Show HN: Reddit alternative – decentralized social news site, no censorship
get-frisbee.com
get-frisbee.com
After people claimed Reddit was censoring users by banning /r/fatpeoplehate, the more unsavory users flocked to Voat, a blatant Reddit clone.
As you would expect, said unsavory people posted unsavory content. Said unsavory content, while free and uncensored, was not legal, and that causes problems: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3avyem/voat_...
Said issues caused their PayPal account to become frozen: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3augr0/drama...
No, "decentralized" does not magically make you immune to law and punishment.
Or did they refuse to take it down? I thought the CDA protected hosts as long as they took it down when notified? But I also haven't been following this closely and I don't know where Voat is (was?) hosted.
They switched to a cloud provider to fix it in the short term.
This time I decided to be more constructive. :)
I don't see voat as being a long term viable thing though, since it's just one kid in college and the recent surge of users was largely driven by an exodus from reddit over banning politically incorrect speech.
It's the community and moderators who make the site, not only the technology.
Therefore all redeeming qualities lie in the respective users of those sites, and less in the programming.
Voat is just starting and reddit is perfectly capable of performing a 'digg' and alienate its users.
Let's wait and see.
I don't think I understand your definition of "huge success".
The same thing happened to 8chan, and then it entered a gentle but consistent decline: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/8ch.net
Actually the fact that they shot up at all is a sign they did something right.
Now it is a question whether they can maintain that momentum, but they did get a real good start.
It’s worth nothing that PayPal’s only value is in decrementing values on one side and incrementing them on the other, a preschool exercise it nonetheless somehow routinely fails to carry out. 180 days to do some adding and subtracting is asinine.
Though, you specified "running a website" which is not the same.
However:
The whole scenario is an utter joke: Reddit is thought-policed to the point of unbelievable absurdity. It's like a nursery school filled with Rachel Dolezals. Voat is filled with people who have gone completely off the rocker, given the ability to exercise their rights, and see fit to use their newly acquired rights to speak of nothing but those unsavory topics - most commonly racists.
The website are polar opposites and both are a hindrance to free, critical and intelligent thought - be it on purpose (Reddit) or by virtue (Voat).
It seems like the website format is a flawed concept. I don't take either website seriously.
I'm sorry, but what does that even mean??? Please, enlighten me on how a community openly filled with racist (chimpire) and sexist (candidfashionpolice, not even gonna list ones involving dead women or children) is "thought-policed."
If you mean there are groups of Redditors that openly oppose such subreddits, then yes, those do exist. That is a far cry from thought policing.
I like a lot of the ideas behind this, but I feel like the execution is very, very poor.
Totally dont need to re-engineer hyperlinks. They are hyperlinks!
(logo in the left hand corner does change the url to https://frizbee.co/#HotPosts but as you and I said it just doesnt work)
You should use less js. I should not be able to watch things being indented and layouts being modified as the page loads.
Because Tumblr does it too???
What is the positive???
The real question is why? What are you getting from replacing hyperlinks with something that performs horribly and needs debugging and has a poor user experience?
No thanks.
No censorship as in no punishing the stalking and threatening of others?
Also no thanks.
I want free speech where people are free with their speech, not unrestrained speech (specifically) where people feel free to hurt others.
Just to clarify, the owners of particular playlist servers can moderate them as they choose. The difference is that because of the decentralization aspect, it is not chosen by a central entity.
If someone creates a Frizbee server full of child abuse material, and it becomes popular, and is always on the front page, what would you do?
Also, I made a comment on Frizbee that consisted of `[wow](file:///etc/passwd)`, and it let me post it. You probably want to whitelist a few schemes.
Am I able to ban entire "playlists" from my node?
If that information is deleted, the difference between frizbee and reddit becomes so extremely marginal that one really wonders whether this really is a rationalization for allowing people to organize around threatening and stalking people online.
