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The main problem with alternatives is that it only attracts people who even see the need for an alternative, people who consider Reddit being captured by one side of the culture war is a problem. That means you get for the most part people on the other side of the culture war (of which not all of them are high IQ either, that means you probably get flooded by people who just really want a place to spam the N-word) and the very rare few people who are on the side that captured Reddit but are actually principled enough to prefer a neutral platform. If you get a site whose members are all hyper aware of culture war topics, the best case scenario is that you get a website where culture war topics dominate (see: The Motte). Worst case scenario is something like poast.
Those you are missing out on is the large contingent of not terminally online people who don't care that much or are unaware of the culture war stuff online; a lot of my friends are like this. Those who don't see it as a problem that reddit is captured, because they still get enough engagement on their posts. While you might not care about their opinions on culture war topics, you might actually want to hear what they have to say about IT, about cars, about AI, about health, etc...
To make a viable alternative, you need normies too. Reddit is a natural Schelling point for communities on any topic, until you break that aspect of it. Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).
I think the main problem actually is the government and advertisers enforces a certain level of censorship. Just look at the "shots fired" at the Telegram founder when he refued to play ball. So unless someone can answer how they will fund it, and how it will stay independent of government demand for "enough censorship"
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Reddit when it started was not full of normies. It was full of tech nerds who had some, um, interesting characteristics. Remember, "le Reddit army", "narwhale bacon", "r/jailbait", etc... The site had a weird, fedora-wearing energy.
The normies showed up later. When the normies first arrived it was probably the golden age of Reddit, say 2012-2020. But after 2016 right wings views were censored and the site gradually descended into what it is today.
So I do think it's possible for a new site to start that appeals to a niche and then grows to include normies. But obviously the initial niche can't just be a right-wing witches.
Yeah, but it was also technically superior to the incumbent (Digg) AND appeared at a time where the said incumbent had created a window of opportunity by going through a badly recieved overhaul (Digg 2.0).
If we assume the 90-9-1 rule is right (90 percent of people are only interested in lurking, 9 percent are "remixing", sharing or commenting, and 1 percent are creators), when Digg cratered, reddit almost immediately captured the 9%. It just turns out that until about the mid-2010s, that was mostly tech nerds, but as more and more normies became constantly online, that 9% started representing them. Normies were not participating in online communities on other websites than Reddit or Digg, they were not participating in online communities at all.
We have the iPhone to "thank" for that. The mobile VT-100 that a "smartphone" is becoming actually usable and cheap enough to be universal is what launched Reddit and Twitter (and to a point, Facebook) into the stratosphere. Phones before that were too slow, the screens were too small to sit in front of all day, and mobile data was too limited/expensive.
It's also why IRC had its resurgence [Discord is not meaningfully distinguishable from an IRCv3 implementation, complete with message persistence]- because you can be always online to answer questions in a way you actually had to be sitting at a computer to do before (which is why forums, then Digg/Reddit, took over from IRC in the late-'90s-early-'00s).
You can track the rise of the leftist moderator through that as well: if we assume that leftists are more likely to have fake office jobs, then the fact they're able to use their VT-100s at work bestows them a significant power advantage over rightists simply by being able to show up. Take that ability away and their advantage evaporates.
If you look at the kind of people that moderate the top subreddits, I'd say the amount of work they'd have to put to keep track of everything would mean they have no jobs at all, or this is their job, and they probably glow in the dark.
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Technically, there is a third option, the one that's deployed frequently by SJ - "destroy Reddit's technical capability to function, such that people can't use it anymore". It's just that that's really hard for such a large platform that doesn't have many external dependencies.
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