431–440 of 587 posts
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Once upon a time, yes.
It’s easier now than ever. The difference is that normal people don’t venture off the big websites now.
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).
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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 (previous discussion)
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).
There 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.
How much does facebook make per user per month?
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Events are the thing that keep me and my peers using it.
I’ve been using https://gath.io to organize events. All you need is an email to create an event, and as far as I can tell, you can give it a fake email. It’s only used to send you the edit link (also displayed when you create the event). Same thing to RSVP, although it doesn’t share the link to remove yourself except by email, to my knowledge. They’ve just introduced groups, so setting up events for a group of friend…
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I agree that people aren't looking for new social networks, but I do wonder about your view of disengaging from Facebook. I keep reading about it on HN but I'm not seeing it myself. I wonder if it's a US-centric view.
According to Pew research, Facebook usage in the US has been flat since 2016, neither gaining nor losing overall. However, the age breakdown of those users has changed a lot. Facebook has absolutely hemorrhaged users younger than about 45. The majority of American FB users are in the 46-76 year old range now, with 68% of US FB users aged 50 or older. In the US, anyway, Facebook is for old farts and businesses.
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).
I 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 d…
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Musk didn't found Tesla and is (somewhat inappropriately) labeled as a cofounder, but joined in Series A as an investor. But he very much did build SpaceX from nothing (well, his Paypal money), and his unconventional approach is responsible for their success.
It's also questionable whether Tesla Motors would have had the same impact (or even survived) without Musk's efforts and leadership. They were making a very niche sports car at the time that was basically hand built. Musk is the one that got them to a mainstream commercial product.
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Prismo[1] was an attempt at that if anyone wants some historical context. [1] https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo
A 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.
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I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the vario…
Also, a (mostly) consistent user interface.