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Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' :

“We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.”

To the current CEO, Ellen Pao:

It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.

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As someone who loves reddit, this dichotomy is the clearest sign that it has no future. Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls on top of platforms like IPFS and Ethereum's Swarm. Every attempt at building a reddit clone fails because reddit enjoys tremendous network effects. But decentralization yields its own network effects—you don't have to start your own site to see your changes in the wild, you just fork the codebase and tell people about it. The useful changes thrive, the useless ones are forgotten, and everyone's still contributing to the core stream of submissions, comments, and votes that make the system work regardless of which fork they're using.

reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.

I wouldn't say I love Reddit, but I'm certainly an active user. But I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread. There are lots of little communities that work well, with their own things they value. (There was a particular thread over on /r/OrthodoxChristianity, now removed, that would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad: a member of the community tried to convince everyone else to move to Voat. The usual talking points for that move didn't really go over well there.)

I suspect one of the network effects is simply that people have Reddit accounts and know how the site works; it's not yet another site to sign up for, for a small-ish community of people interested in a thing. I think that's the sole reason, for instance, /r/rust works as well as it does; philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole. I suspect that it's not users of any particular other subreddit (not even /r/programming) who are there, but people already using Reddit for many many other things. It's become one of the bigger discussion forums for the language, especially since the closure of the rust-dev mailing list.

If you can build a decentralized Reddit-like system with no per-community account system and also with no spam problem, you may stand a decent chance at replacing it.

I agree with your prerequisites. I think they can be achieved.

I'd suggest directed acyclic graph comments, too, so that a comment can reply to more than one other comment. Potentially super nice, but I haven't seen anyone implement them yet.

Though I'm sure HN's audience would appreciate it it would be quite hard to get a lot of traction when people think reddit is complicated as it is.

That's certainly an interesting idea, but wouldn't some people just "reply all" for more visibility?

That's a good point. I was thinking along the lines of something that's essentially like reddit or HN, but had a field where you could add additional parent comment ids, so that the parent poster was notified of the reply.

Imageboards implement such system, by having plain hyperlink(s) to parent(s) in post body, and JS to produce backlinks and convenient navigation

You mean "Bring back Usenet".

Because that is what Reddit is serving, as well as the previous board sites the people came from.

Usenet was decentralized, no logins, and some were moderated. But this is what the people want, yet they do not know the name.

Most NG servers are shut down.

Usenet was decentralised, and therefore utterly unable to deal with spam and abuse. That's a problem any distributed system will have to face too.

There were techniques we were working on prior to the ISPs neglecting them.

One such technique was a crypto method, similar to what has been recommended in reducing spam in emails. The client has to do some lengthy crypto transform for the message(and NG) they send. On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message. Small amounts of messages would get through, but spammers would be unable to bulk-send without some sort of supercomputer.

The appropriate algo could be agreed up and updated to increase the amount of time for the message. Even in worst cases, you're utilizing a slow computer for a second or 2. Solves the spam issue.

On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message

So if I want to post from a mobile device, I have to wait considerably longer? And if I hijack a lot of computers for a spam farm, I can send as much as I like?

Spam is not only defined by bulk. You still need moderators, and that means a process for establishing and maintaining who moderates a particular group. You need people to delete the child porn and the death threats, and that means a process for deletion. (Signed cancels were a pretty good solution in the end). You probably want some means for identifying persistently troublesome users and their sockpuppets from legitimate new users.

You need hosting so that people can effectively access it despite firewalls and on mobile devices. You need a means of paying for that hosting.

As someone who hung around a few usenet discussion groups well into the 21st century, the problem was less "spam" and more "trolls and kooks". It only takes a very small number of people to completely disrupt a group, and no, "plonking" was not a solution that worked. A new usenet would need some sort of moderation system.

Even in worst cases, you're utilizing a slow computer for a second or 2. Solves the spam issue.

Not really. 300 messages a day would only be a few minutes of compute time and could seriously disrupt a large number of small group.

Today, we have cryptocurrency, which is a better way of accomplishing the same thing.

>>philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole

It's true. I for example was off-put by what I perceive as forced niceness. While it shouldn't matter on a subreddit dedicated to a programming language it's, at least for me, an illustration of culture conflict on Reddit.

Very small example: there was a poster claiming that we shouldn't use a word "guys" when referring to mixed groups and the moderators were willing to grant that request/encourage different ways of addressing mixed groups for some completely bs (in my view) reasons like the equivalent word in German being used only to address male groups.

Well, my preferred way of dealing with such requests is: "We don't mean to offend anyone but this is English so deal with it, using a word guys to address mixes groups is completely standard"

I find the culture of forced niceness and political correctness off-putting and it is reason enough for me not to engage in certain communities (/r/chess is another one I stopped posting in because of it). I think a difference in views on this matter is also why some Reddit communities are perceived as hateful while I not only don't see any hate there but I often see the critics as hateful authoritarians (one example: r/mensrights)

I would be happy just with HN clones more focused on specific topics. The per-community thing I don't care about too much; it doesn't even have to be the same host (it's 2015 we have bookmarks and speedials and password managers). What I care about is moderation done right. But I suspect it's an open issue for very large scale communities.

Surprisingly, there is a "Hacker News for Hacker News for (x)", because a few people have done just that.

http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com/

> I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread

While that might have been true when you posted this comment, I have trouble believing that it could be true for anybody right now. At least a half dozen defaults have gone private an the majority of posts on the signed-out home page are about this story.

Is it so hard to believe that active users wouldn't be subbed to any of the defaults?

Looking at all of my subscriptions, it looks like exactly one of them, /r/linux, is currently private. /r/bayarea previously was. Places like /r/debian or /r/AskNYC or /r/SandersForPresident or /r/osdev just don't care -- or at least, they care less than they care about keeping their community open. There's a post each on /r/Christianity and /r/Catholicism saying thanks to the mods. There's a post vaguely about the subject on /r/networking, but it veered into discussion about the community.

As I mentioned elsewhere in these comments, yesterday's issue was specifically about the tensions between large, default sub volunteer moderation and Reddit the company. Most of the subreddits I read are small communities without these problems. (And they don't see themselves at risk for being banned for harassment / political incorrectness / what-have-you, so they're not concerned about that, either.)

> Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls

This would be worse than 4chan, that has moderation as well (although more laxed than reddit or HN), why would anyone go there instead of reddit?

Her wording should be.

We want to be a profitable platform and some of you have to go for that to happen.

The timing of the iAMA admin's removal coincides all to well with the recent Jesse Jackson AMA that went exactly as AMAs do and not how politicians want things.

Most celebrities can handle abuse and such, but there are certain one's and definitely more politicians who will not tolerate it from the rabble. To them they are royalty and damn if they will suffer humiliation, rudeness, or the like, from anyone. So likely we will soon have amusement park reddit, where there is a hint of roughness but everything is policed, scripted, and shadowbans go out like candy on halloween. AMA will likely come back as service to "the important people" Ellen and her like want to associate with to the point all posts will be so filtered it should be renamed "Ask Me Approved Questions"

Hrm, well, Yishan supports Ellen's recent actions:

http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...

Numerous subreddits were closed on Yishan Wong's watch.

Lip service is the first step.

As far as I know it was just for stuff that broke the ToS. Not just because they didn't like them.

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