I wonder if there is a market for a Reddit alternative that is somehow treads the line between being a cesspool like that one site that tried to replace Reddit when they banned a lot of fascist stuff was and that other site that infantilized everyone. Is there a middle ground? I feel like treading it would be useful.
There is a market for this, and I believe at some point a site like this will probably replace Reddit... but it can't be started on that basis. It'll have to be set up independently of Reddit, grow organically with its own community, then get successful enough that people move over when there's already an established userbase.
That's how communities get big without becoming cesspools or going over the top on the moderation. See recent examples of Discord and Twitch, which started out targeted to gamers, and have gone mainstream from there.
I think if anything, Discord will get a lot of what Reddit had in certain communities. Particularly anything around hobbies. It's a shame because things in discord get lost the moment after they happen, but I can find years old reddit posts about something I'm newly interested in.
I agree with you. The move towards platforms like Slack and Discord where you need to be logged in to see anything at all is a terrible one, and it basically kills discoverability stone dead. Also gonna make for an interesting future for Google if it becomes the norm, since it's also unusable in their search engine.
Alas, it definitely seems to be the direction these services are going in, and (at least in my opinion), seems to be on the verge of outright replacing Reddit for communities about games and media related topics.
Any "Reddit alternative" will have a hard time gathering users as long as Reddit exists (and doesn't alienate a critical mass of their users ala Digg). Dan Olson of the YouTube channel Folding Ideas made a very insightful video about the problem of setting up "alternatives" to popular social media platforms (having lived through several painful platform transitions himself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI
The tl;dw is that if your "alternative" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your "alternative" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an "alternative"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.
Isn't that, in itself, a unique and valuable feature? An established player that becomes highly censorious creates the market for a newcomer offering an explicitly free-speech-oriented alternative. I personally value that very highly.
I'd remind you too that a lot of people - including myself - don't see this "toxic" dynamic the way you apparently do. Our stomachs might turn at the sight of much of what is on reddit nowadays just as yours might when you see the front page of Voat.
Maybe userbases are generally dividing as we seek providers with which we are more politically aligned, with decreasing focus on the bells and whistles they have on offer. That's their value.
The first one you're referencing is voat.co. I can't remember the name of the second, but I do remember cute-looking dinosaurs all over the place and I think that's the one you're talking about.
Side note - I thought Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) left for that competitor, but it appears that she was at WeWork and now at LinkedIn (as of August - just in time!)
Victoria never worked at Imzy though (and didn't leave for anything - she was fired). She was at Cake (https://cake.co/) for a while, I think that was between WeWork and LinkedIn.
Thanks! Wow, Cake looks terrible. I wish someone would just fork reddit and stop trying to make it look cute. Dense text may not be beautiful from afar but it looks so much better from a user's perspective than acres of whitespace and endless scrolling.
edit: just checking out your project. Looks more like what I'm talking about!
Fun fact, before it was re-branded to voat it was called whoaverse and wasn't a giant trove of nationalist and racist posts. It actually had decent discussions. Over time as more and more of the people were banned from posting on Reddit they had to migrate somewhere, and eventually overtook whoaverse at which point putt re-branded it to voat.
