Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival • Hacker News Board

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#571

Post by st1ck » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #303

ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

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).

One 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.

"Decentralized" is the key here. One option, already mentioned, is federation like Fediverse. Even more interesting would be friend-of-a-friend system, where rating of each post is subjective, and weight of someone's upvote is inversely proportional to degree of separation between you and them.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#572

Post by baby » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #539

baby wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’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.

I don’t recognise that - maybe that’s only on new.reddit, or you’re looking at a thread in contest mode?

Maybe if you’re logged in you can see the depths?

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#573

Post by retpirato » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

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 is redditery if you want a cleaner (picture-focused) interface. There's also mewe if you want a complete replacement.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#574

Post by retpirato » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #502

andrei_says_ wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field. See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc. This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

I feel like I've seen more of the opposite (piss poor moderation) than the good. This is why on your average subreddit, the average quality of discussion is extremely low, with the top comments being low-effort one liners. In worse cases, sometimes the moderators because straight up authoritarian, censoring opposing views even if they're well-reasoned and thought out (any politics-related subreddit).

I'm not defending reddit at all, however to be fair certain topics are almost guaranteed to have very heated comment threads, politics for example.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#575

Post by retpirato » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

inamberclad wrote: post #481

AndrewStephens wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe a federation of blogs is needed? Everyone has their user pool so that a user on `blog-a` named `user` can post on `blog-b.com` as `user@blog-a.com`. Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.

that sounds like mastodon for blogs. you can have an account on the main site mastodon.social & message someone on a different instance. Your username will show up as [user]@mastodon.social. you can also follow people on other instances & in turn content from them & others on their instance will be easier to find on your own instance.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#576

Post by retpirato » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

If you don't like facebook try mewe. There's no ads & you get the basics for free, but you can pay for things like a dark theme or extra emojis in different themes. Mastodon is a good twitter replacement.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#577

Post by butterNaN » Mon, Nov 18, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

system2 wrote: post #440

elihu wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, a (mostly) consistent user interface.

As long as you use old.reddit.com.

You can just go to preferences and disable redesign, no need to change the url itself.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#578

Post by ryanmercer » Mon, Nov 18, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #362

ryanmercer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending money I'd spend at a brick and mortar store, that I'd have to drive to using oil life/tire life/gasoline/brake pad life/brake rotor life while also losing time. Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notc…

> oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, Related, I went to buy a shoe stretcher on Amazon. Had to buy 3 before I got one that wasn't complete garbage. I'd have gone to someplace local but none of the local places have much inventory for quality goods anymore either... For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy. Heck for a little while earlier this year the o…

>For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.

Yeah for me it's mostly books (digital and physical), Amazon basics stuff and stuff I can't get anywhere locally (that I know of) like a tofu press or hard to counterfeit stuff like my televisions/an iPad Air 2/my reconditioned vitamix.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#579

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 6:23 AM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #452

ZainRiz wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You missed the most important point: 3. Discussions Try discussing anything on a random website. Discussions, just like on HN, are usually better than the linked content.

I really don't see much actual discussion on Reddit.

For all that it was a ghost town, if you could find some good conversation hosts / moderators on Google+, that site had some really good discussions. Probably mostly because it didn't try to scale.

(Yes, this was a hugely subjective experience, and depending on who you did or didn't follow, quality varied dramatically. The core G+ user group was probably ~100k or so English-literate participants, of whom a good 10-20k have ended up on the Pluspora Diaspora pod.)

I've both tried to start and gone looking for conversation on Reddit. The site conspires against this, in several ways.

If you're aware of specific subs that really shine and aren't afraid to name them, I'd appreciate it. (I can completely understand not wanting to out good discussion.)

Mind I'm contrasting discussion with merely good information, which Ask Historians, Ask Science, and a small set of other subs manage to achieve, with draconian (and much needed & welcomed) moderation.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#580

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 6:28 AM UTC

brabel wrote: post #532

andrei_says_ wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field. See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc. This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

You overestimate the skills of moderators... I doubt very much that true experts in their fields would spend any time doing moderation Reddit... most likely, people doing that would be recent graduates trying to learn and impart their recently gained knowledge upon laymen.

There are several subs I'm aware of which do seem to garner expert-level moderation.

The Asks -- Science, Historians, possibly Economists (I'm trying to decide there -- the mods talk expertise, though quality IMO lags). Several of the Fitness subs are quite good. Various technical subs attract high-quality contributors, and the CSS support sub (specifically for styling old-style Reddit custom stylesheets) is simply superb. I've dug into energy topics, and though there's a bit of BS flung about, there's also quality expertise.

Posting online actually is a form of shingle-hanging and getting a sense of issues people are facing in the real world. There's value to that.