Show HN: Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments

I have two slightly challenging comments, which I hope you will take as constructive prodding to clarify your thinking.

Firstly, you have a bit of dissonance in your thinking that you’ll need to clear up. You say lots of complementary things about HN and suggest that the quality is what you’re aiming for. But you also say you “don’t believe in censorship”. Depending on what you mean by censorship (people have wildly different definitions!), you’ll need to reconcile the fact that HN has relatively restrictive community guidelines, and very active moderation. Many people would credit the high quality of discussion to those things.

Secondly, I think your “tags as subreddits” misses the point of subreddits. They’re not a filtering mechanism for which links you want to see, they’re a way to let users associate into small(er) communities where community norms, standards, shared experiences, running jokes, moderation expectations, and generally a community identity and spirit can develop.

I think most 'Reddit alternative' options that people are trying to show off are missing what made Reddit great. I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is.

Tagging posts with hashtags or topics or labels or whatever misses what actually made reddit great, which is the sense of community in (mostly?) smaller subreddits, and the ability for specific subreddits to have their own rules, moderators, and general sense of what that place was for and why people would want to be there.

Nicely put.

At its best and its worst, reddit reminds me of a more impersonal version &TOTSE's forums from the web of the 90s and early 00s: a community of communities, where you might see familiar faces from one spot to the next, but they were largely their own little worlds with their own norms, regulars, moderation, etc.

It was infamous at the time for the Bad Ideas forum where things like explosives and shoplifting techniques were discussed, but it also hosted flourishing communities dedicated to books, literary criticism, movies, politics, etc. Many people were quite content never sticking their heads out of the nicer places into the more 'interesting' areas, and it remained markedly welcoming and collegial throughout most of its existence.

It and reddit also had the benefit of easier discoverability: it's trivial to move around and discover new, related communities, which IMHO was also the charm of IRC and something rather missing from Discord and the like.

> I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is.

Which is an interesting point to make because that's exactly the experience I'm finding with Mastodon, having joined a community-specific instance (metalhead.club) which gives me that feeling of being in a community, but having some access to users from other communities via following interesting people. That last thing is the key difference with Mastodon - discovery is different. There's no algorithm pushing things into your feed - you need to be much more active in your own content discovery.

What I find strange is that I don’t want to be part of only a single community. Yeah I know I can follow others, but to me it’s still somehow stranger than e.g. reddit’s model.

Yes. I agree there’s more friction if you’re active in multiple communities.

Lurking can sort of be achieved through judicious use of following tags.

Why couldn't this be accomplished through tags? For example instead of going to the /r/digitalnomad subreddit, you can view the digital nomad tag (https://zsync.xyz/t/digitalnomad)

I agree that there's still value in private subreddit style communities, but I believe that that could co-exist with tags.

Ultimately it's a tradeoff. Without tagging you have to figure out which subreddits to post in, potentially cross-posting in tons of different subreddits, fragmenting discussion. With tagging you only need to post once, but a single tag feels less like a "community". I guess personally I never really felt any real sense of community from any subreddits (unlike the old phpBB forums), so the sacrifice made sense to me to keep discussion in one place. But this would only work well if the site can actually foster balanced, intelligent discussion and debate across the spectrum (otherwise just becomes the PC hivemind dump that is the mainstream subreddits like /r/politics), which Reddit has proven incapable of over the last decade - ending up fostering extreme communities like /r/TheDonald as a backlash to the PC hivemind + censorship in the rest of the site.

I think you are looking at it from a technical point of view, and not a "product" point of view.

Adding a tag to something doesn't communicate that you are posting it in a community, nor does it communicate that community's rules, etiquette, morals and values. When a user "tags" something it just means adding a label to it. "Posting" in a community communicates something very different.

> I guess personally I never really felt any real sense of community from any subreddits

Honestly that staggers me. Maybe you’re spending too much time on giant subreddits rather than in smaller communities? Your experience with Reddit appears to have omitted the parts that make Reddit great.

> Maybe you’re spending too much time on giant subreddits

I think this is definitely the case for a lot of people who use reddit. My advice to everyone I've recommended Reddit to is:

1. Sign up for an account 2. Unsubscribe from every subreddit you're subscribed to by default 3. Join smaller communities like <list of subreddits that I think they might be interested in>

Take gaming as a topic for example; /r/gaming has over thirty million subscribers, which is insane. There's no way that space can be welcoming or foster a sense of community.

Instead, look for something more specific, like /r/NintendoSwitch, /r/PS5, /r/BaseBuildingGames, and so on. You can also look for more cross-topical subreddits, like /r/GirlGamers, /r/AccessibleGaming, /r/Gaymers or /r/LGBTgaming, and so on.

This is the distinction that so many of these Reddit clones miss; I'm not just looking to get a feed of links, I want to get to know and recognize people, learn others' perspectives, and get a real sense of what these people are like. I want to be able to bring up things like the trans and antisemitism concerns around Hogwarts Legacy without being drowned out by (or targeted for harassment by) transphobes and nazis.

