>people's initial reaction is to look for a site JUST like it but without the bad thing. That feels like stage 1 of grief: denial. Denial that the thing you loved is no longer the same.
it makes sense if you were raised in the early 2000's forums. I don't know what framework it was, but there very much was a feel where many sites had the exact same forum UI/UX, just different theming and color. Only difference was who was hosting the site and who browsed it (which would inevitably have some overlap). So migration was almost seemless.
Reddit technically has some ancient open source part out there, but even if you remade the UI/UX, social media in the 2020's is a completely different landscape.
>If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left?
The theory is that
1. the site's own qualities stand out and you get enough power users to keep content flowing if you hit a certain critical mass. This is the part I have yet to see under "anger", unless you count Reddit itself after Digg.
2. the people are what make a community, so if those people stay you got a community. Of course, this doesn't take into account that some people may simply just leave social media as a whole if the experience isn't already seamless for them. So you create a power vacuum.
Also keep in mind that users =/= website creators. Faster horses and all that; the user don't generally know what they want, simply what makes them comfortable.