"Social media is hard! let's go shopping!"

The thing that puzzles me is that when you say "let's build a Reddit clone" how do you not see that you will clone Reddit's problems? Alexis and Steve certainly didn't get into the social media game because they wanted to freeze peaches, they wanted to grow a lot of traffic quickly and then skeedaddle the minute it got tough. And since you can only sell Reddit once (especially when the ROI is so low), you better have an alternative plan in mind.

I keep returning to SomethingAwful. Got a noxious community? charge them. Need to pay legal fees? Pay them from membership fees. Assholes in need of banning? Make them pay again if they want to rejoin the community. My favorite article talking about how horrible SomethingAwful is ran seven years ago and they're still going strong because Rich padded his wallet with the necessary operating expenses to steam-clean the carpet on a regular basis.

RedditGifts was stood up in a weekend. Webtoid took a couple days. Voat probably took less. I think when your experiment goes that crazy, the best thing you can do is write a journal of the inevitable crash and try to sell it to Salon.