Comment by mercenario

Completely agree with you, if reddit didn't provide anything useful it would be really easy to just leave it and go somewhere else.

Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort.

This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/