The problem, I think, is there is no real reddit competitor at the moment. People were trying to force a reddit alternative via whatever flavor reddit clone could be found. The big problem with these sites was that they largely didn't have a large established community already. The result was there was no real "culture" in all those reddit clones. At the same time no name sites were trying to capitalize on the chaos to promote their low traffic websites and gain some exposure. Not to say those sites were bad, just that they could not possibly stand against a wave of reddit culture washing over all their established users. What reddit really needs is a rival, not just a clone or a replacement. Right now reddit has no real competition or rival and so there's no legitimate place to jump to. If there were an established competitor to reddit, the chaos would've been funnelled to that site, instead there was a mix of people trying random new websites and people trying to just make "reddit 2.0".