What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.
But can your grandmother do this ... or just the common person?
Where and how?
(edit: it is now 23!)
Won't make me rich.
But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.
If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.
You won't get rich but you will be part of something.
They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
r/sffpc has https://smallformfactor.net/forum/
r/JDM_WAAAAT has serverbuilds.net
Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.
1. It's free 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Websites are great for displaying information but they are not ideal for discussion
Blogger is free. LiveJournal is free. There's plenty of free offerings. Taken as an ecosystem, they are decentralized.
> 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
The question was for a decentralized service. You can't really have everything under one site and be decentralized, because that one site can filter anything they want. I agree that people want that, but it wasn't the question.
> 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Not really part of the question, which was whether the average person can make a forum through a web page.
I think your points have merit, but they don't necessarily apply to the question that was posed, at least as I interpreted it and intended my response to apply to it.
In theory you can find new subreddits starting from the main page, but it's more often because of people cross-posting things from somewhere you weren't previously aware existed.
There isn't any technical reason why a decentralized system couldn't work the same way. Basically just need a standard way to designate posts as permissible to repost on other sites with a link-back, and then a button on the site that makes it easy to do that.
> You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Small sites should go the other way and use an email as the login name (distinct from the public display name if you want). Then you don't even have a password, to sign in you get an email with a token in it. Paste the token or click the link from the email and you get a cookie that keeps you signed in. Lose the cookie or want to sign into another device and they send you another email.
Then "signup" takes five seconds, there's no login to forget (it's your email) and no password to forget (it doesn't even exist), so doing this on a hundred independent websites doesn't matter. You don't even have to use the email you actually read, you could use one exclusively for this type of account and then ignore anything that comes to it that isn't a site login token.
The signal will be hugely susceptible to outlier bias -- The Post That Goes Viral, and generates a huge number of incoming links -- will dominate the rankings.
Because the signal is so thin, distorting and manipulation (through link farming) will be cheap and difficult to detect (a small number of links across a large number of sites).
Don't get me wrong: looking at incidental behaviour is useful, and can often be much more beneficial than direct actions. But remember that all of these signals are actually proxies for some ineffible quantity you're trying to measure, quality.
(The very definition of which should leave you crying on the floor after a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years....)
May minds have attempted this task. All have fail.
Your correspondent included.
(Small site, many moons ago, since surrendered its electrons back to the Great Disk in the Sky.)
And I'll claim my prize to the second ;-)
The problem is essentially this: since pagerank is basically the probability that a random walk through the link graph will end up on your site, linking back to yourself, and no other websites, gives a big boost to your pagerank because a random walk will get stuck on your site. Of course it’s easy to just ignore self-links, but you can get essentially the same effect through clique-like groups of websites and this can be more difficult to detect.
What’s interesting is that an algorithm based on how electrical current flows (so a link is a one-way resistor, i.e. a resistor in series with a diode) would not have this problem. Attaching a conductive loop to some point in a circuit does not change how current flows. Electrons don’t get stuck in loops because they don’t drift around randomly, they move from lower voltage to higher voltage.
Link graphs remind me of lightning descending leaders. If you can have a sense of charge potential between cloud and ground, there might be a circuit equivalent which drains largely self-referential link-farms.
Or is that rephrasing your description? My circuit physics / EE-fu is exceedingly weak.
I think so? There is an obvious circuit equivalent where links are interpreted as one-way resistors. You get a charge potential automatically given the circuit and a choice of source / sink nodes (which you need to decide on anyway to apply pagerank).
Cluster analysis generally shows such relations though.
(I'm pretty sure these questions have generated multiple PhDs at Google.)
I have a feeling that you think the electrical potential must be defined by some ad-hoc method before applying an electrical algorithm, and this requires fancy techniques like cluster analysis and the like? This is not the case. Let me re-emphasize that you only need to specify the network of resistors (which is the link graph) and the source and sink, and then the potential is defined automatically in terms of those things (the same way as in physical circuits).
The source and sink are arbitrary? Or do they need to correspond to some actual reality?
In regards to the question, the latter. The source corresponds roughly to the E vector of the pagerank whitepaper. It's a set of websites that's axiomatically good. The pagerank paper suggested the Netscape home page and John McCarthy's homepage as examples, or alternatively making every website a source, although the last option is more prone to abuse. The sink is harder to find a good analogy for. I think a reasonable choice would be to add a new node to the graph representing the sink, and then connect every website via a directed resistor. Then websites could be ranked by how much current flows through the resistor to the sink.
Edit: By the way, upon thinking about this more, I've just realized that I'm not sure about the exact mechanism by which link farms boost pagerank. As far as I can tell there are two possibilities:
A. The original "stuck in a loop" explanation, by which you can illegitimately magnify legitimately earned rank.
B. With the every-page-as-source strategy, you can boost the rank of a website by creating a new website and linking to it, even if nothing links to the new website. Then the other extra links in the link farm just exist to avoid detection of this sort of thing. So you are illegitimately creating rank from scratch, rather than magnifying existing rank.