As a datapoint, Wykop [1], a polish "equivalent" of Reddit (or perhaps Digg, as `Wykop` is also a play on words for _digging things out_) uses tags in its "mikroblog" section [2]. It's nowhere like Reddit and the experience is completely different — for worse. I agree with other posters that product-wise, a service with tags is nothing like Reddit, and it builds a completely different community and steers discussions in a different way. I think the biggest difference is that tags feel _small_, and services like Instagram encourage using lots of tags for _reach_. But this behavior does not build smaller communities IMO, which is IMO Reddit's biggest appeal

[1] https://wykop.pl/ [2] https://wykop.pl/mikroblog

> potentially cross-posting in tons of different subreddits, fragmenting discussion

Isn't this kind of the point - different communities will have different discussions if the same content gets posted.

Sure, but hashtags aren't communities.

If I'm talking about a base-building game that's on Humble Bundle, should I discuss it in #BaseBuildingGames, #Gaming, #PCGaming, #HumbleBundle? Where are people going to see and contribute to the discussion the most?

If I'm posting about Hogwarts Legacy's antisemitism, do I post it in #Gaming and #AntiSemitism? Aren't the antisemites and trolls who enjoy gaming going to see my post and go brigade #AntiSemitism?

For a long time, subreddits were not considered "communities". Redditors were one community and they used subreddits as sub forums. Communities were created through increased moderation which identified, grouped and isolated users. When communities were created, "Redditor" as a common shared identity was destroyed.

What happened was that around Trump running for office, and with an increase in users overall, certain subreddits (most of them not political btw) became more active and for want of a better word more "problematic" than others. The reddit admins, active mods and other vocal internet users wanted this content removed. To do this they added "quarantine" in an effort to restrict the activity of identified subreddits, and called these subreddits "communities" for the first time. Visiting a subreddit was labelled as joining a community.

By isolating subreddits they further isolated the users of reddit from each other, but they increased the group identity and feel of individual subreddits. Subreddit mods were very happy with this and other concerned users were happy with the politicisation via group creation of reddit.

A group identity becomes stronger the more one defines it in opposition with other groups.

The assertion that "subreddits are communities" evolved from the whole Trump debacle is inaccurate and makes no sense.

A lot of the subreddits that I've been in for a while have always been their own communities with their own topics and guidelines. Smaller subreddits, like /r/NintendoSwitch, /r/AccessibleGaming, /r/DND, and so on didn't become their own communities and their own moderation guidelines because of Trump, they became that way because they wanted a focused space to discuss a slice of their own topics and interests.

That description fits discord remarkably well as well, albeit discords format is more live-chat focused.

They did however lately introduce a channel format that functions more like a forum.

It was that now it's yet another content mill slowly being filled with Conde Nast clickbait and garbage articles.

This is it. People are trying to create subreddits; not reddit itself.

I think the most interesting thing about Reddit is that it can have so many different subreddits with different rules. There are unmoderated ones that still stay on topic, free-for-alls, niche discussions, and pretty heavy moderation that inspires new subreddit that is never as good.

Then there is AskHistorians. AskHistorians has some of the best answers, and almost no discussion. It is pretty common to have posts with no surviving comments. I someti es wish it was less strict, but maybe it needs sister sub where unanswered questions and discussion can go. Can the replacement platforms have AskHistorians on them?

With respect to moderation and censorship, I would suggest the authors look at Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/). That project sadly didn't go anywhere, but their overall approach to moderation, I think, is the one that comes closest to reconciling the need to curate with decentralization and differing points of view.

Election structure

Elections are always-ongoing affairs, they never stop.

This seems absolutely, horrifically, terrible. Under such a system, no leader will ever lead, instead, a leader will grandstand constantly. You'll end up with moderators that spend all day, every day, playing a popularity contest.

Why do you need a "leader that leads" for a subreddit?

As for grandstanding, that may well be the case if that's what the membership wants - in which case I would argue that it is precisely what they should get. But also, does it really matter if you can just opt out from moderators you don't like?

> Under such a system, no leader will ever lead

That's the whole point. It elects spokespersons, not leaders. It's a wonderful idea.

It's terrible. Peer pressure, eg popularity contests, are the cause of most of this world's ills!

Do you realize that on the Internet people can move to a different community if they don't like the BDFL-style mods?

Besides, you are precisely claiming that dictatorships are better than democracies.

Read carefully. I said no such thing.

That voting system seams overly complex, but an idea worth to be explored and tested.

I agree that the tags aren’t going to work quite right. If you have multiple tags, the conversion will get dominated by the largest/most vocal tag. niche tags will be drowned out.

There's no cognitive dissonance in appreciating one thing and yet wanting to do another thing.

The point of subreddits has been a failure. Most people do not understand that subreddits are individual communities. If you browse reddit from the frontpage, you get little sense that you are participating in different communities.

Most people, for better or worse, perceive reddit as one community. So the question is: Should power mods have this immense power to shape the values of this community?

This isn't HN (moderated) or reddit (individual communities) but HN and reddit already exist, a new thing should be different.

Fair point on the active moderation. I've never moderated a community before so I have no idea how much work goes into it, perhaps I'm drastically underestimating it. For example I posted this before going to sleep and woke up to see that someone had spammed the site with 300+ throwaway posts. Forgot there are people like that.

