The way you replace Reddit is by making its business model obsolete with a better model.
The problem with Reddit is that the interests of the users, mods, shareholders, and advertisers are not aligned. Their interests are being pitted against one another in order to generate profit through enshittification.
The way you make a better Reddit is by creating a cooperative model where the users, advertisers, and mods interests are aligned, and there isn't a profit motive for a shareholder group that takes precedence over the quality and governance of the site.
The web site and free app are ad-sponsored. Paid subscriptions first give you an ad-free experience, and secondly, give you and API key you can use in any 3rd party app. 3rd party apps make revenue from the subscriptions, giving them an incentive to create an ever-better user experience.
Mods earn a fee based on traffic and interactions with their subreddit. Not enough to call it a job, but enough for the community to show appreciation.
As a cooperative model, there are no investment shareholders, the site sells bonds to fund it that pay a deferred, fixed yield to get it started. Bondholders, have a vested interest in the success of the site, but have no say in its operation. Without shareholders demanding profits and growth, the interests of the users, the mods, the advertisers, the bondholders and the non-profit that administers the site are aligned.
The best things in this world aren't for profit, the hug of a child, a national park, a sunset and the stars at night. If you want a Reddit-like experience to stay pure, it needs to upset the apple cart and be a tech entity of a completely different model in order to avoid enshittification.
I think explicit & transitive trust is a strategy worth exploring. If you trust accounts made by people that you know personally, and you transitively trust the people that they trust (say... five hops). That's going to be a significant portion of humanity.
If you start getting a little spam, you explicitly revoke trust in the spammers. If you get a lot of spam, revoke trust in whoever you trusted that trusted the spammers, etc. A little bit of social graph hygiene ought to go a long way against spam, so long as we're trusting people and not platforms. We're practiced at one of those and not the other.
