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Show HN: Reddit alternative – decentralized social news site, no censorship
- empressplay 11y agoIt's a bit of a stretch to call this "decentralised" when it still relies on software running on a "master" server (your bot.) Second, if it is indeed fully anonymous, won't it just become a haven for trolls?
- frizbee 11y agoEven though many playlist servers run on the frizbee.co server, some are community-owned. Feel free to host a decentralized server here: https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentation.md https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati... You can also block users for spam.
- empressplay 11y agoOkay right, but it's not _decentralised_ -- if it was, I would be able to run a completely stand-alone server, or join an arbitrary network of servers completely unrelated to yours just by punching in the IP address of another member server. If I _must_ have anything to do with you, it's not decentralised. Distributed, maybe. But _not_ decentralised.
- colordrops 11y agoWhat about using bitcoin as a voting mechanism? That would get rid of trolls, or at least the poor ones.
- gruez 11y agothat has the unsavory effect of money = votes
- lettergram 11y agoI like the idea, but I don't think the UI design is really all that great. 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?"
- personjerry 11y ago"We're the only decentralized democratic social aggregator website" I feel like this is not true.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rtpg 11y agohow can a website be decentralized...
- x0 11y agoMaybe if you spread it across 500 AWS instances
- personjerry 11y agohttp://ephemeralp2p.durazo.us/ http://ephemeralp2p.durazo.us/ ^ This is a truly decentralized website
- frizbee 11y agoHi, 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/documentation.md https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati...
- empressplay 11y agoIt's not true. It's not decentralised.
- Grue3 11y agoUsenet says hi, from the 80s.
- monksy 11y agoUmmm no. You're late to the game. Also, you're not established. If anyone has a claim to this, it's Voat. (Despite their difficulties)
- zxcvcxz 11y agoWho runs voat? How do I know it isn't run by Russian spies? or US spies?
- bhouston 11y agoWhy is this being downvoted? Voat.co is really winning this space, mostly because of timing and exploiting an opportunity.
- monksy 11y agoLaw 32: Play to People's Fantasies http://48laws-of-power.blogspot.com/2011/05/law-32-play-to-peoples-fantasies.html 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.
- minimaxir 11y agoLet's look at what happened to Voat. 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_finally_caves_the_first_bannings_of/ 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_over_voats_paypal_account_getting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3augr0/drama... No, "decentralized" does not magically make you immune to law and punishment.
- Natsu 11y agoDid I miss a post? SRD seems to say that Paypal terminated their account. I don't see involvement by law enforcement, unless I missed a post? 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.
- minimaxir 11y agoAh, forgot to include that Voat was earlier shut down by their hosting provider (hosted in Europe) due to the nature of their content: https://voat.co/v/announcements/comments/146757/ https://voat.co/v/announcements/comments/146757/ They switched to a cloud provider to fix it in the short term.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- myhackeraccount 11y agoquite slow
- __z 11y agoGrey text is hard to read - needs contrast overall. Finding links and controls by random clicking and trial and error also isn't pleasant. mystery meat navigation.
- koko775 11y agoNo censorship as in no moderation? 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.
- frizbee 11y agoHi, 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.
- x0 11y agoIf this website is another reaction to reddit, you're only going to attract the absolute dregs of that site — /r/fatpeoplehate, the pedophiles, the gamergaters, etc. 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.
- tomjen3 11y agoDid you just put gamer gaters in the same group as pedophiles?
- x0 11y agoYou're right, gamergaters aren't as bad as pedophiles, my post implies that they are and I apologise.
- ossreality 11y agoIt's okay, I'm hellbanned and I can say it, yes, they're basically just as bad. Proof: go to KiA, etc. Are they talking about ethics in journalism or are they bitching about something some female did online. I'll let you guess.
- carsongross 11y agoHaters gonna hate, but eventually something like this will win. It's too obvious an idea and hard drives are getting too cheap.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pyrmont 11y agoI'm confused how the licensing of users' content is intended to work. 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 https://frizbee.co/#WhatMakesFrizbeeDifferent558b273db212a [2]: https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5 https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5 [3]: https://frizbee.co/#LegalLicense5589af95a67c3 https://frizbee.co/#LegalLicense5589af95a67c3
- __z 11y ago"you own the copyright to your content... all the content on Frizbee is in the public domain... you can use and redistribute [user content] in any way, completely free of charge." 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.
- keedot 11y agoI honestly hope one of these takes off. I don't want to ever go there, I don't take amusement in other people's suffering. But seeing so much outrage on reddit from assholes bitching that they can't be racist/bigoted/loathsome on a private forum screaming about freedom of speech which belies their own ignorance makes me long for the days of gopher. I find it repugnant, and I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted.
