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What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be
by ratfaced-guy 7y ago
What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).
- smt88 7y ago> What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved. > Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. I think it's reddit's right to do either -- purge or not purge -- but I'm not interested in the old reddit. The redesign is bad, but I'm not really a power user, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. You can always just use old.reddit.com anyway, right?
- zionic 7y ago> I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page. Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless you explicitly sought them out. The one exception would be /r/all, but again the default is your "home" page so you'd never see that content.
- dunnevens 7y agoThe toxic elements didn't exist invisibly. They bled out regularly into unrelated subreddits. For example, the fat phobia of /r/FatPeopleHate seemed ever present for a time. Popped up in many different places. And then after the sub was banned and many of its users banned, that particular form of insults & speech mostly vanished. It was a huge quality of life improvement for the site overall. There have been similar results from banning some of the more virulent racist and misogynistic subs. I suppose if you never read the comments, then the subscriptions would keep you away from certain types of content. But if you wanted to participate in the community, only banning and active moderation worked. Subscriptions weren't any barrier at all.
- Semaphor 7y agoI feel like I’m in between both of you. On the one hand, stuff like fatpeoplehate never had any influence on my usage of reddit, on the other hand I never felt like there was a big difference between before and after the ban (of this or any other subreddit). The big subs are still utter shit, any decently sized sub without strong moderation is utter shit. Small subs are most of the time amazing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- friendlybus 7y agoNew hate groups and power sub's pop up with the same toxicity but on a different theme. The psycho redpill has been replaced with a version for women. Reddit doesn't want a 'better' site it just cycles the garbage to fit the trends.
- spats1990 7y ago>The psycho redpill has been replaced with a version for women. Can you elaborate on this?
- friendlybus 7y agoI forget the name of the subreddit. The old subreddit which captured man's manipulative, controlling & dark side of relationships and general coaching of male sexual behaviour aimed at maximum recreation, has been quarantined a while ago and now the female version with basically the same content about how to deal with the dark side of relationships for women is in vogue. They both overlap with multiple political groups and generally attract the unsavory. They use the same language and have information structured in same format.
- thekyle 7y ago> Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? I don't think so. As far as I can tell, Disqus is not decentralized at all. It's basically the same as Facebook comments but from a different company. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments/
- dredmorbius 7y agoReddit, like HN, was never as good as it used to be, though many like to pretend it was. The locus has shifted, though. Early Reddit was decidely techy, it's now exceedingly popular/memey. There were and are many cesspits. As well as numerous dead or stagnent fora, several of which I can lay claim to myself.
- samstave 7y agoNot under the thumb of a $200 million Chinese investment..
- AndrewStephens 7y agoThere already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please. What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.
- hutzlibu 7y ago"There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please" But can your grandmother do this ... or just the common person?
- leoh 7y agoHow would you go about creating something like that?
- zanny 7y agoActivityPub. Prismo already tried it, the developer just burned out before it got anywhere usable.
- cortesoft 7y agoOne of the reasons that reddit can avoid 'blog spam' is because as a centralized service, they can control user registration and take measures to prevent bots from signing up for thousands of accounts and upvoting their spam. How would this be prevented in a decentralized system? Spammers would join the network, create thousands of bots, and upvote all their spam.
- zionic 7y agoI wonder if crypto could play into this. Blockchain prevents sybil attacks by making interaction not free so that large scale influence is incredibly expensive.
- mdgrech23 7y agoI mean couldn't you just require a phone number for all accounts?
- jobigoud 7y agoLast time I checked you didn't even need an email address. username & password only.
- sneak 7y agoThis was tried: steemit.com. It didn't become very prolific, perhaps because the daemon was difficult to run, and there weren't many good frontends. The founding organization subsidized account creation, but was bad at spam detection, so eventually gave up.
- zanny 7y agoInstances can A. block bots on themselves, B. block other instances known to harbor bots the same way they ban bots on their own instances, and if necessary C. whitelist federation if there is a pandemic of hostile actors.