If that information is not removed, does such a site deserve to exist? It may pass some legal standard, but is that a site that differentiates itself in any way except in its support of systematic and continued online stalking??
I'm getting rather tired of seeing words like "harassment" being bandied about as shorthand for incivility.
reddit explicitly defined their language around harassment to mean:
> Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.
http://www.redditblog.com/2015/05/promote-ideas-protect-peop...
Key words to pay attention to here are: systematic, continued, fear. This isn't about being a jerk, or even being a jerk randomly. It's about being a jerk in a targeted way, a lot and over time, in a very intentional way to the degree that it causes fear to speak up or fear for one's self.
Look at the extent to which reddit admins allow hateful speech so long as they don't step outside their boundaries, and you'll understand that they're actually sticking to that definition.
Lots of officious nonsense posted by bot accounts, but the entire admin staff over there refuses to answer direct questions, despite them being posted every time one of them shows up in a thread.
Not exactly the mark of people who are acting in good faith. If they were, I'd expect them to be falling over themselves to answer questions...
Slang in one place may refer to something rather innocuous and that same term may refer to something entirely different in a different place or dialect. Also some terms can be endearing in one place and quite crude on another.
So, unless one represents an official standard, like a company or a government, censoring content is a bit of a wild goose chase.
Now, that's not to say I want to read crude or hateful content, as I find it a turnoff, but the alternative on balance seems worse. I'd say leave it to the indiv communities and their admins to establish norms rather than a site wide policy.
When I go to reddit or another community, I want civility within the subcommunity I'm interested in, if an alternative community wants to spring up with a free for all approach, so be it.
The question I ask myself is whether or not they should be banned. I usually come to the conclusion that rebuttal is better than banning.
However, i'm also a fan of Karl Popper's don't tolerate the intolerant.
An example of the Intolerant, https://feministrag.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/remembering-the...
No, actually, koko very loosely defined actual free speech. In a nutshell free speech means that you can say whatever you please so long as you don't venture into what the American courts call "fighting words" (words/images designed to cause harm to another person or words/images that inspire others to cause harm to another person).
Example:
Let's say that I am prejudiced toward piglets (those damn curly tails!). I can express my extreme disdain for the swines to my heart's content. I can talk to people who share my bacon-related woes in the open.
However, I can't encourage people to go and harass or do harm to the hogs. I can't dox Babe and let everyone know the specific pen of residence: that would be encouraging others to harm, harass or make breakfast out of the pig.
*May not actually apply to pigs.
Uh, yes it is. If you're going to take the time to tell me that I'm wrong, you might actually also take the time to correct me. Not only was your statement incorrect but it added absolutely nothing to the discussion.
It can't be done over the Internet.
Yes you can actually. You just can't plan a specific crime at a specific place and time.
Second, if it is indeed fully anonymous, won't it just become a haven for trolls?
Feel free to host a decentralized server here: https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati...
You can also block users for spam.
If I _must_ have anything to do with you, it's not decentralised. Distributed, maybe. But _not_ decentralised.
For example the upvote button is massive, and I couldn't easily find the comment button at all.
Basically, it made me scared to even look at the site... like, "where am I?"
The site states that you own your content[1] but then on its manifesto page[2] states that all information is in the public domain. The license itself[3] is not particularly clear.
Putting information into the public domain does provide for maximum freedom in terms of how the information can be used, but that's because the copyright owner renounces their rights.
[1]: https://frizbee.co/#WhatMakesFrizbeeDifferent558b273db212a
Yeah, really really strange. That makes no sense. The whole thing in general seems to confuse copyright with responsibility of content. Of course I could have got the gist wrong because it was very confusing and contradicted itself.
There will be two key moments with this: 1. Will people stick around after this is off the front page of HN?
2. When people decide to game your site, how well do you handle voting rings? The reddit founders have mentioned that nearly half of their code catches voting rings; that's not trivial to do. And of course, it may be premature optimization, but it is something to consider that anyone with a few minutes of time to build a bot could completely destroy your site.
