5 ms·

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 hel

by natrius 11y ago

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.

geofft 11y ago
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.
- natrius 11y ago
  I agree with your prerequisites. I think they can be achieved.
- termain 11y ago
  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.
  - steve-howard 11y ago
    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.
  - leod 11y ago
    That's certainly an interesting idea, but wouldn't some people just "reply all" for more visibility?
    - termain 11y ago
      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.
  - jarman 11y ago
    Imageboards implement such system, by having plain hyperlink(s) to parent(s) in post body, and JS to produce backlinks and convenient navigation
  - kefka 11y ago
    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.
baby 11y ago
> 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?

by natrius 11y ago

geofft 11y ago

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.

natrius 11y ago
I agree with your prerequisites. I think they can be achieved.
termain 11y ago
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.
- steve-howard 11y ago
  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.
- leod 11y ago
  That's certainly an interesting idea, but wouldn't some people just "reply all" for more visibility?
  - termain 11y ago
    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.
- jarman 11y ago
  Imageboards implement such system, by having plain hyperlink(s) to parent(s) in post body, and JS to produce backlinks and convenient navigation
- kefka 11y ago
  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.

baby 11y ago

> 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?