With Reddit users mass protesting over recent changes, many people are looking for alternatives.
The question is, are there any serious viable alternatives to Reddit? What would it take for a competing platform to overtake Reddit's market share?
Personally I think it will be extremely difficult for any platform to replace Reddit because it is extremely difficult to overcome the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is already on it.
Whether or not another PC meme dumpster actually manages to replace Reddit doesn't interest me because I'm not 12 anymore. What I've always wanted is a Reddit-like website where spending time on the website and commenting doesn't feel like being the one grown adult amidst grade school kids, where reading comments and engaging in debate expands one's mind rather than feeling like a depressing waste of time. Reddit post and comment quality has been garbage since the early 2010s, and because downright toxic and completely lost the last bit of trust I had during COVID when no one was allowed to question anything about COVID lockdown policies.
I have yet to see any Reddit alternative that accomplishes that or even cares to. But high discussion quality is the primary goal of zsync. If this site cannot achieve that, then it has failed and it shouldn't exist.
If you believe in this mission, then you're in the right place.
The biggest challenge in retaining users is incentivizing the creation of high quality content. I haven't figured out the solution to that yet. But I think that prioritizing high discussion quality as a core part of the mission is a necessary requirement to retaining a high bar of discussion, otherwise history shows that as social media sites grow, the general quality decreases.
I'm very anti-censorship and anti-authoritarian. I think that ideally machine learning algorithms would enable users to see more of the type of content they like (of course with the ability to tweak this or opt out so one isn't enslaved to the algorithm).
Also in an ideal world the tech and data would be decentralized rather than monopolized by some private entity, but I don't think the tech for that is there yet. The fediverse seems like a lackluster compromise to me because users are still dependent on private servers that can shut you down anytime.
Anyways enough rambling. I hope we'll finally start to see some real competition and innovation in this space because Reddit has had way more staying power than it deserves having been such a garbage platform for such a long time outside a few solid niche subreddits.
For technical discussions, Hacker News is already very good, and feels a lot like Reddit did back in 2008/2009.
I'm also spending some time on Tildes to see what that community is like.