I feel like this is not true.
^ This is a truly decentralized website
This is true, the only other decentralized aggregator, Aether, is not a website and rather requires download upon your computer.
Frizbee allows users to host their own decentralized playlist servers: https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati...
I know, I know, Reddit pulled similar stunts in its early days but it still feels a bit dodgy.
It's not a stunt, and you are purely speculating. The reason for the view count for the comments being different is very easy to explain: a comment may not have been posted at the same time as a post, and therefore has a different number of views.
hmm...
There is no such thing as hate speech in a free speech environment. There is no guarantee you won't be offended.
That's all any of us wants.
For example, in the UK recently there was a notorious case where a Muslim teenager posted on Facebook that he hated the soldiers who went to Muslim countries and killed women and children, and he hoped those soldiers would go straight to hell. That is 100% pure political speech .... so what happened?
Well, a woman who was the mother of a soldier saw the post and was of course terribly offended. She reported him to the police, on the grounds that nobody should be allowed to criticise her boy's choice of career. The police arrested him and he was tried in court. The plods said, "He didn't express himself very well and that's why he's now in a spot of bother". Sounds so pleasant, doesn't it, except he was found guilty and sentenced to community service. It would have been jail but he agreed to renounce his heresy in public.
The moment you say "I support free speech but not if it upsets someone" you don't have free speech. The entire purpose of protecting free speech is to ensure ideas that some people might find ugly or insulting can still get heard and debated, and thus to keep flexibility in the political system. It must be possible to enrage other people with your speech.
I'm not an absolutist, there can be some exceptions - for instance I don't consider publishing a list of people's passwords to be "free speech", but the definitions of what's not acceptable should be incredibly tightly defined. And no countries laws even try, really. Especially not in Europe.
I'm going to be optimistic for the future of humanity, and assume that was a (masterful) troll.
Americans tend not to realise that their free speech laws are sometimes seen as extreme in Europe.
It's not surprising they used a throwaway, they already got downvoted.
(It wasn't me.)
Unfortunately this means the UK tends to be run for long periods by social conservatives, because that's the only way to get people who are also fiscal conservatives. I don't think you can draw deep conclusions about the value of free speech to people in Europe or the UK when it's so rarely debated.
(British guy speaking here)
For example, you prevent anti-jihad activists like Robert Spencer from entering the UK to speak, but you're perfectly prepared to allow pro-jihad activists to live in the UK and preach hatred of Jews, women, and non-Muslims in general.
This is the problem with limits on freedom of speech - they allow people doing the limiting to ban speech they don't like, for no other reason that they don't like it.
Of course it isn't! They live here, border controls are entirely the wrong tool to use for citizens.
Those border controls are used to prevent many Islamists from coming to the country.
And violent Islamists are dealt with using other laws.
A better example of uneven freedom of speech laws might have been the protections that Jews and Christians had (under racial discrimination laws and blasphemy laws) that were not extended to Muslims.
No, they're banned because their speech is so unpopular amongst a small but violent group of the population, that the Govt. would rather they weren't allowed to speak there.
That's a freedom of speech issue, not a border control issue.
If the Govt. were functioning properly, it would uphold its duty to protect unpopular speech by preventing (or at least attempting to prevent) violence directed at them. Instead, they just close their doors.
If a user wishes to 'doxx' me, my right to privacy and their freedom of speech are at odds. Which wins?
I just admire the American concept of free speech more than I do ours.
http://48laws-of-power.blogspot.com/2011/05/law-32-play-to-p...
A lot of people feel that a "decentralized social service" would be great. It hits a techies' ideas: free, open, unfiltered, uncontrolled by government.
I personally feel that it's too much like dispora: Too much tech, too little network, and a bit unproven that its a reliable/convincing network. I believe that Voat [like reddit after the digg-fail] hit a sweet spot. Although they've been a little unprepared and may be a little naive about how dirty their opposition may be.