I agree on the value of subreddits as private communities. I suppose private communities and tagging can still co-exist. Many different ways to design that.

You are probably monumentally underestimating it, and with that it's not really a Reddit alternative... maybe rather a toy version of it? Not only is moderation going to be a huge task, but it would be so, even without worrying about much of the most basic spam, which I have to assume Reddit catches automatically, without moderator intervention. Your 300+ throwaway poster may be a malicious user, but on the other hand they may have set out to answer an obvious and important question about this Reddit "alternative", by seeing if it's up for the job :) See it as free user acceptance testing (fail).

Yea that's why I'm not even mad about it.

I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea.

I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats.

The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)

I upvoted your comment, but presumably the idea is to get to HN-quality commentary mechanically (rather than having a handful of human moderators doing all of the moderation).

That said, I think the highest quality forum is currently lobste.rs. It might just be that smaller forums are easier to moderate, but also I think lobste.rs' moderation isn't vulnerable to some of the exploits that HN's moderation succumbs to. For instance, on HN if someone posts something mildly negative, they'll likely get moderated; however, if they post something that's pretty obviously hostile (to most people, anyway) but with the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability, they're not likely to be moderated (and anyone who challenges this plausible deniability may themselves be moderated for violating the 'assume positive intent' guideline). Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job--maybe there's something Zsync could learn from their approach as well?

> Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job

I believe HN moderation works similarly. Users can flag posts, which - given enough flags - (automatically?) triggers the [flagged] annotation. Moderators also see flags and can act further on them - adding/removing [flagged], warning/banning accounts, etc.

In addition, dang has said in the past that the most likely reason some stuff doesn't get moderated is because the moderators don't see it [0], rather than them letting some stuff off the hook.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35971955

Re. HN, the guidelines cover this:

> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'ld love to login lobste.rs but we need an invite to join. How can we join if we don't know anybody ? This leaves good people out.

If you leave a way to contact you, people might be able to help you with an invite.

Thank you very much. Here is my email address: mail@chmike.com I have just set it up. It should work

Not GP but I’m also hoping someone can invite me. My email is cynix@cynix.org

Thanks for the invite :)

IMO, I'd rather see ML used to improve moderation rather than another opaque algorithm picking content for a social media feed. I wonder how accurate an ML algorithm could get at picking out moderation-worthy comments.

How is ML not also an opaque algorithm? You can still bake bias in, especially if you train it on the type of content to favor.

I wasn't trying to say ML makes an algorithm any less opaque - just that I don't like when such algorithms are used to populate content feeds.

I avoid content feeds that aren't driven by algorithms with simple, understandable rules, like the HN's voting system.

But I thought maybe there would be an application for using ML to help moderators more quickly detect posts and comments which warrent their attention. In that case, the "opaqueness" of the algorithm doesn't matter to me.

You might want to look at the current issues in StackOverflow - both sides of the dispute say that ML is not good enough to detect bad things.

Do you have a good link? I think it's an interesting subject, but all I can find are posts made by SO mods and admins which are generally positive about using bots to detect bad posts. If there is a controversy, I suppose SO would probably prefer it be hard to search for.

I've thought many times about ideas for platforms which involve user-submitted content, and I've always given up on them quickly because I couldn't think of a good way to handle moderation. It's probably just wishful thinking that ML could significantly help with that.

>In the future, we could use ML to offer options to sort comments in more useful ways, such as by sorting by "most insightful". We could determine based on your upvote history the type of content you'd be most likely to enjoy

Honestly, you lost me here. I am so sick of algorithms trying to serve me what they think I want. I'd much rather be able to just say "Give me X" and get X, not "But also you might enjoy Y". It also seems ripe for abuse further on down the line whenever money begins to be a problem and advertisers are breathing down the site's neck.

Additionally, as long as I'm just giving kneejerk personal opinions, I hate that all these reddit clones are copying the new-reddit "centered" setup with huge amounts of blank space on either side. I think you're right to be inspired by HN, especially when trying to foster more high-quality discussion-oriented content. Emphasize the text, let it take the whole screen!

I don’t mean to overly uncharitable to OPs work but the “AI” stuff jumped out at me too. Especially in the context of their previous post about building a “web3” Reddit alternative:

https://jsavage.xyz/2022/07/28/im-building-a-web3-reddit-zsy...

Now that “web3” isn’t in vogue that’s de-emphasised and AI is emphasised instead. I’m wary of anything that chases buzzwords to this degree.

That's because all the web3 grifters jumped ship to AI when the future of crypto became clear.

I didn't even say "AI" in the post, I said ML. And the ideas I proposed are basic ML 101 stuff. Nothing revolutionary, just basic common sense features that would drastically improve Reddit if implemented. Do you have any objections to the actual ideas proposed, or you just want to ad hominem?

Yea I built this last yea when the term "web3" was still in vogue. I agree that buzzwords tend to be overused and especially "web3", but in any case I'd appreciate if you'd actually address the ideas proposed instead of focusing on the terminology.

For every hype there’s an equal and opposite reaction to the hype. Proposing ML to sort comments is a totally valid suggestion, but might be difficult to get right

I should've clarified that these algorithms would all be completely optional and could be opted out.

