Why No One Will Defeat Reddit (Yet)

For the last couple of years, we’ve seen a lot of attempts to ‘dethrone’ Reddit. There was Voat, which capitalised on the banned subs debacle to attract a more controversial audience than Reddit was willing to allow. There was Imzy, which tried (and failed) to be a ‘more positive’ Reddit, going for the same problem from the other end.

And if Reddit Alternatives is to believed, there are now legions upon legions of clones trying their hardest to take over Reddit’s market. Steemit, Voten, Hubski, Bantr… the list just goes on and on. It’s a veritable gold rush out there!

However, here’s the problem:

None of these sites will succeed. Why? Well, for one simple reason.

They don’t get it. They don’t understand why Reddit succeeded in the first place, nor why Reddit is struggling a bit now.

For example, look a lot of Reddit alternatives (or community sites in general now), and you’ll see comments about tech. About how they chose this tech stack or another. How their new Node.js powered system will be so scalable and work so well on AWS.

But here’s the problem:

No one cares. Really.

No one cares what powers your community. They care about the content and the people that use it. That’s what really matters to them.

For all they know, the system could come down to two tin cans and a piece of string between them. It doesn’t matter how well it’s coded or fun it was for you to develop. It matters whether the community is there for people to care about.

Yet these people don’t care it. They throw money at tech, talk about how great their programmers are, comment on all the new features they’ve got. It’s like those forums of old where the admin was obsessed over having the fanciest paid script with the nicest style and the best plugins.

It’s all completely irrelevant. So that’s one reason these sites will not likely beat out Reddit. Because while they’re super focused on their fancy tech and complicated features, the real replacement will be building up their community with good old fashion friends, fake accounts and general hustle.

However, it’s not the only one here. Oh no, another issue that these sites have is that they focus too much on a certain type of content.

Namely, political stuff relating to running a Reddit like website. In other words, they’re too obsessed with what Reddit is doing at this point in time, or talking about how they’re replace it.

Again, it doesn’t matter. Why? Because the average Joe doesn’t join a forum or community to discuss the ethics of free speech as applied to internet communication or to rant about how evil moderators on another website are. They join because the community is talking about things they care about.

And that could be anything from video games to movies to fashion and sports. Simple, every day things people are interested in discussing with like minded folk on the internet.

Yet every site I’ve seen trying to replace Reddit hasn’t understood this at all. They’ve got a bit of discussion of politics or free speech online or what not, but their sections for gaming or sports or whatever else are stone dead.

So why would anyone in the mainstream join them? If they wanted to join a gaming forum, they’d join an active forum (of which there are thousands of the internet). They’d take one look at this ‘revolutionary’ platform and bail the minute they realise the sections they care about are ghost towns.

It also filters down to the marketing too. What do I mean by this?

Well, look how many ‘alternative’ sites seem to market themselves on ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘privacy’. It’s almost like a rallying cry for the hacker crowd.

Problem is… average Joe doesn’t care. His or her views are boring and unlikely to be threatened by any rules to begin with.

In fact, based on the mainstream media comments of ‘evil trolls on the internet’ and ‘hate speech’, it’s quite possible he might look a site boasting of freedom of speech and think ‘this is another 4chan isn’t it?’ and not sign up altogether.

So the answer is to keep freedom of speech and privacy and what not, but to not market the site on those terms to normal people. Market it like that to tech forums and Hacker News, and market it to average Joe as a simple way to communicate with people who have similar interests.

Either way, it’s clear most of these competitors don’t get marketing, don’t get running a community and have no idea why Reddit took off in the first place. But it doesn’t end there.

There’s another problem with their approach. One which is incredibly simple yet completely ignored here.

Namely, they’re trying to copy Reddit. They’re trying to be Reddit in structure, except better.

However, that doesn’t work.

Large successful services, businesses and websites do not fall to a competitor doing the same thing as them but ‘better’.

They usually fall to competitors that approach the same problems from a different angle and make them obsolete. Look at Netflix and Blockbuster for example. Did the former beat the latter by creating a better chain of video rental stores?

No, they did things via first mail and then digital distribution, and made the latter’s entire business model an obsolete relic. Same goes for Facebook, it destroyed Myspace not by offering better customisation options but by offering an easier to use, more pleasant to browse, more professional website with better you cared about.

And there are legions of examples like this. You’ve got Steam, which succeeded by Valve created an easy to setup way to play PC games that didn’t require lots of settings and driver installations. There’s Uber, which provided a cheaper, less professional but more efficient service than taxis did.

Big successes like these don’t create a faster horse, but completely shift the paradigm and make their old school competitors irrelevant.

Which is also true of Reddit and its market too. What did Reddit do well? Same thing all news aggregators did well. They realised that traditional internet forums, mailing lists and newsgroups were too complicated for a lot of people and offered a simple way to discuss and rate content in a community setup without all the bloat of separate accounts, reputation systems, different sections, etc.

A true Reddit replacement is probably not going to do the exact same thing again. Instead of a list of links with ratings and comments spread across dozens of sections run by their own moderators, it’s likely going to be something completely different.

Something that makes communication online easier and generally better than Reddit does. Not a carbon copy of the same with little to differentiate itself and no hook for people to care about.

None of the Reddit alternatives I’ve seen have understood any of this, and they likely won’t succeed as a result.

Thank you.