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Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

Spam protection has been around for years and years. It's nothing new. Sure, Reddit may have a handful of devs dedicated to perfecting it for their platform but there are a huge number of solutions to spam and I bet many commercial and OSS ones too.

DDOS is provided by many hosting companies now for free.

Now, I'm not trying to make this out like the Dropbox post many years ago comparing it to self-hosting, nothing of the sort.

But Reddit (and other tech giants) provide very little above basic forums imo and in any case, the price is too high!

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Although the point of being centralised is portrayed as a negative, that is the single largest benefit these platforms provide over forums.

Yes it is easy to make a forum and throw it on some low cost hosting, for a person skilled in IT. However FB, Reddit et al. provide a platform (heh) to any kind of group no matter the size. Nobody wants to create dozens of accounts for their local chess club, their local shop, their local pub and whatever. I can be a member of a anti Phillips screw subreddit, but wouldn’t create a forum for it.

The value of centralised identity is enormous.

> Nobody wants to create dozens of accounts for their local chess club, their local shop, their local pub and whatever.

> The value of centralised identity is enormous.

That's what OAuth is for. As usual, the technical problem has been solved but social problems remain.

Counter anecdote: the last traditional forum that I have any interaction with was so plagued by spam that they turned off registration and the new registration system is “send an email to the admin asking for an account”. Needless to say, they aren’t a growing community anymore. They also don’t use SSL because none of their admins are fluent enough to set up LetsEncrypt. Don’t forget that lots of non-technical or less-technical people like to have forums too.

Reddit’s scale provides eyeballs Facebook’s friend web provides a bunch of people you know

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