What will prevent this site from becoming Reddit 2.0?

I don't think there's any chance whatsoever of Tildes ever becoming even remotely a "Reddit 2.0". It's just too different, starting with its non-profit status. And most users seem very opposed to what Reddit represent nowadays.

If Tildes fail, it will fail in its own way.

In my opinion: keeping it invite only. I don't want this to sound snobby, but if there's any indicator that's always the same when some subreddit goes down the gutter, it's that the user base hits a critical mass. As soon as that number is crossed, the user base is too diverse and there's too many new people coming. The old people who've been at this place for a while don't want it to change (or they would've left already), but new people have a completely different background and experience than the old users that have been there for a long time.

That's generally the point where subreddits then hire more mods, try to crack down harder on the rules, introduce flairs and other small helpers, but it's too late. No matter what they try, 99% of the time the horse is out of the barn and the "old" subreddit is gone. There's endless examples from reddit.

I think, the thing tildes does better is: no downvotes, the way even old thread can reach the front page as long as there's some comment activity and the comment tags. All of these heavily encourage (higher quality) submissions and less meme-y content. And though it sucks in some instances that you can't create your own group, having Deimos control them is probably for the better, since it makes it more likely that you engage with the sum of Tildes, not just your niche.

Comparing Tildes to Reddit is like comparing an eggplant steak to a 12oz sirloin steak. They're simply not the same thing and appeal to different people.

Reddit's biggest problem is something that Tildes will likely never succumb to due to the closed nature of the platform. It's volunteer moderators having too much power to dictate what's allowed on the website, and the admin's tendencies to defend these people to the hilt from any criticism.

Digg had a problem with power users but unlike the handful of people that control all the major subreddits, Digg's power users didn't have the ability to remove other people's comments & submissions, nor dish out community bans. In fact, Digg's upper echelon were at best just overly active users like MrBabyMan that had legions of fanboys propping up their content, and at worst paid spammers employed to push other people's content to the frontpage.

I would just like to see a platform that places a premium on meaningful social dialogue for the future betterment of all involved.

SaidIt tried to do this by basing their site-wide rules around the "pyramid of debate" and that rather non-shockingly flopped. Look at the state of the site now, it's just been astroturfed by the right wing.

That being said, I don't think Reddit is in that "too big to fail" group, but rather that all the clones have tried to pander to the free speech warriors that have risked getting their platform cancelled. I'd like to see a Reddit competitor with actual solid core features, common-sense rule enforcement and just a place for discussions.

Voat failed, Ruqqus failed, Poal is failing, Gab is failing and Parler is failing because of said FSW's, because it turns out that no sane advertiser, payment processer nor network provider wants to do business with people that think it's okay to preach violence and hatred against minorities.

Nobody has specifically pointed this out yet, but the licensing of the Tildes source code under AGPLv3 will help a lot. That gives the users the right to the same source code running on the server, in perpetuity. That also applies to any Tildes derivatives in the future. This codebase can't be closed off and it can be forked. It is a genuine open source framework for running your own link aggregator and it's really not hard to get your own up, easier than phpbb back in the day.

Like any good open source project it can spawn all sorts of interesting things. This site is the first and official Tildes, but it won't be the only one in the future.

I'm sure this has been posted at some point, but do we know what growth looks like on the site? It doesn't feel like there has been much change in the few years I've frequented Tildes.

There are a lot of things that make reddit terrible and toxic and tildes seems to address them fairly well.

Firstly there's comments--people just being absolute dicks to one another, bad faith arguments, low-effort nonsense, etc. And I've seen that stuff get called out or outright removed from tildes frequently enough that I'm not too concerned about that.

There's mass downvoting where a non-popular opinion gets drowned out with downvotes so that a conversation about said opinion can never really take place. We can't downvote on tildes, so that's not much of a concern. And I've seen some really good conversations take place about unpopular opinions here as well.

There's brigading, where a subgroup decides to just overwhelm another group with downvotes, negative comments, and hijacking the submissions there. Tildes groups aren't very comparable to subreddits. They're not so much mini-communities within the larger tildes community as they are just tags/categories for submissions. Plus I have no doubt that any brigading-type stuff would be met with swift action here.

There's astroturfing where corporations will present ad or PR content as organic content on the site. Everyone on reddit likes to joke about /r/hailcorporate, but it definitely happens and sometimes it's really obvious, but nobody seems to care. Imo, tildes' only defense against this is that it's too small for a company to spend time/money/effort on. I assume Deimos would react swiftly to this as well, but there aren't really any mechanics/policies in place to prevent it (AFAIK).

But ultimately for me, if tildes goes to shit I'll just move on, so I'm not that concerned about it. I'm no stranger to losing communities-- lots of forums, digg, social media, etc. have all kicked the bucket over the years and I've gotten to used to it just being the natural cycle of the internet. That being said, I'll do everything I can to help foster a good environment here on tildes and I'd obviously love to see it grow and maintain its quality in the process.

And I think there are a lot of things in place to prevent tildes going the reddit route . I think a big chunk of this community being disenfranchised redditors who know exactly what went wrong with reddit and digg before it means it's less likely to happen here. Or so I hope!

The sort of person who is active on Tildes, or uses it at all, is one that has tired from Reddit and Reddit's antics. They have deliberately sought out an alternative to Reddit. Therefore you would expect them to interact, post, reply, et cetera in entirely different ways from Reddit. You can see this clearly- the general tone, in every subforum here, is far more serious, far less shitposty. It won't go the way of Reddit is for sure.

I'm not sure how this old topic ended up in my feed, but the invitations allow for permanent bans and prevent bots. Even if/when Tildes gets large, I think the site should require invitation codes. As now, they can be freely available.

While the original mission of this site is foucused on peventing the situation the OP described, I think the lack of scale (above a million+ user base a small percentage of bad actor can generate significant amout of toxic content) and incentives for fast growth as well as the lack of recommendation system (less likely those toxic content will be promoted) can help a lot.