This reads a lot like you're kind of working to shit on them, though.
It looks dead.
Ok? I don't know how you'd get that impression and you don't really elaborate, but I don't really see what might lead to that impression.
You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.
Yeah. Invite systems are a valid solution when you're looking to limit the pace of growth, and social media sites like aggregators often want to rate-limit growth in order to avoid an Eternal September moment changing their culture. Password recovery is amusingly antiquated. Their scoring works different and the numbers don't translate 1:1.
The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?
Yeah. Welcome to Tildes, a site utterly dedicated to high-concept, high-content, participation and engagement - with near every aspect of its design based around discouraging low-bar contribution and encouraging effortposts. If you personally find a long philosophy section and a ultra-simple aesthetic to be disengaging to you - then they're probably working as intended, and you're just not the target demographic. They're reaching about the same growth point as Reddit did when it made that decision themselves, and from what he said in the announcement they're facing the same problems. They're sitting at numbers well above "100 users" though, - as mentioned, they're not trying to be a highly-active and super-busy space. Several thousand users on Tildes produce a much smaller total footprint than several thousand users on lemmy or kbin.
Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.
And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.
At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.
This is the part where it's just like ... did Demiorz kill your dog and fuck your wife or something? Because these read as if it's coming from a pretty personal set of feelings for you.
It's a website where you are not the target user. That's fine. You don't need to hate them for that. They don't need to change for you.
If this whole thing isn't personal between you and them and is simply about the fact that they're a 'reddit alternative' that isn't the Fediverse, I think playing Websites We Use like it's sports teams where our guys are the best and everyone else is shit is ... kinda juvenile.