Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.
Next reddit will start with free speech and, if it becomes popular, eventually the anti-free speech people will move in and turn it into reddit.
A "free speech" platform is not enough of a value proposition for mainstream users to migrate. The only people who will be incentivized to move will be toxic/fringe/controversial people and their followings. If you want to make a community for those people, go ahead. See gab.com, voat.com, 4chan.org, parler.com etc... All these places are similar to reddit/facebook/twitter but without censorship. However, the whole point of a "free-speech" platform is to encourage an open exchange of ideas. If you only serve one side of the political spectrum, what ideas are you exchanging? It's just an echo chamber.
My point is that a real competitor to reddit will be highly dependent on some technical innovation that convinces a "normal users" to migrate. Our only hope is that this new platform will be wiser in terms of censorship policies. No normal person is going to waste their time signing up, actively post, check, and sink their time into a platform who's whole pitch is "a twitter/reddit clone with less users, but you can say racial slurs".
So I‘ll use my mom as an example. For most of my life I used message boards and chatrooms to get my internet experience. For decades this women had no idea what she was missing out on. Eventually they mainstreamed the stuff I’ve been using for people like her. They go to Reddit now because we used to go to Reddit, they sit on Facebook now because we used to sit on message boards.
The stuff the tech minded people use today will be the stuff people like my mom will use tomorrow. She doesn’t know what she’s missing out on again. So we absolutely have to keep innovating.
The problem with alternative sites like these is that these do not try to be their own thing and instead focus on being an "anti-reddit". Which - given how political reddit is - already resulted in creating a site that you describe. It's called Voat and it's dominated with right-wing politics and consipracy theories and it is pretty much unusable for anything else. There's not a single community on Voat that is worth suffering through pages of political nonsense. Gab has the exact same issue.
The problem is not that reddit doesn't allow free speech, the problem is that these sites became the front of war for people who live and breathe real-world politics. That type of content seems to dominate everything else on these websites and turns off people who just want a nice little community to discuss their niche hobby.
I believe the next reddit won't be a site that advertises itself for allowing free speech; I think it will be one that bans real-world politics and does it's best to keep it this way.
It seemed to me that shill mods started to back off around August when some of the rioting and arson started getting old and having the opposite of the intended political results. And, now that we are a month from the elections they are no longer interested in censoring as it probably won't have an effect especially since people have already started voting.
I agree somewhat but the solution is tricky. You've described two problems, actually: 1) Community norms/culture and 2) censorship/banning. Ideally, the "next Reddit" would/should allow flagging content that is hateful/hurtful while providing a sensible (and formally regulated) means to appeal flagging, censorship and banning.
Ultimately, the Internet at large needs to grow past this adolescent stage that yields to mob rule and crudely divides people and ideas into "good" and "bad" without any discussion or nuance.
Reddit has always leaned incredibly liberal, that's not new. But some of the most active subs sport borderline extremism for conservatives as well - and that viewpoint would be shared and upvoted plenty, just like ACAB or sympathizing with Chris Dorner will rise to the top of /r/politics.
Online communities without moderation exist, and they're usually cesspools. I don't think they'll catch on like reddit did.
I think the left wing has adopted the view that they are good fighting evil and the ends justify the means in anything they do, which of course is not compatible with free speech and subject to political abuse. Online communities without moderation have always existed. Pre-internet BBS's were full of what people would call "cesspool" stuff although it would be considered tame today. Today cesspool means generic conspiracy theories. Obviously a big right wing one is politicians and pedophilia which congress just passed a resolution about WHILE there is this whole real thing going on with pedophile island, Epstein, and, yep, politicians. So it is hard to sort out which is 'cesspool' and what are attempts to censor reality and hide crimes coming from the political establishment.
Any board where they just remove flagrant porn, gore, and violent threats would be OK and would last until the general public learned about it.
Next reddit will start with free speech and, if it becomes popular, eventually the anti-free speech people will move in and turn it into reddit.