Ironically the only thing for which Reddit is still a useful website is NSFW User Generated content on subreddits that focus on the NSFW bit and forbid any political or relevant discussion.
Any typical sub today regardless of what the official topic of the sub is taken over by overly political content just barely reworded to fit the sub's topic.
Reasonable level of popularity is hard to really gauge. There is no current Reddit replacement for everything it is. Federated services like Piefed, Lemmy, etc are trying and there's good content to be had on those. It's like an early reddit but not as mainstream. Checkout something like https://beehaw.org for one such instance and see if it's your thing.
It seems to me that a reasonable level of popularity is where you get into trouble, as there is regression to the mean. If Eternal September has taught anything it is that the average person is pretty bad.
The audience and the posters are the content, not enough people want to start posting and commenting on a dead reddit clone to get it off the ground to entice more people
And also, there was less competition and a lot of lazy market leaders. Digg v3 facilitated reddit's rise in a week the same way that Skype's negligence and TeamSpeak's technical focus made is really easy for Discord to take over.
I think user moderation is where the opening will be. Reddit as a whole is pretty heavy handed in banning anyone who says anything wrongthink, or worse, actively bans users who participate in subs they don't approve of.
You had Voat spin out but it had the same problem, with a vastly different opinion of what wrongthink was. It didn't last long.
I think the between that, the unpopular API changes, new Reddit that nobody asked for, and now paywalls, there is an opening. One challenge is that it's hard to actually make money from the idea, which I guess is why there haven't been a lot of entrants in the first place.
Honestly just sounds like reddit wants to get some of the only fans money, reddit is already filled with only fans girls advertising but they're not getting a actual cut of it.
possibly, but taking money opens them up to the headache of visa mastercard issues relating to adult content. increased attention could get them removed from the app stores. they could also remove it
I just remembered that Tildes (https://tildes.net/) still exists, I wholly forgot about it. Anyone else using it these days, perhaps over reddit and even lemmy, mastodon etc?
It sounds more like they want to compete with either Patreon, OnlyFans or both. Though reddit as it is now is a horrible place to build a community. It's hard to keep bad actors out, but moderation (and the culture surrounding most moderation on reddit) is also completely opaque. So you simultaneously have a problem repelling trolls (participating in trans subreddits essentially guarantees hateful DMs), but you can also shape comments in their entirety to make a place a perfect echo chamber. Entrance fees might actually solve this problem.
Any typical sub today regardless of what the official topic of the sub is taken over by overly political content just barely reworded to fit the sub's topic.