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How dare a private megacorp whose business model relies on eyeballs watching ads do whatever it takes to avoid driving said eyeballs away. A common pattern I'v

How dare a private megacorp whose business model relies on eyeballs watching ads do whatever it takes to avoid driving said eyeballs away. A common pattern I've found among the HN or 'liberterian' crowd is that they correctly point out a problem then come up with the most absolute wrong 'solution'. In this example, the problem being 'maybe we shouldn't have surrendered public speaking places to a handful of adtech megacorps that only care about maximizing engagement', the correct solution being 'we should abandon and dismantle these platforms for federated or decentralized alternatives', and the solution most people on here come up with being 'actually they should just unban Nazis'.

repolfx 7y ago
Well, because building a decentralised Reddit is really hard. Decentralised user accounts and reputation alone is a research-level problem, let alone questions like "who will run nodes", "why would anyone run a node" and so on. There was an attempt to do this once. It was USENET and it's been abandoned because nobody was incentivised to improve it. We may argue about whether or not Reddit's more and more activist moderation activity is an improvement or not, but, nobody can deny that the structure of a (supposedly) for profit company was great for incentivising them to add features and maintain the site.
- wubblebubble 7y ago
  here is an interesting website to take a look at that i stumbled on last year: notabug.io . there are like a handful of people that use it. last i checked there are some complaints about the voting system, which is PoW-based, and there were people hardware accelerating that for GPU's. the owner, goldf1sh claims that when the site is the size of reddit, vote manipulation will be more difficult. that's to be seen. i've also seen a couple soft exploits related to unicode usernames (which are called 'aliases' because you can post anonymously) as you might expect from a reddit clone (voat, etc.) the userbase is mostly those that got banned from reddit for whatever reason. notabug is mostly the libertarians/Aaron Swartz worshipping kind. the website has some sort of subreddit system called "spaces", which I don't understand, but i'm told is very well implemented.

repolfx 7y ago

Well, because building a decentralised Reddit is really hard. Decentralised user accounts and reputation alone is a research-level problem, let alone questions like "who will run nodes", "why would anyone run a node" and so on. There was an attempt to do this once. It was USENET and it's been abandoned because nobody was incentivised to improve it. We may argue about whether or not Reddit's more and more activist moderation activity is an improvement or not, but, nobody can deny that the structure of a (supposedly) for profit company was great for incentivising them to add features and maintain the site.

wubblebubble 7y ago
here is an interesting website to take a look at that i stumbled on last year: notabug.io . there are like a handful of people that use it. last i checked there are some complaints about the voting system, which is PoW-based, and there were people hardware accelerating that for GPU's. the owner, goldf1sh claims that when the site is the size of reddit, vote manipulation will be more difficult. that's to be seen. i've also seen a couple soft exploits related to unicode usernames (which are called 'aliases' because you can post anonymously) as you might expect from a reddit clone (voat, etc.) the userbase is mostly those that got banned from reddit for whatever reason. notabug is mostly the libertarians/Aaron Swartz worshipping kind. the website has some sort of subreddit system called "spaces", which I don't understand, but i'm told is very well implemented.