- bruceb 11y ago" I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted." hmm...
- steveeq1 11y agoEnglish translation: "I believe in freedom of speech. . . except for things that I find offensive" There is no such thing as hate speech in a free speech environment. There is no guarantee you won't be offended.
- eevee 11y agoEnglish translation: "I want to be as big a jerk as possible and blame it on everyone else when they don't like it."
- flashman 11y agoMore like, "Nobody is going to stop you saying what you want... but they're going to hold you responsible for the consequences." That's all any of us wants.
- steveeq1 11y agoAnd if the consequences are high enough, it's not really free speech.
- keedot 11y agoThat isn't the argument. Racism, bigotry, exploitation, bullying are all examples of speech that has no place in an enlightened society in my view. Freedom of speech is limited in America too, the rest of us think that if you're going to have limitations, then set limitations which promotes human cooperation and understanding, and excludes speech which only serves to promote violence and the insularization of arbitrary groups.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ethana 11y agoApparently you can clear your cookie and up vote again. I can see the spambot coming already.
- thefreeman 11y agoCan anyone clarify what is decentralized about this? I clicked around a few threads on the site and they all appear to be hosted at frizbee.co.
- empressplay 11y agoIt's not decentralised. You have the ability to run a node. Your node communicates exclusively with frizbee's servers.
- liamzebedee 11y agoIf people are interested in P2P decentralized discussion systems, check out http://getaether.net http://getaether.net made by @nehbit . Beautiful UX, wasn't released yesterday either.
- blfr 11y agoHow does login/registration work? Once I changed the moniker, added a password, how do I then log in?
- frizbee 11y agoYou login using the same menu you used for adding a passphrase- you enter your passphrase form another computer.
- jedberg 11y agoThe top post as I write this: "Delete your cookie and upvote forever".
- protomyth 11y agoI'm starting to think the sufficiently complicated Lisp quote applies to USENET.
- austenallred 11y agoIt looks like you're off to a good start. There's design cleanup to do, for sure. Ya, there are buts that people can clear cookies and vote again - welcome to the world of building social news software. 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.
- __z 11y agoWouldn't "handling vote rings" be a form of "censorship"?
- NeutronBoy 11y agoYou have a right to say what you want, you don't have a right to manipulate the ranking of the content.
- __z 11y agoI don't see the difference. If you want to be free of censorship that also means free of moderation. Every community needs moderation if only for spam for a reason. That's why this doesn't make sense, there will have to be some choices at moderating the content thus choosing what is displayed or not.
- NeutronBoy 11y agoYou have a right to say what you want, you don't have a right to manipulate the ranking of the content.
- moron4hire 11y agoI don't know, is censorship the problem with Reddit?
- adamrezich 11y agoI don't want to be That Guy, but I really don't think the UI is very intuitive. A lot of things really bug me about it. It's hard to peruse a list of posts and scan headlines, unlike on Hacker News or reddit. You compose comments with a serif font, and then the comment is posted with a sans-serif font. It appears as if all URLs are just frizbee.co/#SomethingGoesHere, regardless of what it is. This makes me lost a lot because I'll click the logo in the upper-left corner because I want to go back to the homepage, but it doesn't work. It also means that I have no idea what a link is before I click on it. When I see reddit.com/u/takua108, I know that it's takua108's user page. When I see reddit.com/r/dota2, I know that it's the Dota 2 subreddit. When I see https://frizbee.co/#ICameHereFromHackerNews558b70ef40cdf https://frizbee.co/#ICameHereFromHackerNews558b70ef40cdf, I have no idea what the hell to think. Plus, there's no comment permalinks, and it looks like every link is using javascript or something, because I can't even hover over the link to see where it leads! I like a lot of the ideas behind this, but I feel like the execution is very, very poor.
- __z 11y agoIts even worse than that. Navigation is just totally broken. For example I clicked your link then on that page I clicked Our Manifesto. The URL changed to https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5 https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5 but the page content did not change! This seems to happen all over. 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 https://frizbee.co/#HotPosts but as you and I said it just doesnt work)
- SrslyJosh 11y agoIf you're a bad enough person that _Reddit_ will ban you or your favorite subreddits, by all means get the fuck out! =)
- empressplay 11y agoThe original Frizee submission from 32 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593729
- empressplay 11y agoAlso, the "view counts" on the website are pure BS -- the comment view counts don't grow at the same rate the thread view count does, for example. The thread view-count grows at almost a clockwork rate, etc. I know, I know, Reddit pulled similar stunts in its early days but it still feels a bit dodgy.
- frizbee 11y agoHi, 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.