The heading/title should say:<p><pre><code> “We reimplemented reddit, but took out the feature of reddit that made reddit a success”
</code></pre>
PS: the OP’s site is now super NSFW. I assume someone is tying to prove a point :)
Without a voting system, users have no way to find "quality" content. Everything is mixed together, which means that the signal to noise ratio is only going to get lower and lower as more people contribute to the community.
Maybe I'm biased, but in the last days there were plenty of Show HNs about social networks:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21252544" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21252544</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21241476" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21241476</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224211" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224211</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21312318" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21312318</a>
You can do without voting. All you need is a way to discern what is popular, in order to display 'popular' and 'new' categories. For example by measuring comments and clicks, maybe the amount of time users spend on the comment page relative to the amount of comments. Not a great idea since it can be gamed, but what can't nowadays.<p>It would probably favor clickbait, violence, etc like every other system. The only escape from this on a user-submitted site, if there are no subcategories outright banning certain content, is what's already in place, just sorting everything by date.
You could also poll the client to see what threads they're reading. You could add this to an engagement score of some sort.<p>On a page with a long list, you add this score to all the items on it they're reading