I worked at reddit for almost 4 years, but quit and started a non-profit so I could work on building a site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality content, etc.
It's not incredibly active yet since it's in invite-only alpha, but it gets several hundred posts a day and is coming along well. There's more info in this blog post (including how to request an invite): https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Just send me an email if you're interested and I'll give you an invite. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled for now while we get base features and site culture built up.
Hey, I'd like an invite please. Also I would be interested in discussing your philosophy with you. I run a similar "startup". We have 2 apps in the social recommendations area (currently focused on maps/places). One is a mobile app in private beta atm. You can sign up for an invite once we go public here: BIBIMAPP.COM. The other is a crowd source mapping app. It's very rough atm and we haven't promoted it at all but you can find it here : mapbeet.bibimapp.com. Feel free to reach out to me on the email in my profile.
Happy Tildes user here. I believe Deimorz has some stated plans on how it will pay for itself (non-profit, donations, etc) but here's the thing:
I used to ask myself that question, then I realized it doesn't matter. Communities come and go. Slashdot used to be good. Reddit used to be good. That they're not anymore doesn't matter.
It sucks to up and leave a community once in a while, but it's not like you lose everything you did there. Social apps are intrinsically focused on the short term (past & future). It's okay to change which websites you visit once in a while.
I highly recommend Tildes. I enjoy my time there. It's pretty quiet and has very high signal, very low noise. If one day it has to be shut down because the bills can't be paid, that will suck… but there will be others.
Even at this point, the actual bills are already covered several times over, and the site could probably easily grow to at least 100x its current size without needing any more donations. The only real question is whether I continue working on it full-time, but keeping it running isn't in doubt at all, and I can't imagine that changing. There's no investor/owner pressure that would result in it needing to shut down: https://docs.tildes.net/faq#what-if-you-dont-get-enough-dona...
taking out the cost of the workforce (R&D, sales, associated GnA) working on revenue generation, ie. ads, analytics, etc. i'd suppose the rest of the costs of a typical Web2.0 site (like Twitter, FB, Reddit) comes down to basically hosting only and isn't that high - can probably be easily covered by donations. Or a real example - without meaningful monetization and thus related costs, WhatApp was fine with 55 employees serving $19B worth of user engagement.
Hopefully Tor isn't a problem. In the Age Of Snowden, I use it almost exclusively. Also might I suggest a .onion gateway (and maybe a .i2p gateway too)?
Old Reddit died with the Ellen Pao fracas. New Reddit is doing well; the new web UI is still weird for people with an Old Reddit background, but on mobile you don't confuse it with the website you loved in 2008-11 -- yet it's pretty good at what it does: entertainment for the broader public.
Old reddit died well before Pao. I still get value out of Reddit, but you just have to use it in a different way now, like any community that blows up and goes mainstream.
While I think the redesign is bloated and slower its not unusable and you can opt out of it at present.
Being prompted repeatedly to open in app is certainly annoying but at present most mobile users probably use one of the apps. At least for android where 85% of your global market lives there are 7 different options nearly all of which are better than viewing in mobile firefox/chrome.
In short your experience is valid but since you probably represent a small percentage of the userbase reports of reddits death are still presumably greatly exaggerated.
On the lighter side old reddits code was open source and lives on in voat which at present is infested with a lot of racists and alt right. Maybe we can all move over and "voat" them out of their new home like we kicked them off reddit.
>In short your experience is valid but since you probably represent a small percentage of the userbase reports of reddits death are still presumably greatly exaggerated.
I don't think people are forecasting Reddit's death so much as wishing for it and asking for alternatives they can go to instead.
I don't think Reddit will ever really die. It will persist, as a sort of night-club district from the comparatively well lit streets of Facebook and Twitter. It's not really a red light district anymore, but it's edgy enough for most people.