Currently Reddit by default sorts comments by "best", which uses whatever methodology they've decided (idk how that works, but clearly it doesn't work well for me). Other options they have include "top", "new" / "old", and "controversial".

I'm simply proposing having "best" be more accurate, and/or adding other options (eg. via clustering) like "insightful" - which is really the only one I care about for this kind of site. Then people who want the most quality, well-researched, thought-provoking comments can find those, while kids who just want memes and puns can find that. Everyone gets what they want and lives happily ever after.

The problem with personalized recommendations on other platforms like Facebook and Youtube are that you can't opt out of or customize them. I agree with you that that's a crap experience as a user.

You need a new name.

zsync is an rsync-like tool optimized for many downloads per file version. zsync is used by Linux distributions such as Ubuntu for distributing fast changing beta ISO image files. zsync uses the HTTP protocol and .zsync files with pre-calculated rolling hash to minimize server load yet permit diff transfer for network optimization.

That doesn't matter at all. First, there's always some obscure Linux tool with the same name, simply because Linux has a long history, and good names are the ones taken first, even when they're totally unrelated to their task (gnome, thunderbird, apt, to mention a few).

Second, the name will not confuse anybody. 99.99% of the target audience will not have heard of the linux tool, and the ones that have will not thing "zsync.com, I bet that's going to be a site about diff transfers optimized for network load".

I'm def not attached to the name, was just the best I could think of with a domain available. Can brainstorm others / open to ideas. Thanks for the feedback.

It's also very close to zksync

I agree. The name sounds like a toolbox.

Strongly concur. I really wanted this to be a `rsync` work-alike with `zstd` features built in.

Appreciate the anti-censorship stance in theory, but involving cryptocurrencies and hoping that AI some day fixes all your discoverability issues are pretty big red flags to me. And most importantly:

Front page is entirely spam = I am not going to use your site

Do you not see the irony in your comment? You are anti-censorship, but complain the front page is entirely spam. Sounds like you use 'censorship' to describe moderation of content you like, and 'spam' to describe content that you don't like. You tell the creator that you are not going to use the site because they haven't censored content you don't want to see.

> Do you not see the irony in your comment?

Of course I do? I'm well aware that the spam is obviously a direct result of the lack of any content moderation, in the name of anti-censorship. I can oppose censorship as a general concept while also acknowledging that it's difficult (or maybe impossible) to build publicly accessible Internet communities that are of high quality in their discussion while also being resistant to censorship. Recognizing that doesn't mean I have to stop supporting attempts to make them play nicely.

The issue here is that "spam" is subjective. What might be spam to you, might not be spam to somebody super religious or with a very different world view;like a communist vs a silicon valley vc.

Pretty sure OP is aware of that too. Not sure why everyone is talking to them as if they’re clueless.

Right, this is exactly the dilemma facing pretty much any site of this nature. Some level of censorship is required otherwise the site will be unusable but exactly how much is “right” is an endless debate.

You can offer censorship to users who want it, everything stays up but some people dont see it

Then someone on your ignore list starts posting all sorts of false/defamatory comments about you with know way for you to ever see it. You have no idea what's happening but your reputation is turned to shit. It's a reverse shadow ban and just about as broken.

thats a bit of a stretch

I'm pretty sure curated content (whether via an editor or via voting) is substantially identical to just moderation (i.e. "censorship")

Moderation is not the same as censorship

What is your specific objection to the cryptocurrency feature of this site? Or are you just dogmatically anti-crypto for emotional reasons? If the latter, well that's exactly what I was criticizing about HN ("it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto.") and so the site is probably not for you anyways. HN is better for anti-crypto.

The ML stuff was just throwing some ideas out there for the future.

Regarding the spam, apologies on that. I posted this before going to sleep, and woke up to see the spam. This is just a side project and I didn't implement any automated spam moderation yet or assign any mods.

I am often at dissonance with the HN hive mind and thus I find myself delighted by your post, I think it expands on what is out there.

I think being able to reward post authors with something of value vs platform specific "coins" is excellent. People should be compensated for their work.

I also think that ML can and will play an important role in intermediating human discussion. From preventing flamewars and personal attacks to detecting logical fallacies.

Reddit isn't good, it is just the one of the best things we have right now in terms of audience and breadth of subject matter. It is basically AOL+Usenet without the advantages of Usenet.

Having posts and tags doesn't make it a Reddit replacement, because a lot of what reddit is about is specific subs about a particular topic. Sure, you can find that hyperplane of folks that like the same tag, etc. But that doesn't seem to work.

Lobsters [1] is also that HN/Reddit alternative and while it has a large subscriber count, it doesn't have the discussion volume.

One of the biggest problems with all of sosh-meeds is that it is designed to a constant stream of ephemeral distractions to engage eyeballs to see ads.

The static viewer, river of artifacts that we drop hot takes on for forum points is what needs to get replaced.

I think you are on to something, but it looks more like a link aggregator with comments than a forum to build discussions around topics.

https://lobste.rs/

I don’t want anything to do with cryptocurrency (each time I tip someone am I creating a taxable transaction?). I’m not even sure what problem it’s solving. Reddit incentivized good comments without ETH, right? I suspect that, like most crypto projects, this is about creating a way for you to get rich

And I’m very suspicious about “No censorship” stances. If you don’t aggressively filter out spam and abuse then the site will have an unusable level of spam and abuse.

