Ask HN: Is a human only Reddit alternative possible?
Keeping bots at bay
First thought was stop bots at the very beginning. This means we would need to stop bots from being able to create accounts. Requiring video and photo ID would stop bots from registering for the most part, but it will also stop people from registering as well. I think a good compromise would be requiring an email address coming from a valid source (i.e. corporate email address, govt email address, college/school email address). This will not completely stop bots from creating accounts as they can phish people's email address and create it from there, but it will cut down the problem by a lot. This will also cut down on previously banned users and stop people from making multiple accounts.
Centralized vs decentralized
I think a centralized site will be always better then decentralized. People want a one stop shop to see all their communities. Centralized sites make it a better experience for users and makes it easier to maintain.
Nonprofit, open source The site should be registered as a non-profit and its code should be open sourced. This will keep the site focused on its users instead of profit/greed.
Private/public communities
I envision this reddit alternative to have public and private communities. What is the difference between a public and private community? A private community is one started by users. They will become the admin of the community and can decide the direction of it as well pick moderators. They can be the moderator themselves and/or pick users to moderate. They have the ultimate ability to ban people from their community. Think of this as a private group. I think it will work well for niche topics that people like to participate in.
A public community, on the other hand is will be open to everybody and meant for large groups. These can range from topics like tech, news, movies, television, etc. Users can participate in these groups and nobody can ever be banned from these public communities. There will be no admin. Moderation will take the form of a jury. Anybody who's in the community can join the jury pool. Any content/comment that is flagged by users will put against a jury. 3 users from the jury pool will be randomly selected and they will determine if the content should be removed. If 2 out of the 3 deem it inappropriate, then the content is removed. The goal of the moderation is to remove illegal content that’s against the law and terms of service and to keep the content focused on the community topic.
No more karma
To keep people from focusing on accumulating karma/points, there will be no points in this new site. For posts, there will only be upvotes; no more downvotes. For comments, there will be no upvotes or downvotes. You can only mark comments as insightful, funny, off-topic, . You can also reply and flag the comment.
Text first website The site will be text only. This will keep the users focus on writing insightful comments instead of memes. It also saves on server cost hosting videos and images.
Monetization/Fees Any/all sites should make enough money to be self-sustaining. Making enough to pay server costs and a respectable salary for 1 engineer will drive the growth and future development of the site. It can something like pinboard.in where it makes enough to support an engineer continuing development of the site. There are many ways to generate revenue including donations, ads and subscriptions. I believe the most honest route a yearly subscription. $5 per year to post/comment after first year. If the site can get 40,000 paying users, I believe it should be enough to make it self-sustaining.
Marketing Getting the site to get to critical mass is hardest part of developing a site. I am stump on this and welcome any suggestions/ideas.
What do you think? Would something like this work?