There's a term of art in philosophy called universalizability (Kant). Basically, what would happen if everyone followed a principle or strategy. Locke spoke of the social contract - civilization is not compatible with unlimited individual freedom.
Reddit already has an interesting user sorting and self-selection process: sub-reddits. People can more easily congregate around common interests. They don't even have to buy a domain, learn HTML, or pay hosting bills. Which would seem to reduce flame wars. But this can result in groupthink and safe spaces for extreme views.
Just for those interested in philosophy but lacking knowledge of the subject, this is technically correct but not the complete picture. The term "universalizability" is informal and not precise in describing Kant's morality; it falls under his categorical imperative.[0] I suggest the entire linked SEP article for a more thorough discussion of the topic.
[0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#CatHypImp
this sounds interesting and im not sure its common knowledge. does anyone have a source?
Xbox Live: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/microsoft-explains-xb... I've never owned an Xbox so I don't know how effective it was.
Looking at the front page now, it's just turned into 4chan.
Right now it is very closely editorialized, but conversation level is at a good point.
Reddit itself did grow massively with the Digg exodus, but that was after it had already grown into its own, it had a community behind it to begin with. There was no content void for trolls to fill up with crap. It only worked because Reddit had grown up naturally already.
If a site is hyped as "reddit competitor", it will fail, just like sites hyped as a "facebook competitor" or "twitter competitor". Hype is a horrible thing for any site that depends on user interaction and discussion.
"You'll get over it"
> All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep
This is fundamental risk to any business that depends on a social space. The best explanation of the mechanics that create this risk is Joe Peacock's talk[1] at NOTACON 8 about the time fark.com made the same mistake... and then poured gasoline on the fire with the infamous "You'll get over it" comment being the only publicly visible response by fark.com's management.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
[2] They also mentioned that some of the loudest people that left came back later under a different username. That's the lesson the talk is trying to explain: most people probably do like (or will eventually like) the benefits of the "new and improved" version, so involve them in the process and respect that they might just need some time to adapt. Forcing people to adapt immediately only associates the new version with a strongly negative experience.
This is the goal of https://notabug.io it's a p2p fork of reddit based on GUNdb. Still very early; but my hope is that there will be enough interest in lifeboats that people will be interested in helping to construct one.
notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is:
distributed: peers backup/serve content
anonymous: but don't trust it to be
immutable: edits are not supported
votes are PoW *voting is CPU heavy*
In practice it will tend towards federation for calculation of sorts/searches I expect.
The big thing protecting reddit right now, IMO, is that /r/worldnews for all its faults is still a much less awful way to browse international news headlines than the vast majority of news sites. Sure, the headlines are editorialized and the comments are mostly trolls, but at least it won't crash your phone browser and it's not gonna interrupt your unhealthy obsession with foreign affairs to bring you someone else's unhealthy obsession with celebrity gossip. And for all the ads pimping the reddit app, just try to download a recipe from Cookstr or the Food Network or whatever and you'll soon be begging to see fake loading screens that ask you to download an iPhone app. (Serious Eats is good though.)
So it'll be a while.
The only other ubiquitous logins are Facebook and Google, and I trust neither of them to do Reddit's job better than Reddit does (which is, admittedly, not the highest bar.)
HN did introduce a minifier [-] in the wrong side of the comments, but at least the rest is pretty much the same.
> You retain the rights to your copyrighted content or information that you submit to reddit ("user content") except as described below.
> By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
> You agree that you have the right to submit anything you post, and that your user content does not violate the copyright, trademark, trade secret or any other personal or proprietary right of any other party.
The individual users retain the rights to their comments and posts and so on, Reddit just gets permission to display them.
So, a mod would probably have to gain permission from every user before federating, legally speaking.
How does archive.org get away w/ archiving reddit pages and content?
You'd think their api would make it not possible to break the policy above, but you can grab comments/posts/etc json feeds without an api key, and agreeing to anything at all.
It says and 'to authorize others to do so too....' could that mean by 'others' anybody who accesses reddit endpoints via api? Or uses the .json feeds?
For a while during the LJ/Dreamwidth transition there were people using apps to post on both, and Dreamwidth even let you follow arbitary RSS feeds so you could include reading public LJ through it. It still took a long time to transition most communities, until the Russian buyout and change of policies.
The most avid consumers of my own posts seem to bee reputation-farming robots at reddit clones, on Twitter, and the odd Wordpress blog.
Reddit publishes RSS feeds, and has a pretty robust API. The behaviour described is one consequence of these.
I doubt it. Unlike Digg, Reddit has community lock-in. If your content is generic memes and videos and general-interest news articles, then you can switch without caring too much if everybody else follows right away.
But if you’re in a small city sub or the sub of some niche hobby or interest, then it matters a lot if everybody else agrees to move. You want to be where the other people are and it’s really hard to get an entire community to organize somewhere else. A site that can pull 20% of a small sub’s users isn’t 20% as good. It’s useless.