This is exactly the type of clueless low substance anti-crypto HN comment I created Zsync to avoid.

> "I don’t want anything to do with cryptocurrency"

That's fine. It's a completely optional feature.

> "Reddit incentivized good comments without ETH"

First of all Reddit comments are garbage. Second, Reddit only allows you to gift another user "Reddit gold" if you really like their comment. Your "gift" to the recipient is just paying Reddit, and the recipient doesn't get any of that money. In Zsync, you can directly tip the user whatever token you want, and no platform or middleman is getting any cut (ie. I make no money here). I guess theoretically this could be accomplished without crypto, but I'm guessing not every user wants to link their bank account with a social media site, nor do I want to deal with that headache of brokering international bank transfers.

I agree on the need to filter out out abuse and spam.

Thanks for your feedback.

Reddit was around for like a decade before they added Gold, which was primarily a way to try to make money. My sense is it didn't work very well.

And I'm confused. Are you censoring abusive posts or not? Who decides what's abusive? This is a much bigger deal than incentivizing users to post IMHO.

I think it’s a good idea, and a great way to incentivise someone for content they’ve created. It also reminds me of “Steemit” from a few years back.

Even mentioning crypto is triggering for a lot of people, especially after the scams and recent crashes.

It’s also becoming highly regulated, so you can’t even legally use it without paying taxes in most countries.

So many downsides that I would avoid using it myself… but I truely wish you all the best with it

You've just lost my first click on your website.

Monetizing content does not increase its “quality” in some absolute sense.

Monetizing content causes creators to create the content that monetizes the best.

Long thoughtful posts may be the highest “quality” across multiple dimensions, but a meme or witty joke is likely to garner a tip from more people because it’s more accessible, digestible, and can pander to baser emotions easier.

I don’t think any micro transactions based reward system for commenters will create a dynamic diverse flourishing community of communities like Reddit. It will feed on whatever gets the tips until only a certain demographic sticks around to tip each other and receive tips (aka patting each other on the back)

Reddit’s largely anonymous rewardless system means you only comment if you actually care. Money can’t buy that.

I agree. Originally I'd been planning to have upvotes be redeemable as tokens, but quickly scrapped that idea for the same reason.

I'm thinking now the best way a site like Reddit can satisfy people like me disappointed with the quality is to improve their ML algorithms to better serve content suited to users. I'm not talking about anything revolutionary here, can just do some basic clustering and add an "insightful" option. I'm admittedly not a ML person so not claiming any expertise here. I hope someone more well-versed in that area can create a Reddit clone or Chrome extension or something that has these better more accurate comment sort by algorithms, I'd sign up.

In other words, you invite professional pandering.

Why do people all say "I don't believe in censorship" and then fail to address the fact that the best online communities all aggressively moderate.

There's clearly value in moderation. Why can't we just say it?

Because saying "I believe in free speech!" is a very attractive stance to take. You don't want to be one of those fascists that only allows speech you agree with, do you?

We all know that limiting speech is bad and that freedom of speech is an unalloyed good (I'm being very serious there, it is), but this absolute position really applies to governments restricting speech and the spread of ideas in the population. Where exactly the line is when it comes to slander/libel/defamation, or what constitutes incitement to violence, or a myriad of other things... well that's not something people can easily agree on within or across societies. But regardless, you get 'points' for being in favour of freedom of speech even if you can't fully define it. Because you're not anti speech or anti freedom, are you?

When this translates to private companies and the internet, the services want to claim they're all for free speech, but they also realise that this emboldens really unpleasant people to say really unpleasant things, which in turn drives away the mainstream audience. So they have to find ways to moderate or censor without triggering the voices that will shout about censorship. This means doing it quietly, passing the buck where possible, and generally trying not to look like you're doing it at all.

To me it all stems from a couple of odd logical disconnects people have -

1. Private platforms and government censorship are equivalent - "The government censoring stuff would be totalitarian, therefore if Twitter doesn't give the most vile hatred exactly the same platform and prevalence as all other speech we may as well all be living in North Korea". This doesn't follow, to me. You can still spew your bile with impunity, but there is no obligation for any one company to hand you a megaphone, you can always go buy your own.

2. The marketplace of ideas - Good ideas will win out over bad, the best way to tackle bad speech is with more good speech to counter it. Lovely, high-minded principle but a complete bust when many participants in the alleged marketplace aren't in the slightest bit interested in seeking truth, exchanging ideas or finding the better ones, but rather flooding the common space with verbiage for political or monetary gain.

But in the face of "You believe in free speech, don't you?" this sort of nuance is lost.

Just a note that sarcasm doesn't translate well online. Once you stopped that I think your points were well made.

> Lovely, high-minded principle but a complete bust when many participants in the alleged marketplace aren't in the slightest bit interested in seeking truth, exchanging ideas or finding the better ones, but rather flooding the common space with verbiage for political or monetary gain.

Also worth noting that the same people who believe that "good ideas win over bad" are often also the same people who often believe that "popular wins over right". These two beliefs are obviously at odds.

