Apart from the HN audience, what is the rest of the internet going to turn to when Reddit goes belly up?
1. pseudo-anonymity, gives people freedom to speak their minds
2. moderation ensures people know that they are in a controlled space
3. Ensures that spaces have a branding, shared identity between them but are not being controlled from without, but only within
Could also mean "No controversial subjects", sort of like Tik Tok where any kind of political conversation, Covid related subject, etc. is taken down or ignored by the algorithm. Lots of people already think of reddit from a content consumption POV instead of a forum
> 1. pseudo-anonymity, gives people freedom to speak their minds
Making an influential account should be exceptionally difficult. All submissions and comments should be, by default, anonymous, with users only taking an identity when relevant (ie: if you're a scientist on something like r/askscience, or a developer on r/programming). Nobody should have to make a throwaway account to be anonymous, it should just be a flag on the server. Throwaway account comments should not be possible, you should need to build reputation to make a comment that is seen by most.
> 2. moderation ensures people know that they are in a controlled space
Moderation, if granted special powers, will always be taken over by "powerusers" with an agenda. Moderation should be done exclusively through comment and post scoring, not through individual named users. If downvoting and upvoting worked correctly, moderation would be entirely unnecessary. That's the whole point of curation, isn't it?
My main idea is to take a known set of good voters (ie: myself, some friends, early contributors, etc.) who exclusively follow the etiquette and can pick a substantial post from a bad one, and then based on user similarity to the known good set, you can grant a multiplier or a decimation to those that seem to vote similarly or dissimilarity. Essentially, you'll have fractional voting/scoring.
> 3. Ensures that spaces have a branding, shared identity between them but are not being controlled from without, but only within
I don't like the idea of anyone being able to create a namespace. It fractures things too significantly and you get echochambers for each party or each viewpoint. The usenet hierarchy was better, and it should be combined with subscriptions to #tags to get more granularity for individual user interests.
> (1b) Throwaway account comments should not be possible [...] build reputation to make a comment that is seen by most. Reddit is already sort of like this, honestly. That's why high karma accounts are often sold.
> (2) grant a multiplier or a decimation to those that seem to vote similarly or dissimilarity. This will be slowly (or swiftly) shifted by brigading bots.
> (3) I don't like the idea of anyone being able to create a namespace. It fractures things too significantly and you get echochambers for each party or each viewpoint. You'll still get echochambers for each viewpoint. There will just be fewer of them. Based on point 2, the majority will choose the viewpoints of the echochamber.
That seems shallow to me, it's only true insofar as 4chan is a well-known forum that allows for anonymous posting. 4chan is ephemeral, the site I'm imagining is not. 4chan is image based, the site I'm imagining is not. 4chan doesn't have threaded comments, the site I'm imagining would.
Most importantly, 4chan allows for anonymous posting that isn't tied to a central identity (there's nothing tying anonymous posts to tripcoded posts), the site I'm imagining would. There would be no throwaways, you would only be able to post anonymously on an account with a profile behind it.
> Reddit is already sort of like this, honestly. That's why high karma accounts are often sold.
As far as I know, there's no bias given to high karma accounts in terms of default comment sorting or post visibility. The only reason I can imagine that someone would purchase a high karma account is to use them to gain outsized influence by applying for mod positions on big subreddits.
> [Vote biasing] will be slowly (or swiftly) shifted by brigading bots.
If they can accurately upvote good content and accurately filter bad content, so what? They will never be able to get a bot into the good pool of known benevolent actors, and if they're always voting similarly to the known-good actors, then they're indistinguishable from good participants. Everything would be derived from being similar to the known-good actors, or similar to those that are most similar to known-good actors, and so on.
> You'll still get echochambers for each viewpoint. There will just be fewer of them. Based on [the shifting of vote biasing by bots], the majority will choose the viewpoints of the echochamber.
The pool of known-good (possibly paid) voters/editors should thwart this.
Mobile first would be enough. I'm a little bit older and still do not understand the appeal of snapchat, tiktok, etc. I understand FB/twitter/instagram (I just don't like using it). But making a mobile version of a small feature fuel the hype storm needed
Their mobile app being awful is pretty hilarious given all this, but they're certainly trying very hard to improve the experience on mobile(while also showing as many ads as possible).
Everyone is projecting their need for anonymity in response to this question, but ultimately it comes down to frequency of dopamine hits. Think TikTok but more formats than just video.
Look what happened to big subs that where playing cat and mouse with the mods, they all just scattered after trying other platforms like Voat or whatever.
- actual communities centred around a topic, like knitting or a particular video game.
- just general memes and funny photos/videos
That second use case can be supplanted by basically anyone and anywhere.