By your reasoning, Linux should not exist. Yet, it does, and companies make money contributing to it without resorting to ads. A distributed, open-source, col

By your reasoning, Linux should not exist. Yet, it does, and companies make money contributing to it without resorting to ads. A distributed, open-source, collaborative approach to forums could work. It did work in the past. Somewhere in between usenet and reddit was a plethora of small message boards run, frequently, on open source software. Many of the same people who ran those message boards now run reddit subs only because its easier and because users gravitate towards big, centralized places like reddit. A return to a multitude of little message boards seems unlikely at this point, but migration to a monolithic and distributed open-source alternative to Reddit or Stackoverflow could happen. We just have to reach the point where enough people appreciate that there is a need for such a thing. A lot of people probably thought reddit was some kind of non-profit public service, but now they're going to have to wake up to the reality that Reddit is a business and they are now determined to make a profit even if it means driving their service into the ground. (From a business standpoint, a few years of actual profit leading to collapse is better than decades of producing no profits, especially in a sector where disruption could easily lead to collapse in that timeframe anyways.) Moderation is a key problem to solve. Moderation is what keeps forums on-topic and free from spam, hate, and other trash, but it's also frequently abused to push bias or power trip. Existing social media sites typically do a poor job of providing transparent or accountable moderation. You typically don't know who the mods are, what they've done, what they're doing, nor do you have any way to challenge their actions in a meaningful way if you have a reason to do so. Getting moderation up to professional standards without paying for it would seem like an obstacle to a free social media service, but today's social media sites don't pay their mods either. If you provide anonymity and don't demand accountability, it turns out people will just volunteer for the job! As such, a lack of an elegant solution to the moderation problem should not be viewed as something that blocks alternatives to the online forums we have now. They haven't addressed the problem either. The replacement for reddit doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be there.