>but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own. People have absolutely made sites that have been described as "Reddit clo

>but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own. People have absolutely made sites that have been described as "Reddit clones" - I never investigated enough to know if they were actually using a fork of the actual codebase. But yeah, I wasn't suggesting that people use Reddit's source code to build a new Reddit. My point was, the functionality isn't difficult to build and certainly not a big "moat" - the difficulty in producing a better version of Reddit would almost certainly be in the softer side of things. Although Reddit's modern interface is really bad. Like, really bad. And I am not one of those people who hates new stuff for being new or thinks SPAs are the devil or whatever. The performance is so bad it legitimately feels like something a coding bootcamp graduate cobbled together as a capstone project than something built by a team of skilled professional developers. From things not loading. Like you bring up a post and the comments don't load. To the horrendous "video player". It's a complete fucking mess. So while I would say in a macro sense, there isn't a "moat" around the functionality they've done such a poor job that a well built front-end would go a long way. But yeah, it would be a waste of time to actually try to use their backend code that has been open sourced, beyond referencing some business logic they added around fuzzing votes etc...