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Comment by mjs7231 | Hacker News Reader

A lot the post above boils down to "Trust me bro." As early users of a new website, what assurances can be put in place to help us believe the motives here? As the site grows, and costs exponentially more, your mindset and desires are sure to change.

One of the big issues I see with Reddit right now, is that we the community never "owned" the data. Now that the site owner's motives changed, we're stuck in this weird state where the community made the site what it is today, and now the owner is taking it back to monetize it for his own gain. If the community is required to help moderate, grow, and maintain an organized dataset, it would be ideal if somehow the community shares ownership or has assurances it remains faithful to the statements above we are buying into.

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> A lot the post above boils down to "Trust me bro." As early users of a new website, what assurances can be put in place to help us believe the motives here? As the site grows, and costs exponentially more, your mindset and desires are sure to change.

Looking at this from your perspective, you have a really good point here. And I don't know exactly what to say to you except that, at the end of the day, with anything with network effects, you have to trust someone. This even applies to the fediverse; you have to trust the admins.

Perhaps the most that someone can do here is to proclaim their values loudly, so that they are, at the very least, putting their reputation on the line.

If you have any ideas what I could do here, I'd love to hear. Seriously.

I don’t think there is anything that you can do.

The only reason people switch from old communities to new ones is because of a vastly better UI for your average user. See the switch from Usenet to forums to Stack Overflow / Facebook or w/e. In the case of Digg to reddit, Digg’s UI got worse.

The only thing anyone can do is make a new app/website with vastly better UI and then live through your values accordingly.

Most of your blog post is about moderation/monetization and that’s important, but to be honest, it doesn’t speak directly to your average user.

> And I don't know exactly what to say to you except that, at the end of the day, with anything with network effects, you have to trust someone

I don't trust anyone running my Matrix, Kbin, Mastodon, or email servers. Well, they're me, and I guess I trust me. (My family trusts me too, I suppose)

With the classic early 2000s model of PHPBB at least you only trust each “sub” individually and they don’t have enough power or resources to fuck you up. That is why say, random example: https://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php has not introduced all the reddit shit despite being just as old. If it were a sub or on your alternative it would be subject to all that.

What would be good is a modern enough Reddit clone, open source, that you can selfhost once per subreddit and one or more places that will host that (like you can get wordpress hosting from 1000 places). Maybe have some free ones that run ads but still run the same basic software and do it free.

What you will have is some localised issues but no one has the power to change everything and pull the rug on millions.

"community shares ownership "

How can this work practically or legally ? Any real world concrete ideas ? I am open to learning more.

Yea but the tech for a truly decentralized site of this nature just isn't there yet, so what's the alternative?

The world needs something like a web3 reddit.

You know what's an interesting problem? Decentralizing moderation. HN does it sort of but the masses are really stupid and biased.

Maybe an ML based personal moderator. Based off of comments you vote down or up.

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