The real problem here is, we still aren't, and probably never will be wired for 'online'. To that I mean, take a standard community. A community that has existed for, quite literally, through our ancestors for countless generations.

In such a community, sure... people could say anything they wanted. People can do so now! That is, you go for a walk, and people can approach you, say whatever, there is a wide range of what you can say in public.

But... if you act too aggressively, you get a punch in the head. If you yell and scream obscenities, people ignore you, if you do it too much, you again get a punch in the head. If you say 'crazy things' but are polite, people make excuses "Sorry, have to go look at this bush over here... talk to you later, have a nice day!". If you stand in the middle of a park and start screaming, again ... if you don't stop ... punch to the head.

(In more modern times, 'punch to the head' may be replaced by 'officials that come and make you stop via force if necessary', but the result is the same)

And to this, if you have people sitting in a park at a picnic table, enjoying a conversation, there is a limit to what people will tolerate.. if you just amble on over, start talking, and at the same time don't "fit". If you join a church, same thing. If you join a club, same thing.

Imagine if people got together, a group of 5 friends a picnic table at a park weekly, to talk about hockey, and some guy came over every day and started talking about how hockey is really fascist, and you're all asshoes, and blah blah.

Would that go over well? HELL NO!

In short, there is no moderation in traditional society, but there is also no tolerance for people shoving their face in your business. People that do not fit are not tolerated.

People confuse "how people interact in real life" with "people can say anything they want in real life".

Taking a step back, people have never had limitless ability to force others to hear their crap. You could take out ads in a periodical / newspaper... IF the newspaper thought it was not going to get many people mad at them! You could print your own "stuff", and pay to have it delivered, or hand deliver it to people on the street. You could print stuff and try to get people to buy it. There are loads of delivery methods, but even this is all new, 200 years ago no average person could do this.

So some online forum where you're talking about turtle eggs, and endless people liken it to "MY GUY!" or "POLITICAL THING" or "BUY MY APPLES" is absolutely non-real in terms of how humans have ever acted before!

Something like /., with its moderation system, and its meta-moderation system was a good start. "No! Go away from my picnic table!" with the comment still there but gone, is much like real life. But even that is not completely real, for eventually people "punch you in the head" if you persist.

As this thread discusses, most moderation systems seem unable to handle this. The truly sad thing is, I think that:

* until sock puppeting is impossible

* until identity is linked to your actions immutably

We won't ever get past this.

And this means that anonymity needs to end, and a person's actions need to count, because in the real world everyone can see "Oh crap, Bob's coming over here again", and "eventually you go to jail" is how we deal with human interaction in real life.

NOTE: none of this detracts from people wanting to, in real life, have a club of "completely open ideas". Yet that is quite rare!

"I don't believe in censorship" is a political position, and political positions have no obligation to reflect reality.

A couple things:

- Censorship is okay. Having a high bar for censorship is what places like HN are founded on. Setting guidelines is a good course of action for that. This is opposed to a code of conduct, which is essentially a pseudo-legal system that assuages some idea of fairness, which you'll frankly never have in social.

- Given the name ZSync it seems like you want to attract techies. I don't think ML or any algorithm which cannot be sufficiently explained is going to work well.

- Tags are not a substitute for subreddits; there's hard separation in a subreddit whereas tags are pretty fluid and usually a filterable option.

- There are so many zsyncs: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=zsync and I don't even get what it's syncing.

> HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto.

HN was pretty amenable to crypto when it came about. Over time things soured. I think when things crossed the line here is probably when people started openly advocating removing code hosting for even basic non-grift crypto tech and then were seen advocating for AI ~1.5 months later. I don't think you can pick and choose what future weird attitudes your users will adopt.

> HN is basically a single subreddit mostly geared towards tech and startups. It'd be nice to have an equivalent of "subreddits".

HN is geared towards curiosity technically. The community may select for more than that via the flag and voting system; the selection bias will also change as HN gains more users of more diverse backgrounds and as people age into new careers/life. In the short time I've been here I've seen many HNs.

Overall, I applaud the initiative.

I hope you take this constructively but none of the design decisions you've described sound like they have any chance of working toward your stated goal of fostering high quality content and discussion:

1. Tags are not the equivalent of subreddits. They throw away the good parts of subreddits. You can't foster a community around a niche with tags. Submitting the same content to multiple subreddits is an optimization not really even related to the problem of high quality content.

2. Incentivizing/rewarding high quality content isn't enough to prevent low quality content. Without moderation, you'll have enough terrible content get through that those incentives don't outweigh the poor experience.

3. Crypto tips are not a strong incentive to create high quality content. I would never even consider participating in this for that reason alone. It is one thing to not want crypto-bashing, it is another to assume that people want crypto tips instead of upvotes and downvotes.

4. The machine learning idea also goes against what made subreddits so useful: what is great about Reddit is that it doesn't just feed you random posts you might like, instead it fosters small communities. People create meaningful content for their communities. Content curated by ML is not as meaningful.

5. All those things above that I mentioned in theory, show up in practice when I go to your site. The front page is already a low quality spam dump.

