you're basically saying "I've been here half an hour, it's not what I'm used to, change it for me." Yeah, that's not what I'm getting at. I'm basically saying that as long as the hurdle to clear just to get started is this high, this is never going to be anything but some sort of relatively tiny insular circle of people who managed to clear the hurdle just to get to what might be the interesting stuff. I mean, it's basically the same problem you identified - it's difficult to bootstrap the "Y axis". Basically I'm just trying to wrap my head around the model (which I seem to have more or less grasped, you didn't really tell me I had anything wrong, just filled in some blanks) and use that to figure out whether it can grow to a reasonable size to where there's actually content worth looking at more than once a day - and this bootstrapping issue suggests to me that the answer is no, people will just leave because it's too hard to get going and there's not really obvious value up front. Which means this won't ever be more than a site I'd refresh once a day so therefore it can't ever replace reddit for me. Obviously, reddit shows the danger of "defaults", but I'm not sure if it isn't the intersection of "default" plus "community" (as opposed to "default plus "content") that's the problem there. you were one of the pile-ons during my witch hunt if I recall correctly. Incredibly difficult to find any context considering how hard it is to go back in history on reddit. If you were abusing your power as a moderator of a sub I used at some point I probably called you on it, but other than that I really can't say much. (Side note: voat.co, despite its brokenness at the moment, is a known quantity - it's a reddit clone so it's obvious that it's easy enough for people to jump into and start using. The question is just whether there's enough community/content there for me to make the jump once the site starts functioning again; the system obviously works well enough to last a while. I don't need my reddit replacement site to have 10 million users or whatever, especially considering how shitty the large subreddits become; but I do need it to have something like 100k users with 5k-10k in some of the tags so that there's an actively generated amount of content. I can wait on it to grow - I started /r/tf2 from scratch after all - but it has to have the possibility of growing.)