This is one of the great failures of reddit, the powerful platform for building communities that they never knew how powerful it was (and probably still don't). They've been t-building the wrong kind of communities around a hollow core. There's no stopping it. Like a group poop, it just keeps piling on top until brown spills over the bowl. Who wants to be a zombie in a hivemind of indistinguishables posting the same image with ever so slightly altered superimposed text? That's not a community, it's an asylum.

reddit had one real asset, the only thing that generated original content: People. An aggregator like reddit gets its content from everywhere but reddit, that makes its userbase its sole natural resource, and like all natural resources they burned through it with reckless abandon, utilizing it to its least potential, thinking it would never run out. But now it doesn't even have that. reddit consumes everything and produces nothing. It's the perfect paradigm for America.

People are Facebook's product, not their customer. reddit's not that different except reddit never figured out how to mine its massive userbase without also pissing it off. Since its inception, privacy cherishing redditors have made it abundantly clear that they will not be bought and sold.

Instead of selling its users and their information to third parties, reddit should have been selling the third parties to its users. reddit could have opened the doors of its community building platform to any industry to set up shop without selling out (and pissing off) their one product (i.e. people) to the highest bidder like Facebook and Google do. Companies and schools would have paid for access and use of an even more powerful version of reddit's community building platform designed especially for their private organizations but without direct access to the userbase. It would be up to the users to go to them. Like walking into an ARMY recruitment center. You can always turn back.

Say Harvard established an official subreddit that they controlled completely, like a Facebook page, but without all the stifling rules and restrictions. Different from the unofficial /r/Harvard that's in the public domain of the controlling reddit community, this hypothetical edu reddit (/e/Harvard) could only gain access to you and your information if you granted it to them. For any educational institution, this would be a powerful tool that could revolutionize the entire admissions process. Communities built around existing institutional communities.

You might be saying this sounds exactly like Facebook. It's not. While Facebook is always scraping your information, trying finding new ways to chip away at your privacy and soul to whore you out, reddit would put the power in the hands of its users to let them decide. Facebook leaves you no choice; reddit lets you choose. With options. You can remain completely anonymous or not or just a little. The choice is yours.

But that's just one idea. reddit could have provided an artistic platform for the undiscovered talent within its walls with arts reddits (/a/) for musicians and writers and every kind of artist. Like MySpace did for indie music and Deviant Art did for visual art, reddit could have provided a unique home that's not limited to the uniform blue world of Facebook. Instead, the creatives dwindled and fled drowning in a rising sea of mediocrity. Communities built around artists.

These examples aren't the strongest but they probably come with more thought than what reddit has actually done with its powerful community building platform. It's like if NASA used all its resources and technology to create a realistic sounding smelling whoopee cushion.