- simias 7y agoReddit doesn't really avoid anything as far as I can tell. A lot of the content in the big subreddits is more or less well concealed "organic advertising". The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic. At least good old blog spam is easy to identify and ignore. There are a few topics I care about where you have both big subreddits and also dedicated "old school" forums on third-party websites. The forums are always more interesting and in-depth in my experience, when the subreddits are just a litany of karma-whoring picture posts and low effort so-called "memes".
- weavie 7y agoWhat about Aether : https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/?
- paulddraper 7y agoThat seems perfect.
- rolleiflex 7y agoAh, somebody posted it before I could. :) (Disclosure: I’m the creator of Aether, happy to answer any questions)
- mirimir 7y agoIt sounds like just what I want. But I use VPNs. So I'd need to get a mapped port. What port does Aether want? Edit: Also, can I just install from source?
- rolleiflex 7y agoIt will get whatever it can. You also don’t need a mapped port, Aether can punch holes through firewalls via reverse-opens. (Though having a port open will significantly increase your connection speed and frequency.) You can look at the port it chooses through netstat, it does not have a fixed port. However, once it gets a working one, it won’t change it from then on so you can map that port. Edit: you can, but it having an Electron shell for UI (the actual app is Go) makes the build process somewhat complicated. It’s on GitHub though, feel free to take a look at the makefile and give it a shot.
- mirimir 7y agoThanks. I'll use an Ubuntu VM.
- unityByFreedom 7y agoHow do you install it on linux? I'm getting the error, error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap "Aether-2.0.0-dev.14+1909192130.00bf3c3.snap" SO [1] suggests this can be forced with `sudo snap install --dangerous` but that doesn't sound right. [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-error-cannot-find-signatures-with-metadata-for-snap https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-...
- dunnevens 7y agoI'm a little surprised no one's tried reviving newsgroups for discussions. Decentralized, not privacy-invading, can be rendered by a large variety of front-ends. Somewhat censorship resistant. There would be a huge potential spam problem, but that can be controlled by filters and moderators. Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.
- kbenson 7y agoNewsgroups with an extension that signed your post as a verified account (handled by whatever the moderators decide is good) and with some middleware to accept signed/allowed posts automatically would probably do it, if you could get people to actually use it enough to get momentum. Edit: I suspect something like this probably existed. It seems straightforward and obvious enough that I'd bet it did exist, but couldn't get much usage in a world where spam wasn't quite as bad, numbers of users were smaller, and people were already shifting to HTML based platforms.
- chocolatebunny 7y agoMiddleware to accept signed posts, eh? I smell BLOCKCHAIN!
- pasabagi 7y agoIt's full of really bizarre spam, though - and I got the feeling that it isn't technically straightforward to stop people from spamming, beyond everybody just keeping thousand-entry killfiles. It's also very slow. And the posting format is very hard to follow sometimes, especially when you get people that don't do hard line breaks (or the other way around, depending on the program you're using) or have funny ideas about quoting. Also, the lack of moderation seems to create a very wild-west style of conversation, where apparently rational people can start spewing really hardcore invective at the drop of a hat.
- dredmorbius 7y agoIt's been tried, numerous times. Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland. Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland. The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane. But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep. ("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.") These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.
- zanny 7y agoPrismo[1] was an attempt at that if anyone wants some historical context. [1] https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo
- valeg 7y agoalso https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy
- miguelmota 7y agoA problem with federated networks is that it eventually leads to centralization of just a few providers. For example, email is federated but most users are on gmail. IRC is federated but most users are on freenode. Diaspora is federated but most users are join the server with already most users.
- zanny 7y agoThe only danger is there is the propensity for majority nodes to try to break federation. Normal people will still just use the most popular instance - the value of a decentralized protocol is in how it keeps all actors honest to keep participating, and except for in extreme circumstance of market dominance like when Google and Facebook broke their XMPP support due to their overwhelming control of their silos of communication generally works.
