It's mindblowing that the legions of developers around the globe haven't already made a perfect replacement lined up when Reddit inevitably crashes and burn like Digg did.
Also, I know people are going to come out of the woodwork with examples, but they'll all be inexplicably inferior with even worse UI, terrible performance, and problems that even old.reddit.com solved decades ago.
You could trivially make a Reddit clone and throw some UI/UX enhancements on top.
Then what?
"Build it and they will come" does not apply to social networks. The value of Reddit is in the information posted & pseudo-communities formed.
You could create the Platonic Ideal of a Reddit-like website but without massive numbers of users sharing information, forming communities, heading moderation efforts, then it will just collect dust.
It's an interesting question, how to create a viable social-based platform. It's certainly not a technical problem. How do you solve it? Forget creating the next Reddit / FB / Insta; how do you create a social network at all that doesn't fail to launch or wither and die?
A good start is having your ducks in a row for when conditions inevitably and suddenly lead to people jumping ship en masse to whatever Next Thing is waiting.
Lemmy was already built and deployed in several instances, but the reddit API controversy showed it wasn't quite ready. But now maybe it's closer?
Lemmy and other larger alternatives still leave some important problems unsolved, but the point is that "build it and they will come" still rings true if you have the patience to wait for the next inevitable misstep from the current major players.
>they'll all be inexplicably inferior with even worse UI
basically, yes. but their developers don't think their UI is inferior. because there are legions of developers around the world with replacements lined up, but all of their replacements are built with opinions about the bits of reddit they like. and while everybody can agree that the reddit UI sucks, nobody can agree about how it sucks, and everybody who sets out to fix it fixes it in a different way that everybody else hates.
the problem with old.reddit.com is that it actually is a terrible UI. If you make a site that pixel-perfect mirrors old.reddit.com, the only users you'll attract are the vocal fans of that UI. i've been a reddit user since digg died, and i remember when we could all agree that reddit's UI was the worst. the fact that the newer redesigns are somehow even worse than the old UI doesn't make the old UI good.
a social site populated entirely by contrarians who think old.reddit.com is peak web design is not a site that anybody will want to visit.
Those "vocal fans" represent the potion of the user base that actually publishes most of the content. Drive them off and who's posting content for you to slather ads all over? At that point you're just another 3rd rate Digg knockoff.
the power users post because they have an audience. take away the audience of normies, and you've just got a bunch of nerds trying to entertain each other.
that's basically what lemmy is right now, and it's no fun.
> the power users post because they have an audience. take away the audience of normies, and you've just got a bunch of nerds trying to entertain each other.
Sounds like another orange site I know, that starts with an H and ends with an S ;)
> the problem with old.reddit.com is that it actually is a terrible UI
I know I'm pretty bad at UI/UX, so could you explain how the old.reddit.com is terrible? Like it's not usable on mobile, but on desktop I have no issues with it.
Reddit goes hand in hand to me with Facebook Groups. I dont think either will follow the path of Digg to be honest, the adoption is just far too wide. Some people on this website might be in an echo chamber of old school geeky subreddits.
But I recently found /r/NYCbitcheswithtaste/ to be surprisingly active. a bunch of teen and 20something females in NYC asking for recommended lip injections. Its a natural expansion from the many skincare subreddits that have been popular for years, but I admit I didn't think the userbase has expanded that much
There are several UI/UX things I hate about reddit that a competitor could easily fix:
1. Clicking on the side of the page -- on the background -- navigates to the subreddit main page. This makes it easy to navigate away when e.g. clicking on the page to focus on it.
2. Having to click expand a million times.
3. Having expand sometimes navigate to a new page so you have to reclick on the items you have expanded.
Which is almost impossible on mobile with the tiny (+) target on the latest iteration of new Reddit. If you miss then, as you say, it opens a new page instead, which has random unpredictable effects on the browser history for some reason. You can sometimes click on the whitespace above the comment to do the job, assuming the username isn’t so long as to fill all the whitespace.
Actually writing all this out really brings it home how much of a clusterfuck Reddit’s UI is.
> It's mindblowing that the legions of developers around the globe haven't already made a perfect replacement lined up when Reddit inevitably crashes and burn like Digg did.
Because on today's Internet the hard part isn't the content. There's always some idiots willing to post for imaginary Internet points.
The hard part is anti-spam/anti-abuse.
Anything "free" immediately becomes a magnet for all the bad actors across the entire world. And if you take payments, you have to be careful not to wind up being a credit card fraud magnet.
It's kind of funny. Back in the day, SomethingAwful seemed kind of weird for requiring a single payment to sign up. Now they look kind of prescient.
Yea and moderation is an absolute horrible minefield these days. You will always have someone complaining they’re being moderated out of the discussion, whether they are or not.
I'm afraid I can't direct you to anywhere with the caveats you've set. If Reddit does do the inevitable, I hope you find an alternative that you can tolerate.
Reddit has had access to frankly mind boggling amounts of investor capital over the years, though. Arguably far more than it's needed, but I can't see a competitor scaling up without at least a fraction of that cash.
> when Reddit inevitably crashes and burn like Digg did.
The lesson of 2023 with Reddit and Twitter is that they've grown so large that they're immune to consequences of enshittification. The eternal September is staying where it is this time. It's been shown that only a small number will move on to better places.
You don't understand network effects and information lock-in which is exactly why "legions of developers" fail at replacing reddit. Reddit is where the people are and because it is where the people are it is where all the information is and because it is where all the information is it is where the people are and etc etc. Until you break that loop you don't have a chance at replacing reddit no matter how much better your UI is.
There's a significant non-zero probability Reddit will break that loop themselves once they become beholden to big shareholders combined with their questionable internal decision making.
What I guess will happen is that it won't die for long time. But IPO won't go great and it will be slow fall to zero, and then someone takes it private and then it continues as zombie being moved from one dying empire to next one.
“In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are"
Also, I know people are going to come out of the woodwork with examples, but they'll all be inexplicably inferior with even worse UI, terrible performance, and problems that even old.reddit.com solved decades ago.