Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist.
It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc.
Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather.
I have to wonder why they didn’t just start off charging reasonable prices for the API and dial things up over time. Crummy either way, but less likely to alienate literally everyone they depend on to make the system work.
Not only do you lose the community as already mentioned, but you lose the accumulated data (i.e. post content). This might not matter for a social community; it matters a lot if the community is of a more technical nature; i.e. repair/modding, analysis, etc. A lot of really great and useful content has been lost over the years due to forums going dark; lose a site like reddit and... my god. It's just really a huge step backward.
N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.
Creating a decent Reddit clone is a weekend project. I've done similar stuff as a demo teaching an hour long 'Intro to Rails' class at the local code school.
I’ll admit I don’t know much about the back end. I’m not that sort of dev. Is anyone working on a reddit clone to deploy, then? If there was ever a time, it’s now.
There exists Lemmy, which is a fediverse alternative.
From what I've heard, the development of it, is a bit messy, but it seems to work well enough and has potential.
