Max, would you be willing to evaluate Reddit alternatives? One is https://notabug.io/ after the Aaron Swarz quote, has seen hypergrowth since it started a few months ago using our P2P tech.
I call shenanigans on the hypergrowth, where the metrics you sent me imply ~1 million pageviews per month yet there is barely any engagement or new/original content on the site itself. (and the few comments there appear to be very Voat-esque)
Semi-related, I dislike straight-up Reddit/Hacker News clones, including the UI. If Reddit/HN has enough issue to warrant a competitor by cloning the UI, that just repeats the same problem.
I think ~1 million pageviews (according to SimilarWeb: https://www.similarweb.com/website/notabug.io) is notabug.io+snew.notabug.io (see subdomains section: snew.notabug.io 97.85% notabug.io 2.15%).
So notabug itself is 2% of 1 million ~ 20k pageviews.
As one of the most active users of notabug.io: you're not wrong. There's no hypergrowth.
But the tech has real promise and that's the story here. Of course 'alternatives' get the scoundrels first so criticizing it on that merit is a bit generic.
There's value in federated systems with a p2p overlay even if they're not attracting the money driven crowds. You can't post sci-hub links openly on reddit. You can't even discuss how to handle DRM and bypass it.
Centralized systems are always going to go through the same lifecycle after they reach a critical mass requiring real money. It's not pretty. If anyone can self-host from home or even contribute hosting by visiting with a webrtc enabled browser it benefits a lot of groups pushed out for perfectly cromulent reasons.
There's also a namespace collision on Freenode IRC. The #notabug channel is definitely not for notabug.io it's for the free code hosting group https://notabug.org