- sneak 7y ago> email is federated but most users are on gmail. IRC is federated but most users are on freenode. Diaspora is federated but most users are join the server with already most users. I think you underestimate the long tail in all of these cases. I don't think the first two statements are accurate.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Existenceblinks 7y agoTrue about source of information. When people (me included) find things on google, just also add `site:reddit.com` or just `reddit` next to keyword, most noise results are likely to be gone.
- Mirioron 7y agoThis is what I do whenever I want to find people's opinions on a product or subject.
- Existenceblinks 7y agoThey are generally honest. Another gem of information on products are youtube comments which is tricky to search.
- bonestamp2 7y ago> and for whatever reason I think the answer has to do with the user's voice and a sense of ownership: 1. Even if spam accounts sign up, their comments and posts rarely get to the top of the algorithm because user's have a voice in the matter (downvote low quality content, and upvote other higher quality content). 2. There is a sense of ownership on the part of the mods... people who are generally passionate about the area of interest in which they moderate. There have been a number of cases over the years where moderators were acting in bad faith and the users have voiced their concerns to the Admins, who frequently remove mods or even whole subs that are operating against the benefit of the community.
- all_blue_chucks 7y agoSo... usenet? But with voting? I'm down. NNTP is due for an update.
- thedaemon 7y agoHave you heard of mastodon? It seems like what you are looking for. https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- aaomidi 7y agoI thought I wanted this until I ended up going to multiple of these sites that claim to do decentralized reddit. They're full of nazi bullshit. I look at mastodon instances and any non-moderated ones is white-supremacist shit. I'm not sure if the average consumer wants to see that.
- lokedhs 7y agoThankfully most instances are moderated though, and so far it seems to be working reasonably well. Of course, it's still smaller than Twitter for example so we'll see how it goes when it grows larger, but right now it's working, in my opinion.
- tuckermi 7y agoWhat if HackerNews instances were easily deployable? Say on par with launching a new blog through WordPress or similar. Do you think that that would by and large provide the tools and interfaces to satisfy what you are looking for?
- KajMagnus 7y agoHere's a cross between HN & Reddit and some other things, which I think is ok easy to deploy (like signing up for WP.com): there SaaS hosting so one won't need to install oneself ... Otherwise it's Docker images: https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) — and if you scroll down, you'll notice it adds some improvements on HackerNews and Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/#unique-features https://www.talkyard.io/#unique-features
- faizshah 7y agoEvery few years we all say there needs to be a new reddit but the reddit alternatives out there always devolve into places no regular person wants to join. I think there’s a balance between centralized moderation and allowing creativity and free speech that makes reddit work. We don’t give them enough credit for it. Even HN has just the right balance that makes this place have some of the best threads on the internet.
- cwkoss 7y agoI specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development. The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list. Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer. Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores). You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores. The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list. Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports. For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated. Ex. Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1 Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2 Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9 Alice downloads both lists. Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22 Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095 Content A gets sorted higher than B. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)
- TaupeRanger 7y agoYes, I very often find myself adding "Reddit" to the end of search queries on Google now, because I know that the results will be people discussing the topic I'm interested in, rather than an obscure Wikipedia entry or blog spam.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zzleeper 7y agoI just added a search engine to chrome that searches on Google with the site:reddit com term. Add a simple shortcut to the search bar for that engine like "@", and now I just type "@ best baby teether" and get actual people discussing actual pros and cons of baby teethers (or anything else)
- bentcorner 7y agoFor duckduckgo users, !r does this too
- duckmysick 7y ago!r redirects to the internal reddit search at https://www.reddit.com/search?q=<query> https://www.reddit.com/search?q=<query> It's not the same as searching through Google.
- avainlakech 7y agoI find the Reddit moderator scheme both necessary and also toxic. I deleted my Reddit account a year ago and I feel my life is all the better.
