Ask HN: Let’s build a new social media platform | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Let’s build a new social media platform

4 pointsaandason9 comments

Ever thought of building a new social media platform that’s focusing on users' privacy, no censorship & no sudden restrictions?

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I tried to make a community without censorship at one time. It seemed like a simple enough goal. After all, who was I to judge what's right and wrong? I'd let people post anything they wanted, and if it wasn't illegal, it would be allowed. It also provided a fairly clear line on what was acceptable and I liked that concept.

Well, it went great for a short while. After a couple of years it started to get worse though. A small group of people started posting racist comments and topics. Long term members would then ask why this racism was allowed, and I defended their free speech. Then I started to lose some of the friendly regulars from the community. They got tired of being insulted, and if the community didn't censor of remove racist comments, they argued I was supporting them and giving them a platform to spread hate.

As I watched the community degrade, I realized censorship would be required if I wanted the community to develop into what I envisioned and so I changed course.

In short, no censorship is going to give you a certain type of community, so before starting consider if this is the type of social network you want to bring into the world.

So you favored the most intolerant people (because they were regular) over the most free-speech ones?

The case where the community started already degraded and then evolved towards uncensored participants is also valid.

The best way to do this is to make it a standard format of posting, with RSS feeds, and some sort of subscription/syndication system that reduces the delay for feedback to less than a day.

Anything that requires accounts on a server will be perverted by profit motives, or heavy censorship. We need to sort out our own hosting, with multiple competing aggregators. Basically, the original web, rebooted.

We tried that already. The payment processors and hosting providers kick them off as soon as they become popular.

Like Gab or Parlor? Where are these censorship resistant platforms today?

Have you considered what a truly censorship free world would be like? Are we really mature enough as a species or society for this yet?

There are already uncensored platforms, the World is still alive, no big drama.

They are fringe, not mainstream, people who go there seek out that kind of garbage content.

It would be very different if the majority participated

Organized groups backed by various governments directly or indirectly will pose as extremists, flooding the platform with bots to post increasingly obscene content while pretending to be organic users. The intention of such groups is to get the platform banned so that users are kept on platforms they control.

This is all rather easily averted and solved if someone actually cared, but no one cares.

The problem could be solved by a sort of KYC (know your customer) rule that then is used to silo the platform on a per country basis.

Imagine a reddit that consisted ONLY of your countrymen's genuine comments, without any bots or alt accounts, without any foreign state actors repeatedly pumping divisive stuff to the top.

Further, imagine a sort of certificate authority for identity per the KYC systen.

Americans using this free speech platform could all be anonymous to eachother, but still visible to the feds if they used the platform to post illegal content. There would then be no need or reason to censor speech. People could talk of taboo subjects freely and openly behind their usernames without having foreign ragebots in a Russian trollfarm tur ing it into a flamewar.

You know, maybe Trump's team that recieved huge investment would build such a thing. Who knows.

Okay, how do you expect to get the women to join?

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