No Stupid Questions

Industries tend to evolve into 2-horse-races or monopolies.

"Focus" by Al Ries.

Coca-Cola & Pepsi, as 1 example.

( there is MUCH more in that book: IF you're doing a startup, please read it! then the Lean Startup stuff. )

Who is Amazon's competitor?

Who is Apple's, or Google's, or Facebook's?

Bill Gates called it "friction-free capitalism", when unlike streets, you don't see any competitor & that makes competition, & market-balancing, disappear

Don't worry: what Facebook did to MySpace, the Fediverse is going to do to Reddit.

It is only a matter of earning it, & duration-until-then, now.

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It does; it's called Facebook.

The issue with Reddit over Facebook and smaller forums is that Reddit allows for anonymity while still providing access to a variety of various communities at mostly the discretion of the user. This is very hard to moderate, so Reddit found out a way to get free labor from users. Even then, Reddit has had issues with communities giving it negative press that has caused intervention several times.

And, I don't think people here appreciate this, but the is over a decade's worth of work in spam prevention and other tools developed to keep Reddit from being worse. Hell, the fight about API access was because mods were losing some of the tools they had.

So why isn't anyone trying to copy Reddit like Twitter? No one wants to be responsible for the mess in moderation.

Define "competitor". Hackernews, Stackoverflow, heck even Slashdot is still around. Contrary to popular belief there aren't as many techies around as there are "normies" so a site that like Reddit that also caters widely to normies is never going to be exceeded in size by a site that caters exclusively to techies.

Tech seems to often seems to follow the Pareto Principal of 80:20 split; where one company dominates and gets at least 80% of the market share. In tech its often more extreme and 90% domination often occurs, and is even expected by investors.

It's debatable where this is cause or effect - e.g. whether tech would naturally move to such dominant splits or whether this is actually the effects of bad regulation allowing monopolies to form. I personally favour the latter but thats irrelevant.

So in the space of "forums" Reddit has taken a dominant position. In some ways it gets away with this because it's regarded as "social media" and as such is no where near dominant, with Meta dominant (Facebook, Instagram) and big players like TikTok etc. But in terms of the forum style discussion platform it really is dominant. It's so dominant that people who host communities on there seem to unquestioningly believe Reddit when it says it owns them and all it's content.

Lemmy, MBin, and PieFed show that actually anyone can host their own instances of Reddit like forums, but Reddit does still dominate as a single location hosting and controlling lots of other peoples content.

I think the other comments assume you mean a big tech focused forum.

But did you actually mean a big tech forum, as in something like a meta owned and operated version of reddit?

If so, I suspect that it comes down to timing and relative benefit. By the time anyone realized reddit was going to be what it became, trying to edge into that kind of threaded ecosystem just wasn't useful to them.

Google, meta, whatever, all they had to do to get the benefits that reddit could have given them was to scrape reddit. Trying to create a competitor would have been pointless.

There's Stack Overflow and Hackernews. I'd say that Stack Overflow tends to be a better resource than Reddit for tech questions - it's not exactly a forum, and that's both a strength and a weakness. And you can't just copy Reddit 1:1, because then why would people move away from Reddit to another commercial site? It has been tried at least one time, and it failed (Voat). The threadiverse would probably also be considered a failure if it was a commercial operation.

In addition to other tech forums named, there's also the Ars Technica forum. That's been around for over 20 years. It's a freemium forum, so some of those members are funding it as well, and have been doing so for years. That should at least speak to the dedication of the community.

But Reddit isn't just a tech forum, it's mostly casual stuff. If you go to Ars Technica's forums, or some of the other forums, or hell, even /r/AskScience (and similar subreddits) and you're not an expert, you will get burned. So with some of these places, there is a wall of IQ/expertise most users can't surpass, and they tend to get weeded out. Reddit as a whole has a much lower barrier of entry, and you can avoid the smart areas if you aren't. So it appeals to more people.

Mainly because they've done better at it than the big tech forums have. Bottom line social media is in absurdly hard category for anyone to break into once someone else has a grip. Not sure if you remember google's huge flop when they tried to step in facebooks terf with google plus (Which I do have to say, from a design and functionality level, was a decade ahead of facebook, but google's attempt to shove it down everyone's throats, was horrendous).

Bottom line, if you don't care about who's running it, the best social media platform, is the one that everyone's already using. The existing company has to REALLY fsck it up big time to actually lose that advantage, and the competition has to, at least appear to be a trustworthy company. MS, Google, Facebook etc... would not have a good trust factor if they were to try to make a reddit like website, and reddit's just not done enough to scare off the common users to leave a power vaccume that will draw an audience bigger than say what we have here on lemmy.