The article reminded me about another proposal of how to fix reddit: http://chuqui.com/2015/07/fixing-or-replacing-reddit-some-quick-thoughts/ http://chuqui.com

The article reminded me about another proposal of how to fix reddit: http://chuqui.com/2015/07/fixing-or-replacing-reddit-some-quick-thoughts/ http://chuqui.com/2015/07/fixing-or-replacing-reddit-some-qu... I see a problem with this but there are some valid points. Maybe mastodon.social is heading there: So I wouldn’t host the stuff. But I could build an easy to install environment that would be a standardized system that could be installed on effectively any hosting site. Start with WordPress, WordPress’s P2 theme, a forum plug-in, the Disqus commenting system and a couple of weeks of hacking some custom work, and you’d have something that could be easily installed and run by a non-geek on any hosting service that supports WordPress. There are big advantages to this: If someone really wants a topic to exist, they can get it going for well under $100 (including domain name) and keep it running for $10-20/mo. Most of these sites will be very low traffic and a lot of them will in fact be pop-up and collapse as people figure out running sites is work and audiences don’t appear by magic — but the good ones will thrive and grow, and for most of these, it’ll be cheap enough to operate that most people can run them out of pocket. By building it as an independent site, though, that person would have the option of doing advertising, or running a Patreon or GoFundMe, or find other ways to pay for hosting the content of the site. It also shifts the liability for the existence of the content to the owner and host of the site and away from the central authority. If that person wants to find an offshore hosting service that doesn’t care what the content is, that’s up to them. So you’ve removed the need for a central authority to have to censor to protect its own interests. You still need a way for people to find these topic-specific sites. Enter the central authority. It hosts a directory, much like the original Yahoo! directory was. Building something like this is dirt cheap and easy to host, so someone (like, ahem, Reddit) could do so at low cost so that it doesn’t have to host those subreddits any more but could still support them by hosting a directory of them where they could be found.