The main questions: Considering all the bad practices, why people keep using Reddit and what makes it so great? Why people make custom clients instead of looking for a full-fledged alternative?
The questions are genuine, not a sarcasm. The following is just a rant and emotions, feel free to ignore.
My questions mostly come from these thoughts:
- As far as I'm concerned, it's people that bring value to online forums, not the other way around. Established communities must have no issues moving wherever.
- Creating a huge online forum (even from scratch) has it's challenges, but ultimately isn't the most complex engineering task.
As we live we learn to accept the fact that everything we love eventually dies. Not being an active user I might see it differently, but to me it looks like the forum (the technical part of it!) that people knew and loved is dead.
Why workarounds? Isn't it the time to move on to creating/finding something new instead of feeding the corpse-milkers and digesting whatever they spit back? It's a glorified database client, not a secret non-replicable alien technology.
Edit: reading the other comments I came to realization that Reddit must mostly serve community leaders (who most likely use alternative clients) as a discovery mechanism. And content-consumers would do whatever it takes to consume however inconvenient. I can see how that keeps people there, but don't clearly see why there is no popular alternatives. I guess it's really hard to gain the critical mass in the online-forum market.