The potential for abuse here is enormous. I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.
Like I don’t trust the internet in general to curate these links. But one could surely find networks where the average voter could be trustworthy…
You can look at the full user tree (https://lobste.rs/users) and see if there's anyone you know who might be willing to invite you to join.
I have been a good citizen of Hacker News for fourteen years now...
Anyone here would want to throw me an invite to lobste.rs?
:)
At least for me, I'm the only HN user I know except my dad who doesn't even post, he just got lurk links from his knee if the woods like hackaday.
Modern problems...
IMO this is the kind of content which made early 2000 internet fun. Not the bland, moderated to hell and back social media sites are. Just compare what happened with the million checkbox experience which got a secret ARG made by users having fun and reddit place which is... meh.
It's basically moderation, or a subdomain if you will, and I'm not sure there any place or product that currently has fully automated moderation that works. There's always a human involved if you want to do it properly.
Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems that seem (to me at least, I don’t actually work in this area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much harder.
* There’s a desire to preserve continuity of conversation
* People have different expectations of the types of content they find to be outside the domain of reasonableness
* People have different expectations of what the job of moderation is (curating productive discussion or just banning truly odious stuff?)
Like if I say I’m going to only host technical discussions, we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the line is between tech and political policy around tech.
The easy solution is for users to just mute people that they don’t like, but them you have a conversation where some participants can’t see eachother, they managing back-and-forth a between people with different muted subsets.
And there’s still the issue of managing the general vibe, if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for everyone, even those who’ve blocked the main perpetrators. Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven’t curated a blocklist yet.
In this case, there’s no need to preserve the continuity of conversation. And the users have less ability to continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single user, so the overall vibe is less relevant.
How many users will take the thing for a test drive and then patiently click through and downvote every goatse link they find versus simply uninstalling it when they get goatse'd?
There are studies showing that comments on articles erode the trust readers have in these articles. Given the quality of the average comment, it's likely that comment systems on most sites make people both dumber and angrier.
So I think the idea of forcing comments (or user-contributed links) on sites that don't want comments is fundamentally problematic.
Personally, I don't want random people on the Internet putting links on my articles. If you want to discuss what I write, or provider additional context, or disagree, then do it on your own site, or in a public place like Hacker News, not on my site.