As soon as a viable alternative pops up that doesn't seem tailor made for racists, I'm there. So far every competitor I've seen pop up seems to think Reddit's biggest problem is their (rather weak) stance against hate speech and user harassment, and not all the actual problems being discussed here.
There was an attempt a few years ago to do just this. Remember Imzy? If the answer is "no," you're probably not alone; it shut down after only two years of operation. They didn't have any of the problems that we're discussing here, as far as I remember. (Personally, I suspect its extremely weird and confusing UX design was at least part of what did it in; I found its navigation so baffling I gave up pretty quickly.)
If I remember right, you couldn't see any content on Imzy without creating an account. I assume that instantly turned away over 90% of the users. Then, their design was extremely childish, and it looked like a safe place for kids, rather than a site for adults to socialize. I think they did a really poor job at understanding the market, and I'm not surprised they failed.
How are you going to get any traction when after losing 90% of your visitors to that home page's design you lose 99% of the remainder because nobody is going to join for content that may or may not exist, let alone be interesting. That level of disincentivisation ensures that the site's user base will consist of 90% employees of the site, 5% their friends who signed up and never logged in again, and 5% of randoms that love having a captive audience... until it dies.
There's a great video by Folding Ideas which talks about the issues with secondary services (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI - this is in the context of video platforms)
One big 'bootstrapping' problem is that the first to adopt a new platform are the people who are _too toxic_ for the original.
What part of reddit makes it tailor made for racists? The fact that pictures of members of the KKK appear when you sign up, or the fact that when you're writing a comment you're suggested to include as many racial expletives as possible?
I think you misunderstood babypuncher's comment (I did too on first reading). It's not that reddit itself is racist, but all of the reddit alternatives that have popped up ARE super racist (Voat anyone?) because they are a backlash against reddit's attempt to tamp down on overt hate speech.
The thing is that there's really no other nascent burgeoning platform that could take its place (like reddit did to digg). The Internet has become much more centralized in the past ~8 years ago. And so because of that, users have no choice but to deal with it.
I feel like one such event that could do it though is turning off their API for 3rd party applications. Wouldn't be surprised if it happens soon either, given the advertising pushes they've given their native application over the past year.
I hope it remains. I find it extremely useful for solving niche problems. A recent example of mine was Docker on Synology. It’s a weird interface with some niggling bugs. It turns out Reddit has this nicely covered and I’ve found this repeatedly. It’s way less technical than Stack Overflow but sometimes that’s what I need.
The toxic stew can be avoided while the little subs have solved hours of pain.
r/synology I think, but I was into the sonarr and radarr subs too. The Synology GUI is initially helpful, but quite quickly gets frustrating as some actions can’t be undone without starting from scratch. As an entry into the world of Docker, reddit was by far the best resource for me and there are lots of links to helpful blogs.
Between permissions, ports and paths it’s more than a touch complicated.
All the issues stem from new populations of users contributing to the site, not a top down change. Reddit 5+ years ago was a different place because it was a much smaller place.
One issue is that reddit is not just one big social space. In addition to the front page and the main subreddits, it made up of many different small, but often quite active communities. People who used to form interest groups on various forums, random fan websites and blogs have moved to interest based subreddits instead. A lot of these communities wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for reddit making it so easy to create a subreddit on any topic possible.
While everyone on Digg or MySpace could easily move to reddit or facebook, it is much harder for a subreddit centered around say gardening, astrophotography, headphones or a tv show to just jump to a new website. I do hope that these communities won't be lost when reddit does end up losing its charm and popularity.
