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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#41

Post by cwkoss »

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now:

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 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)

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#42

Post by techsupporter »

incomingpain wrote: post #11

There are a dozen better reasons to quit reddit. The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting. They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them. Just quit reddit already and be happy.

> They want to quit but they can't.

If you mean want to quit but can't in the sense that there is no other place on the Internet to have a like-minded community forum around fountain pens or a particular bank or third-tier game shows, yes, this is true.

But if you mean in a broader sense, of "I just can't quit you!", then no. Reddit steamrolled all of the older forums--and, before that, Usenet and Echomail groups--I used to participate in. Much like how so many sellers of niche products have moved to Amazon, Reddit is where the quirky forums have moved to.

I don't use Reddit as a general-purpose site. It's simply the place where the community that discusses the topics I want to gas on about live. And, yes, I object to what Reddit is doing so I will leave it if the changes come to pass.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#43

Post by wasyl »

satvikpendem wrote: post #34
tomstockmail wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd... Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.

They may downplay it but it is likely true. On the Google Play Store alone, the Reddit app has 100 million+ downloads, third party apps have And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.

On the other hand, if you count downloads of all the 3rd party Reddit apps on Google Play, it'll sum up to at least 10m. So 3rd party apps users might actually be in range of 10%-20% of users, which is far from negligible

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#44

Post by dymk »

silisili wrote: post #28
chongli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only in the short term. Long term, we've seen what happens to unmoderated discussions: spam, (child) porn, violent/illegal images, and more. The worst humanity has to offer. It's like taking your hands off the wheel when driving. A few seconds and you're probably okay. An hour? You're in a ditch!

Oh, I completely agree that some moderation is needed, make no mistake about that. Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.

This is a very simplistic take about thousands of people who mod thousands of subs for, presumably, more reasons than you could possibly enumerate

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#45

Post by b112 »

shmatt wrote: post #17
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…

My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data

Wait, you're saying openai was trained on reddit posts?!

No wonder people are scared of AI.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#46

Post by ebiester »

incomingpain wrote: post #11

There are a dozen better reasons to quit reddit. The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting. They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them. Just quit reddit already and be happy.

It mostly wasn't the rank and file users making the most noise. It was the moderators who rely on the API for a series of tools (including third party tools like Apollo) to moderate the larger subreddits.

For me, it absolutely was a sign to evaluate my usage. I may go back, I may not. The local city subreddit is a good counterpart to my local newspaper, but the real dangers for reddit are twofold: individuals will be less likely to provide free labor (on which Reddit depends both for content generation and moderation), and it gave its most passionate users a timeout on which they started evaluating alternatives.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#47

Post by Goronmon »

silisili wrote: post #28
chongli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only in the short term. Long term, we've seen what happens to unmoderated discussions: spam, (child) porn, violent/illegal images, and more. The worst humanity has to offer. It's like taking your hands off the wheel when driving. A few seconds and you're probably okay. An hour? You're in a ditch!

Oh, I completely agree that some moderation is needed, make no mistake about that. Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.

Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.

Sure, but modding is something you don't need...until you absolutely do. Just takes one person who wants to spam porn/gore/etc to a subreddit/forum/etc and without a human able to ban/limit those actions, it's trivial to takeover a smaller community.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#48

Post by edmundsauto »

willis936 wrote: post #5
edmundsauto wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO. I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of…

We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?

We're talking about it because some percentage of users are very pissed, not because it necessarily impacts the business. I agree there is a line where reddit would be worried for their IPO, but we have no idea if 1% of reddit traffic will drop (not a problem for them) or 50% (big problem).

We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#49

Post by blehn »

basch wrote: post #25
shmatt wrote: post #8

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 g…

I could make a huge list of what Reddit design gets wrong, or at least outdated or suboptimal. But the land grab for names turned into one of its biggest, fixable weaknesses. Reddit should boot up another letter, /d/ or something, and give the communities numbers or hex identifiers, (which they already sort of do with the short urls) and make the names irrelevant. Communities can choose to port over and redirect. Ove…

So there would be 200 communities called "Politics" that are differentiated only by url hashes? How is that make it any easier for users to discover or understand the communities? There are dozens of different brands of laundry detergent at the grocery store — it's much easier to communicate and discover "Tide", "Gain", "Ecos" than it is "Detergent#17", "Detergent#08", "Detergent#32"...

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#50

Post by ilyt »

greenpresident wrote: post #15
nullindividual wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

I wanted to make one for a joke and see how long it takes for people to notice but I guess people did that already for nefarious purposes.

That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.

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