If you want to come up with a solution to your goal I would focus on aspects of other platforms that work well, and innovate/improve on them, rather than throwing the good parts away entirely and hoping it will be better just because it's different. Learn what makes Reddit great and what makes it not so great. The people who are participating in the current reddit blackout are protesting being locked out of using third party apps that enhance the user experience. They are not protesting the design of how subreddits work, lack of crypto tips with upvotes, or the fact that subreddits are moderated. Millions of people just want Reddit almost exactly as it is but without being forced to use the official app due to API prices locking them out.

I find it hard to reconcile "reddit is hostile to things like crypto" and "I don't believe in censorship". If you don't believe in censorship, then you should celebrate redditors free-expression of hostility to crypto. Your post to me reads of someone who wishes to limit the free speech of crypto critics to create a crypto-safe-space.

Turns out, free speech is hard when people have opinions you personally disagree with.

Here's the next thing that's hard to accept: all of the best discussion forums you can think of have aggressive moderation, and likely you don't even notice it 99% of the time. Community requires moderation, moderation is another word for censorship. I personally do not believe culture and community can even exist without restrictions.

Personally, and while I may be downvoted for expressing this opinion: I won't share a forum with the far right. There are many, many folks like me. If your reddit clone is "reddit except we let the far right do what they want unlike reddit" then you just made voat or truthsocial or many other clones, and feel free to see how those went.

Zsync is already a thing.

http://zsync.moria.org.uk/

Man, what a blast from the past. There was once a time that I had to use zsync or jigdo to get an Ubuntu image, almost two decades ago. Now, the whole thing shows up in seconds. Wirelessly. Magical.

KDE neon used zsync for iso deltas less than 8 years ago iirc

> Anyone who connects an ethereum wallet to their account will also have a (non-invasive) "Tip" option at the bottom of their comment, allowing anyone to directly tip commenters cryptocurrency (no middleman taking a cut here), offering a financial incentive.

Other commenters have said many of the things that came to mind, so I'll leave the discussions in those threads.

One thing I haven't seen discussed yet - what financial incentive do you have in mind here? Given the rest of your post I'd assume you want to incentivize quality comments, but it's not clear to me why this scheme would do so as opposed to popularity/snark/one-liners/etc. It feels a bit similar to Reddit awards - spending money to give something of ~value to the commenter - and I'm not very confident those have done much, if anything, to incentivize quality comments on Reddit.

> it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto.

Erm, no, neither random for one of the current biggest scam machines, nor usually very hostile, just deserved from one side and much attached sensitivities on the other, imo.

Besides the already mentioned subreddits != tags, I also find the “high quality discussion” goal questionable in this idealistic form.

There is time for fun, and while some jokes are definitely overdone on Reddit, I do occasionally enjoy reading them. A better idea would be to have different kinds of upvotes, at least ‘useful’ and ‘funny’. That way a genuinely informative comment that for example calls out the post can float to the top as the funnier, low-effort one won’t directly compete with it.

Also, censorship is a must for any forum/community as anyone who have come remotely close to one should know. It just won’t work otherwise, 100%.

What in the world is going on here? Why is there so much hate for this project?

Adding optional ETH donations is cool. I have no idea if it'll work well, but it's cool to try.

Adding ML/AI content moderation is a no-brainer and cool to see. I don't know if it'll work well, but it's cool to try.

Tags are probably not going to scale well in terms of UX, so it'd probably be better to move to a subreddit type architecture.

I'm not sure I like upvotes/downvotes, but if it's well implemented (similarly to HN) it could work okay.

Nice project, and I hope something new like this takes off.

I saw it just before someone started spamming it. I like the idea of posts that can have multiple tags.

Will it scale?

Cool idea, I think Ethereum wallets as accounts have good potential to be an elegant solution to spam/bot prevention. I, too, remember the times when Reddit fostered high(er) quality discussion in almost every thread, so I'll keep an interested eye on the platform.

However, I do agree with other commenters that Zsync is probably not the greatest choice of a name. It's just not that catchy and doesn't seem to have much relevance to what the website is supposed to be.

Some thoughts:

1. The concept of subreddits may seem restrictive, but it's also good at filtering low-effort content when you want a more curated experience. If you allow anyone to tag any post with any tag, it could become chaotic.

2. I think the only way to incentivize high quality content is by only having users that value high quality content. You can't take a random sample from the general population, give them a button that says "this is high quality content" and expect them to actually select high quality content. You need a way to filter users, and it doesn't need to be an explicit filter, you just need to find ways to discourage the people you don't want using it from using it (e.g. by not having any images/video, like HN).

3. Ethereum has high transaction fees. Do you intend on using a Layer 2 protocol? Why not something like Harmony, which has much lower fees.

I wish you success!

> 3. Ethereum has high transaction fees. Do you intend on using a Layer 2 protocol? Why not something like Harmony, which has much lower fees.

Good job recommending L2, bad job not understanding the blockchain trilemma

I once thought of a way to fix journalism, which is broken mainly because --IMHO-- it's paid by media, who are often (aspiring) big corps, and thus act accordingly.

My idea was to to allow tax-free tipping of journalists when their pieces meet certain standards, like: freely available, freely re-distributable, non-commercial, registered in some central db, and allows (and should be) amended/retracted in case it contained false hoods.

