to make things even worse. I'm pretty sure something is lost from the idealism from 25 years ago when people figured they can solve the software crisis by writing more Lisp. So one angle is defense. You can expect hacking and entryists, and if you get big enough, lawfare. And then you want to get the sorts of people you do want contributing to learn about the site and join. The tricky thing is that you want some kind of elitism filter that gets you smart people writing quality content and keeps you from getting swamped with Reddit normies, but also doesn't get you into the Voat failure mode of pulling in mostly crazy people and bad actors. The Motte had a pretty solid niche during the 2010s culture war, which was pretty visible for a circa 2018 misfit grey tribe university freshman, but I'm not sure how much of a going concern it is today. I guess in 2008 there were still stronger remnants of the US religious right around and free software was more of a scrappy underdog than the infrastructure of the entire Web 2.0, and those were relevant things for the original Redditors. So what's the zeitgeist going to be for a 2028 misfit grey tribe university freshman and what will they be looking to escape from or stand against?
The big thing Motte has going for it is hands-on moderation by people who actually have an idea what the site is about and will engage with users pretty far. A big part of what happened to Reddit is that Reddit moderation absolutely isn't this, and at the size of the site cannot be it. So if you can grow, the question is how the moderation can keep up. I guess ideally you'd have subcommunities around the size of the Motte with their own moderators, and some kind of higher-level system. AI might actually help here, if you know what you're looking for when moderating, you could have AI crunch a large volume of comments and look for patterns and summaries, even when you can't read all the volume by yourself.
Thinking about how people manage their identities and what kind of visibility they can expect is obviously a bigger concern than people thought back in the day. Reddit has the blocking thing, but it also recently added a tag to turn profiles private so you can't read through people's comments. The feature is also around here, apparently inherited from rdrama, and a lot of people are ambivalent about it, since there's the perception that people who turn it on are more likely to be bad actors. I'm of the "assume anything you put on the internet will be there forever because chances are it will be" school here, but aren't really in touch with a lot of modern social media. The whole dark forest theory is another modern thing you probably want to think about when designing a brand new Reddit, and for extra fun we're looking at comments being possibly batch-deanonymizable with AI in the very near future for anyone who hasn't kept all their publicly visible writing pseudonymous.
That front page screenshot looks a lot like Hacker News today. It's also getting worse although still miles ahead of today's Reddit. Or https://lobste.rs, which is more tech and higher quality, but invite-only and strictly left leaning.
Heh, I was about to comment the same thing. Still, I wish there were more sorta-reddits out there, but there just aren't as far as I can tell.
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