Hopefully we go back to forums, where the format is more conducive to conversation rather than snarky one-liners and memes.

This whole nested comment format becomes completely unreadable once you have more than two people involved in a comment thread, and the fact that submissions can't survive more than 36 hours guarantees that no deeper conversations would ever happen even if the comment format could support them.

On forums, there are discussion threads that last for years and the format makes them much easier to read from start to finish.

Probably not too much like reddit at all. So long as reddit exists its particular niche in the ecology of the internet is filled and websites which serve a very similar purpose can't really hope to gain significant numbers of users. Attention is a finite resource and sites with more content attract more of people's attention. For sites with user generated content, this means that the more users you have the more content is generated and the more of those user's attention is captured by one that one site. If there are two sites which both rely on user generated content but are more or less identical, the smaller one will inevitably hemorrhage users to the larger one. The larger the difference in number of users, and by extension the amount of content, the faster the hemorrhage. Sites need to differentiate themselves to survive, this can be through format, focus, moderation, or community but all of these options will effect the maximum possible number of people a site can appeal to. Sites basically need to justify their existence relative to other established sties. The question is "what do you do better and how many people does that matter to?". For most reddit alternatives, the answer is not much and not many.

All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...

Probably completely different but will have the same slice of anarchy that made Reddit popular to begin with. Reality is people didn't swarm to that site for pictures of dogs and "AMAs".

A strong candidate: https://tildes.net/

Decentralized and based on blockchain. Something like steem but with lower barrier of entry.