Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.
By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.
The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.
Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.
Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.
(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.
But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).
I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.
Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...
Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.
Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.
Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.
If you want a subreddit for enthusiasts of $NICHE, you're likely to find it, and it's likely to be useful.
I also learn a lot of new stuff.
I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.
I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.
Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.
It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.
Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.
"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"
You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).
A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.