Admittedly the electrical circuit thing only addresses mechanism A. Mechanism B can be addressed by being more discriminating about which websites are in the source. That applies whether you use pagerank or the electrical thing.
Much of this is true on Reddit too, except mods seeing your IP address, but most of the important info is consistently in the subreddit sidebar.
1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it
2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the various information sources and present options that users find interesting is the biggest reason lurkers&voters (90% of it's users) keep returning.
You don't come there for because "it has a consistent user interface". You come there because "it's easy to use!" (and you find it easy because it's consistent, like you said)
See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc.
This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.
The Asks -- Science, Historians, possibly Economists (I'm trying to decide there -- the mods talk expertise, though quality IMO lags). Several of the Fitness subs are quite good. Various technical subs attract high-quality contributors, and the CSS support sub (specifically for styling old-style Reddit custom stylesheets) is simply superb. I've dug into energy topics, and though there's a bit of BS flung about, there's also quality expertise.
Posting online actually is a form of shingle-hanging and getting a sense of issues people are facing in the real world. There's value to that.
3. Discussions
Try discussing anything on a random website.
Discussions, just like on HN, are usually better than the linked content.
In relative terms, it's superior to most of its alternatives (present site excluded, of course).
Reddit is the best place to find those, IMO.
We can have the same discussions about the NIH and new drug development (since most drugs simply can't make money). The internet, chips, Google itself was started as a federally funded post-grad project.
Things move much faster when we devote shared resources into risk taking that cannot make money. It might sound like waste, but government spending, I surmise, is what creates great economies. This occurs because technological advancement, especially those that can't obviously be exploited for financial gain in the market, are the true drivers of our economy.
Either way, we will soon begin to see who is right. There are several countries now competing with the US who were far behind when we went to our current model of low taxation, high free market. It should be interesting to see if their centralized scientific/technological systems outdo us over time.
You need both and totalitarianism never pay.
For all that it was a ghost town, if you could find some good conversation hosts / moderators on Google+, that site had some really good discussions. Probably mostly because it didn't try to scale.
(Yes, this was a hugely subjective experience, and depending on who you did or didn't follow, quality varied dramatically. The core G+ user group was probably ~100k or so English-literate participants, of whom a good 10-20k have ended up on the Pluspora Diaspora pod.)
I've both tried to start and gone looking for conversation on Reddit. The site conspires against this, in several ways.
If you're aware of specific subs that really shine and aren't afraid to name them, I'd appreciate it. (I can completely understand not wanting to out good discussion.)
Mind I'm contrasting discussion with merely good information, which Ask Historians, Ask Science, and a small set of other subs manage to achieve, with draconian (and much needed & welcomed) moderation.
So let's fix that?
Basically, just put a bunch of html/css files in a GitHub repo, then use the above page to let Netlify publish that on the net... it can even set up DNS for you so you can your own domain.
If that's still too hard, you can use a drag-and-drop option: https://app.netlify.com/drop
Just drop a folder with your website and you're done.
I guess, if we’re talking about 'creating your own website', we do literally mean any site, not just a limited subset. Clearly, server-side scripting is out of scope, so we're talking content rather than apps - so any form of HTML+Js+css, with a very accessible UI, and lots of 'templates' available for each of the three technologies.
- Self-hosted mostly-static sites
- Open protocol
- Own domain
- Own site is portal for aggregated views
- Extensions (Install events, chat, ...)
- Rust (minimal RAM)...newsgroups...
> and anyone can start one and run it as they please.
Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.
The names are rather unique, mostly made out of a string of personal names like "Watson, Sherlock & Lestrade Accountants LLC" or of geographical locations "Central Dartmoor Accounting LLC". Such accounting companies are small businesses with around 5-10 employees and mostly local clients. Their real world competition is the other handful of local accounting companies in the rural areas they are in. However, with few exceptions, I had to go to page 3 or even 4 on Google to find the companies' own website because page 1 and 2 were cluttered with ads for other accountants or accounting applications, and, to my surprise, for different SEO optimized collections of company data on accountants.
I used to think that it was just hotel and restaurant websites you have to find on page 3 buried below Bookings, Tripadvisor, Expedia and the like. But even something as mundane as accountants now have to fight SEO websites to get some attention.
Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.
Edit: I suspect something like this probably existed. It seems straightforward and obvious enough that I'd bet it did exist, but couldn't get much usage in a world where spam wasn't quite as bad, numbers of users were smaller, and people were already shifting to HTML based platforms.
It's also very slow. And the posting format is very hard to follow sometimes, especially when you get people that don't do hard line breaks (or the other way around, depending on the program you're using) or have funny ideas about quoting.
Also, the lack of moderation seems to create a very wild-west style of conversation, where apparently rational people can start spewing really hardcore invective at the drop of a hat.
Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland.
Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland.
The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane.
But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep.
("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.")
These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.
People in tech undervalue what older communities offer. If the discussion group hasn't become a wasteland after a few years, there is something there.
I'd argue its a usenet/irc hybrid.
Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved.
> Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content
I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. I think it's reddit's right to do either -- purge or not purge -- but I'm not interested in the old reddit.
The redesign is bad, but I'm not really a power user, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. You can always just use old.reddit.com anyway, right?
Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page.
Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless you explicitly sought them out. The one exception would be /r/all, but again the default is your "home" page so you'd never see that content.
I suppose if you never read the comments, then the subscriptions would keep you away from certain types of content. But if you wanted to participate in the community, only banning and active moderation worked. Subscriptions weren't any barrier at all.
Reddit doesn't want a 'better' site it just cycles the garbage to fit the trends.
Can you elaborate on this?
I don't think so. As far as I can tell, Disqus is not decentralized at all. It's basically the same as Facebook comments but from a different company.
The locus has shifted, though. Early Reddit was decidely techy, it's now exceedingly popular/memey. There were and are many cesspits. As well as numerous dead or stagnent fora, several of which I can lay claim to myself.
How would this be prevented in a decentralized system? Spammers would join the network, create thousands of bots, and upvote all their spam.
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
At least good old blog spam is easy to identify and ignore.
There are a few topics I care about where you have both big subreddits and also dedicated "old school" forums on third-party websites. The forums are always more interesting and in-depth in my experience, when the subreddits are just a litany of karma-whoring picture posts and low effort so-called "memes".
For example, I have noticed shameless downvoting in operating system war threads, both on reddit and on HN. In highly technical threads about physics or mathematics I have noticed people tend to vote based on the quality of the content posted.
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these
days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of
etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips
while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely
dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
I don't know what the rest of the people praising reddit's redesign are talking about. My experience has been that its so heavily sanitized that unless you say something saccharinely in-tune with the consensus view, your comment risks being banished to the nethermost regions of the thread.
Most of the comments are rehashes of the same groupthink, echoing the same banal and glib points over and over till they choke out any real thought provoking, refreshing and original insights.
If the cost of having a system that surfaces original and thought provoking viewpoints means living with _some_ borderline hate speech subreddits, I dont mind paying that cost.
The alternative is just feel-good insanity and a thousand times worse, in import.
(Disclosure: I’m the creator of Aether, happy to answer any questions)
But I use VPNs. So I'd need to get a mapped port.
What port does Aether want?
Edit: Also, can I just install from source?
You can look at the port it chooses through netstat, it does not have a fixed port. However, once it gets a working one, it won’t change it from then on so you can map that port.
Edit: you can, but it having an Electron shell for UI (the actual app is Go) makes the build process somewhat complicated. It’s on GitHub though, feel free to take a look at the makefile and give it a shot.
error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap "Aether-2.0.0-dev.14+1909192130.00bf3c3.snap"
SO [1] suggests this can be forced with `sudo snap install --dangerous` but that doesn't sound right.
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-...
That does cover much of the market... but leaves out Linux, MacOS, and mobile.
It's not the same as searching through Google.
Even HN has just the right balance that makes this place have some of the best threads on the internet.
I think the answer has to do with the user's voice and a sense of ownership:
1. Even if spam accounts sign up, their comments and posts rarely get to the top of the algorithm because user's have a voice in the matter (downvote low quality content, and upvote other higher quality content).
2. There is a sense of ownership on the part of the mods... people who are generally passionate about the area of interest in which they moderate. There have been a number of cases over the years where moderators were acting in bad faith and the users have voiced their concerns to the Admins, who frequently remove mods or even whole subs that are operating against the benefit of the community.
Also if you look at r/all or r/popular right now it’s only images. I remember a time where it was mostly text.
I hate to be that guy, but it did become worse and worse.
I think you underestimate the long tail in all of these cases. I don't think the first two statements are accurate.
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
Unfortunately this leads to meme cesspools lacking any major discussion. reddit's ease of discovery backfires here: it's difficult to keep a subreddit's content focused and meaningful if any random person who isn't invested in keeping quality content can wander in. Moderators, and their removal of "too shallow" content, dedicated days for memes or discussions, and creation of dedicated low-quality subreddits, are a necessary evil.
It's a link aggregator based on ActivityPub, the federation protocol used by Mastodon and company.
I am closing to a 1.0 release, at which point I want it to be completely integrated in the global ActivityPub network and would be interactable with from most of the other platforms. (Basically if you have another valid fediverse account, you will be able to post/interact with littr instances)
There are also several other projects in various states of compatibility and featurefullness that are working on the same idea. On the top of my head there's:
- Prismo: https://prismo.xyz/
- Lemmy: https://dev.lemmy.ml/
I look at mastodon instances and any non-moderated ones is white-supremacist shit.
I'm not sure if the average consumer wants to see that.
Of course, it's still smaller than Twitter for example so we'll see how it goes when it grows larger, but right now it's working, in my opinion.
https://memberapp.github.io/#topic?type=all&start=0&limit=25...
I've opened a new thread for discussion if you have any questions on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21551843
The code looks clean and is based on the old Reddit code and UI.
https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) — and if you scroll down, you'll notice it adds some improvements on HackerNews and Reddit:
Also one site meant it is easily affected by big power.
---
I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Ex.
Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
Content A gets sorted higher than B.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)
I think of my spec as basically just a protocol and think most clients would do the work of adjusting trust scores algorithmically based on the actions you take.