- cmdshiftf4 7y agoIt's toxic because people wanting power insist their position is necessary, others adhere to it (mostly in the name of censoring dissent) and those granted the power, like with politics, are often the last people you want having it. Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
- ranger207 7y ago> leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on. Unfortunately this leads to meme cesspools lacking any major discussion. reddit's ease of discovery backfires here: it's difficult to keep a subreddit's content focused and meaningful if any random person who isn't invested in keeping quality content can wander in. Moderators, and their removal of "too shallow" content, dedicated days for memes or discussions, and creation of dedicated low-quality subreddits, are a necessary evil.
- fishingisfun 7y agothe redesigning of of our internal corporate website is just as dumb. I dont know what it is with this "web 3.0" design aspect but if something is stuttering with simple text input with 8 cores riding on 16 gb of ram, I am afraid to know what the future holds for web apps
- pckhoi 7y agoYou are misguided in thinking that Reddit is a good source of information. Reddit is heavily biased, very left leaning on any political matters. Most subreddits are echo chambers where anyone who voice a different viewpoint could be down-voted to smithereens. The toxicity there is also too high, some are so eager to use insult to drown out any argument.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y agoSurely there are left-leaning subreddits and right-leaning ones? Although, as anecdata, the purportedly neutral politics sub I frequent is definitely left-leaning (but it's swung back and fro over time).
- baby 7y agoIsn’t it crazy that if you go on reddit now you can only read comments one level deep? Also if you look at r/all or r/popular right now it’s only images. I remember a time where it was mostly text. I hate to be that guy, but it did become worse and worse.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y agoI don’t recognise that - maybe that’s only on new.reddit, or you’re looking at a thread in contest mode?
- baby 7y agoMaybe if you’re logged in you can see the depths?
- flexie 7y agoYesterday I needed to find the websites for around 20 Danish accounting companies based on their official company names. I thought it was so few that it would take longer time to ask someone to do it than to just do it myself. The names are rather unique, mostly made out of a string of personal names like "Watson, Sherlock & Lestrade Accountants LLC" or of geographical locations "Central Dartmoor Accounting LLC". Such accounting companies are small businesses with around 5-10 employees and mostly local clients. Their real world competition is the other handful of local accounting companies in the rural areas they are in. However, with few exceptions, I had to go to page 3 or even 4 on Google to find the companies' own website because page 1 and 2 were cluttered with ads for other accountants or accounting applications, and, to my surprise, for different SEO optimized collections of company data on accountants. I used to think that it was just hotel and restaurant websites you have to find on page 3 buried below Bookings, Tripadvisor, Expedia and the like. But even something as mundane as accountants now have to fight SEO websites to get some attention.
- FreeTrade 7y agoHere's a decentralized Reddit - on the Bitcoin (BCH) blockchain - https://memberapp.github.io/#topic?type=all&start=0&limit=25&topicname=Member https://memberapp.github.io/#topic?type=all&start=0&limit=25... I've opened a new thread for discussion if you have any questions on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21551843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21551843
- mariusor 7y agoI'm actually working on something like that at https://github.com/mariusor/littr.go https://github.com/mariusor/littr.go It's a link aggregator based on ActivityPub, the federation protocol used by Mastodon and company. I am closing to a 1.0 release, at which point I want it to be completely integrated in the global ActivityPub network and would be interactable with from most of the other platforms. (Basically if you have another valid fediverse account, you will be able to post/interact with littr instances) There are also several other projects in various states of compatibility and featurefullness that are working on the same idea. On the top of my head there's: - Prismo: https://prismo.xyz/ https://prismo.xyz/ - Lemmy: https://dev.lemmy.ml/ https://dev.lemmy.ml/
- retpirato 7y agothere is redditery if you want a cleaner (picture-focused) interface. There's also mewe if you want a complete replacement.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoCan’t trust one source and particularly not china funded. Also one site meant it is easily affected by big power.
- orionblastar 7y agoThere is http://notabug.io http://notabug.io that can create mirrors of the main site and synch them up using git. It is a beta test and only deletes cp and doxing. Using nsfw for porn and other stuff. The code looks clean and is based on the old Reddit code and UI.