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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday a pretty big thread was made about how Reddit's upper management was infiltrated, see here: http://www.np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/2v7kx3/guy_ex...

A lot of Reddit users (including myself) have migrated to Voat. The main benefits of this website is that it's:

1. Hosted in switzerland. 2. Not owned by a major corporation. 3. Has protections in place to avoid scumbag losers trying to moderate more than 10 'subreddits' (called subverses) at a time.

It's built using C# and MVC 5. Source code: https://github.com/voat/voat - If you can spare some time, contribute what you can. Voat is in it's early stages and you can massively improve it.

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This does not appear to be a solution to the problem of manipulation by a dedicated group of confederates. In fact, "voat" seems to be a bit worse off, as users with no history are being granted ownership over its version of subreddits.

Doing much better at a large scale (i.e. beyond what a few known high quality moderators can tackle) is a Hard Problem™. An important and timely one, to boot, considering governments' efforts to erode privacy and enforce real-name identity.

From that post:

"""A # of users involved in this cabal are depressed, aren't "cool", are LGBT (more difficult to be included socially if you are a member of this group in real life), are social outcasts,"""

And it's basically 100% a cishet presumably-white dude pretending to be a victim in the same way that you see people talking about Mexicans moving in to the US and "taking over" or ISIS being an "existential threat".

Do you think that people are actively trying to 'infiltrate' subreddits, or is it possible that reddit's audience is simply changing and the new users / admins are changing the rules?

There are moderators that moderate over 200 subreddits. I'm not willing to call that infiltration (moderation is a hard job to do and it happens that few people are interested in it, which means finding someone reliable is hard, which means users tend to accumulate moderation positions), but they can't be doing a good job at it at least. This is a particularly charged thread with an example: https://np.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/2v717g/reques...

I'm not sure how voat intends to solve this since users can just create new accounts to bypass the 10 subreddit limit.

I absolutely think they are infiltrating subreddits, it's been proven without a doubt. Just one example, how can one person actively moderate more than 5 subreddits?

I used to be a mod for /r/smite but quit after 2 weeks because it was just too much work. And /r/smite isn't even that big! :)

>2. Not owned by a major corporation

Back in the days the same was true for reddit as well. Honestly, I would like a permanent solution, some kind of reddit based on p2p architecture.

I hear ya, but until that day comes the best we can hope for is to island hop and learn from our previous mistakes.

Not being sarcastic, but this sounds a bit like usenet. Would love to see that come back.

I left usenet in the early 2000s when alt.* was basically wrecked because of people like weev and the GNAA, not to mention all the spam.

There are communities I miss, but lots about it I don't.

This was posted on hacker news a while back that fits your description; http://getaether.net/

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