A lot has been written about the social and legal difficulties of running such a site (how much do you enjoy looking at child porn all day so you can ban the people posting it? How many mass-shooters would you like to have post their manifesto on your site?) But I think the real issue is just money. Even if you keep things pretty stripped down, as 4chan or the original reddit did, hosting still costs money. And if you ever catch on, it's going to cost a LOT of money. Where is that money going to come from? Your users? You don't have a commercial product people are willing to pay for. Advertisers? Not in a post ad-pocalypse era; they don't want to be anywhere near a free, anonymous platform. And keep in mind that eventually you'll have to pay for ddoss protection, a security and moderation team, and probably legal as well. So unless you're wealthy enough to just pay for the site out of pocket indefinitely, any reddit or image board clone is doomed to failure from the beginning. It has a ticking death clock that will expire when the owners finally realize they can no longer afford it.
There was in fact a time where Reddit’s front page included a progress bar showing how much Gold needed to be bought/gifted that day to pay off that day’s server time, and shortly after it was introduced the bar was overfilled every single day and eventually set to a more arbitrary goal than actual server bills. I’m assuming that didn’t include salaries and other overhead, but it does indicate the userbase could basically sponsor the hosting fees. That was also before Reddit directly hosted images and videos, so those bills have presumably gone up quite a bit.
This is actually one of the more troubling aspects of Reddit's decline IMO. The user-funded model WORKED but so much tracking data was getting left behind that someone chose to make the switch.
It will be difficult if not impossible to find a payment platform to service donations. If you accept crypto, exchanges may block you if user pays with stolen coins.
