emodendroket parent
Anyone can create a forum; the question is why people would actually visit this one instead of the existing alternatives. "Real-time" features don't seem like that much of a draw and Reddit et al could easily implement them if they were.
A lot of people feel that Reddit is overmoderated - there was that controversy recently where one of the employees admitted manually altering a bunch of content (removing pro-Trump submissions and comments).
Also I imagine any general forum like Reddit wouldn't retain its power users for more than a few years at most. At a given time, most users are either at the point where they don't get any of the inside jokes, or where all of them are getting old. So it might make sense to have a new one of these every once in a while.
There have been a number of Reddit controversies, but let's be honest: most people don't know or care that much about them. I think that'll blow over just like firing the community manager and the whole Ellen Pao thing did. I'm not even sure that the average person would agree that Reddit is "overmoderated," since their biggest scandals seemed to come from the opposite direction, like having subreddits devoted to hate speech and photos of underage girls.
> A lot of people feel that Reddit is overmoderated -
A tiny handful of people feel that Reddit is over moderated, and those people went to voat or 8chan.
Everyone else thinks there's not enough moderation on Reddit.
When you ask people what the good bits of Reddit are they almost always talk about the most heavily moderated sub-Reddits, which is telling.
Heavily moderated and/or a small and tightly focused subreddit (which usually tend to not need heavy moderation)