2,184 karma · joined May 21, 2010
In short, the difference between a surveillance state and a police state is a matter of nature, but they have capabilities in common.
I think a police state will likely follow.
Still, I remember the State Department talking about developing tech that was supposed to help protesters in areas that service was disrupted. Tin-Can would fit that bill.
Thanks!
We are currently experimenting with a solution to this on Hubski. We are allowing some blogs to mirror Hubski discussions of their content on their blog. Here's an example: http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2013/1/28/evolutio... I've long seen many bloggers append a post with "discussion on HN" or "discussed on Reddit". We decided to skip the link, and to allow the thread to be embedded. It's not so much a commenting platform as a mirror to the Hubski discussion. So far it seems to be working well, and we have a cue of blogs waiting to be added.
I should mention that users can follow or ignore users, tags, and domains on Hubski, and what they see is a result of what they follow. I don't think this would work on HN or Reddit, as no one would want every post from a given blog to be submitted automatically.
You can follow people, ex: http://hubski.com/hub?id=NotPhil
or tags, ex: http://hubski.com/tag?id=economics
I disagree. IMHO it can be accomplished with the correct structure. The problem you identify is that subreddits are shared spaces, and the primary signal that they rely on is the sum of all users. As subreddits grow, the signal becomes worse. Weighting the votes of users could help, but then you are implementing a moderator bias, and not being honest with people about their input would almost certainly lead to blowback.
One of our goals with http://hubski.com was to avoid this problem. Our approach was to avoid shared pages, and instead allow users to build a feed by following other users or tags. That way we don't have the problem of 'keeping bad content out' to begin with. Instead of voting a story up a page, users share the post with those users that follow them. Posts propagate from user to user. Therefore content cannot be 'buried' by competing with other posts in a shared space. Of course, we are not anywhere near the size of Reddit, but it has been working well so far for us. Each user is their own moderator.
Forget the naysayers. People have been spoonfeed by corporate advertisers so long, they think anything that doesn't function as an effective corporate logo is flawed.
I largely agree with this. As long as it's functional, let design take a back seat to community. It can work, it just takes a lot of work. However, since your community is designers, you might want some way that they can contribute in a creative fashion outside of comments.
Best of luck!
Don't?
In all seriousness, should a source of income from hosting free downloads exist? The very nature of the consumer's expectations is why it is so hard to find a legitimate source of income. If you can't make it work without deception, then don't host free downloads.
This is a problem with free software. It's free to make, free to use, but has a distribution cost.