The tips go through a central system that adds up the total, and that total should be shown on the original place the article/video/piece was posted: this should help others to see that "self published journalism" pays and thus recruit new journalists along the way.

It was just an idea...

I think it’s worth understanding one of the reasons discourse on the internet is so bad: it’s because there are financial incentives to do so. Consider the following: you put forward an offensive and combative position that 95% of people hate but 5% love. The extremists give you money. The same is true for upvotes.

Your chances of making money giving balanced and thought-out criticism are very low. Ask me how I know.

Anyway, what I’m pointing out is that you’re making explicit a mechanism that is already present, and one that hasn’t had great outcomes to date.

1) Zsync is a terrible name? 2) Hostility to crypto and blockchain is a good thing considering how many people worldwide got scammed out of their life savings.

There are a whole string of posts saying “The current time is 1686610xxx, you are welcome” - which is not high quality.

At least the name isn't horrid like all the other reddit clones. I have hope for this one.

Use reactions instead of up/down votes and don't allow negative reactions for people who don't leave a corresponding comment. That will make karma farming and other bad behavior more tolerable. Just my $0.2

My favorite are all the XSS injections lol

My number one piece of advice: don't ever present your product in terms of who or what you're competing with. I don't want a Reddit or Twitter alternative. If you have something new to offer, then say that explicitly. Otherwise you come off as a knock off.

did someone find a way to mess this up? the first 15 entries I see are a link to `fxck.you`..

So a cringey/edgelord/not PC meme dumpster would be ok ?

Moderation is actually your core challenge. Since you believe that it's something other than moderation, I don't think you are familiar with Masnick's moderation article. Anyone hoping to build a social site needs to read it.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

If you do not have a viable plan for these issues, you will be on the hook for both unsavory and illegal material. It's not 1995 anymore and governments are no longer giving a pass to libertarian idealism. Most other countries do not have the robust tolerance of speech that has sometimes been a US trademark. And even in the US, not all everything you can post is legal (CSAM being the big obvious one).

top tags are: crypto, investing, macro, web3, politics, entrepreneurship, random

eww

You have zero innovations promoting quality.

meh, I'm not impressed. You gloss over and dismiss high level issues with nothing more than hand-wringing.

Disinformation and hate speech are real problems without easy solutions, but it doesn't mean that they should be disregarded as concerns.

And as for politics, the evolution of the GOP has gone into whole new territory (cult-like), and it's beyond frustrating that there's zero room for real discussion about it.

Back to free speech: one of the reasons that HN is so wonderful is that "unacceptable speech" is not tolerated here. That's a feature, not a bug.

> I don't believe in censorship

Umm... I like to know how would be handled stuff like :

* People putting fascist propaganda

* Praising a massacre

* Fake news

* Harassing post against other users

* P0rn

Congrats on the project. I think adding some margins between the posts will make it look more readable.

bad name, bad domain and OP is chasing all sort of buzzwords which makes me think this wont last long

You re-used an old domain you initiall bought for a zfs sync tool, didn't you? ;)

Did you just realize HN is anti-crypto?

> quality comments

A.k.a. censorship.

I stopped reading at “Ethereum wallet”. Sounds like a crypto scam to me.

Just kidding! That is just the typical HN knee-jerk reaction when they see “ethereum wallet”.

Great job — we need more alternatives that actually have good tokenomics. Would you open source this?

I stopped reading at article with "Andrew Tate is the latest victim of the Matrix...". No kidding.

I was trying not to read too much into test submissions, but yeah. Those are some off-putting examples to use.

https://i.imgur.com/fGcjZzj.png

And another article that "exposes woke bigotry." Really, there are so many better examples to post.

The thing is this could easily be done without crypto - once again another braindead example of crypto still lacking any use case whatsoever and only appealing to fools.

Just kidding (another example of a dumb HN comment you see on every crypto post).

A few lines of code and you are accepting payments from any country on earth, totally decentralized and p2p! Also the site itself is much cleaner and faster than the others posted. Keep it up.

Not in my view. The idea has A LOT of potential. @nwienert, when I saw that I had to connect a wallet, I actually thought that posting a comment would cost some very low ETH/MATIC/whatever price.

It would actually be great to prevent stupid, knee jerk, spam and other comments.

There's also the possibility of "accumulating" part of the charged comment amounts and spread it between a) The original poster and b) maybe the top N commenters (after a week maybe?).

I don't know if you know, but, back in my day ,there was something called Hashcash which was envisioned to minimize or prevent Email Spam. Hashcash the precursor to one aspect of cryptocurrencies (the infamous PoW mining).

Man, this has so much potential.

I agree with you! Re read my comment, I was just also critiquing the crypto haters.

Tags are much better for communities, especially for people that are really trying to follow news or information about a community from multiple sources.

I think you're going to get problems incentivizing discussion with liquid assets, you think people will pay for quality but really people will pay to hear their opinions said by someone else out loud. Or, worse, people will be paid to say things via your reward mechanism.

I'd say let people plug in their own ranking algo and curate their own feeds. Default should be chronological. Trying to get engagement creates the problem youre trying to prevent.