Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short.
Wow, this is quite possibly exactly what I've been looking for! I love Rust (have experience with Actix as well), React (so hopefully Inferno will come naturally), and have been looking for a Reddit alternative for some time!
I'm not sure if I should thank you or curse you for making me want to spend a ton of time on yet another side project ;)
Who cares about Mastodon? Lemmy is ActivityPub compliant, just like PeerTube, write.as, Pleroma, rustodon, PixelFed and the other wonderful AP projects out there.
These platforms do not fracture the Fediverse FYI, you can follow cross-platform & cross-site like normal.
I'm showing my youth here, but this is a legitimate question. Isn't call waiting just a thing that exists on the line? Did phones used to have a switch to toggle that? And what was the harm in keeping it on? When I had dial up, I don't recall having to consider call waiting.
From my recollection, there were 3 or 4 different * codes. Separate codes to turn it on and off, and also to turn it on or off permanently or just for the duration of the next call.
I think at one point it was a value-added service, and you had to pay extra on your phone bill to enable it, but once it was enabled you could turn it on or off at will.
When I was a teenager (in the 1990s), our house had three phone lines. One was for voice calls, and it had call waiting turned on permanently. Another was for modems (first BBSes, then dial-up Internet), and had call waiting turned off permanently. A third was paid for by my Dad's employer, he used it for work calls, work faxes, and call up his work's modem bank to send/receive email, I don't know what he did with call waiting settings.
My Dad ordered three phone lines, but only had two pairs running in to the house. So they ran another cable, which I think had 12 pairs in it, but only three were ever connected. My Dad was smiling about how future-proof they made it. Nowadays, only one of those pairs is still active, and I expect within the next 1-2 years that pair will be turned off too. Analog POTS phone system being phased out in favour of VoIP (the Internet comes into the house over coax, not copper pair.)
Dialing *67, I think, in the dial string for dialup turned off call waiting for the duration of the call. Otherwise a second call would try to ring through and disrupt your Super Z-modem download.
The incoming call tone would disrupt modem traffic so you had to dial a code prior to the number you wanted to dial to disable this temporarily for the duration of your outgoing call.
You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look around you lately, but the modern internet is a dumpster fire.
Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.
> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand.
IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
I disagree with your false equivalency. IRC is akin to a cellphone without voicemail, as when your disconnected from the network (cellular or IRC) you just don't get communications.
Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
>but a good chunk of the population does not want either
The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit.
Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users.
I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either.
And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit.
So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.
What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
Young people now think it’s ok to send out a message and respond whenever they feel like it. Communication is no longer a conversation in the tradition sense, it’s a series of monologues or statements where the sender usually only cares about whether you are impressed by the statement.
IRC was all about conversation. You went there to have a conversation, like a party line voice bridge. You even waited around for someone to have a conversation with... oh I miss it...
This is like the famous comment in the "Show HN: Dropbox" thread that said you could just use rsync/ftp/git instead. Meanwhile Dropbox is now worth over $8B.
Not sure why the value of anything makes my point invalid? I answered there was a simple way for anyone using IRC to keep sessions alive and therefore not miss any message. This is an off the shelf solution, not something you have to build by yourself.
Synchronous and asynchronous communication both have their fundamental strengths and weaknesses. In a chat room you have the possibility of a real-time back and forth. That's invaluable at times.
You might have a preference for one over another, or each might be appropriate for different situations. But to claim one is objectively terrible is ridiculous and only makes you look like you haven't taken the time to understand it at its most basic level, or you're too solipsistic to be able to recognize the existence of value in something outside of your own preference.
Slack is a superset of IRC, except for the protocol not being open.
The UX in slack is not easily replicated in IRC (for example, how does/can global search work in IRC?)
Therefore, it is actually correct to say IRC is objectively worse in those measures. The only measure that IRC beats slack is the open protocol (which, if I'm being honest, not many users care,ala most existing chat services moved to private protocols and haven't lost all their users to IRC or xmpp).
> IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
Well it's a good thing Slack and Discord don't work exactly the same way but with a nicer UI and no need for a bouncer to emulate a persistent session.
These two words next to each other really bother me. That something is "terrible" is not objective, whatever that means. All we have are our subjective valuations.
What I meant was more like, when viewed impartially rather than through the lens of nostalgia. Two people can do that and still have different opinions.
Your use case is what mailing lists or usenet are for, of course IRC is an objectively terrible mailing list, it's also an objectively terrible toaster.
However, the spam mostly died off now. It's possible to have great convos with boomers complaining about each other finally. A small number of people came back because of the pseudoanonymous qualities. Honestly the only thing that really sucks is Google Groups users bumping 15 year old threads.
Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
The spam died off because Usenet died off. If users ever went back to Usenet, the spam would come back again behind them. There's nothing in the design of Usenet that can stop spammers from spamming.
(There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)
Modern internet is both good and bad. Depends on the site. Generalizations don't work. However if those technologies are to ever be popular than they'll need to be redesigned to keep pace with what the vast majority expect, which is in response to the OPs comment. Otherwise you can already go post on usenet right now.
> "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want."
Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?
Is it companies, that would or should do it? Colleges and other publicly-funded entities are who did it the first time. Companies can only do what's profitable. (Or what they can convince investors will someday be profitable, but we can ignore that aberration in the long term.)
I didn't mean it that deeply, just that if people who believe these older technologies can drive modern incarnations then I would expect them to have produced products by now.
Citing UX in a thread about Reddit, the company with an almost universally hated redesign that moved away from a mostly text-based condensed format is... interesting.
Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign. Unfortunate for some of us, and it doesn't preclude the metrics measuring the wrong thing, but that's reality on the ground.
Same reason why Gmail is a bloated mess, because that's what the metrics show is wanted by users.
> Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign.
Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
Not necessarily for social media where there’s an endless river of entertainment content. I doubt most people go to Reddit for any specific purpose or task they’re trying to accomplish as quickly as possible.
Reddit is a corporation with a large amount of VC investment. Profit is a primary goal, and engagement that shows more time and thus more revenue is exactly what they want.
It would have been more honest of them to come out and just admit “yea, this new design is terrible but it juices our metrics and makes us more money so deal with it if you want Reddit to survive.”
Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
> Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
I'm using an extension to automatically redirect to the old one. When the old site is gone, I will probably leave Reddit, the redesign is too unusable for me.
The problem with that is assuming the new design is terrible for everyone. It very well could be that the majority do like it, and it's a vocal minority that complain.
The whole point of the redesign is to juice user engagement metrics and get that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
You don't need megabytes upon megabytes of nonsense just to avoid some full page loads. Or take al ook at something like HN where it's light enough that a full page load isn't a problem.
Ikea is a pretty much perfect shopping experience. It's the opposite of a labyrinth. There is exactly one path through the shop for people who want to just see everything and there are clearly marked shortcuts if you only want to see one area.
Where did you find these numbers? From what I've seen Reddit never released any sort of metrics other than saying one specific Audi ad campaign did like 10x better or something. And Alexa showed lower traffic, higher bounce rate, fewer pageviews per visitor after the redesign[1].
I don't disagree, but "engagement" does not necessarily reflect value to the user. Taking more time to accomplish one's goal (e.g., obtain information) than necessary may improve engagement metrics from the service's perspective, but from the user's perspective, that's extra time that might have been wasted and better spent on other things.
Maybe not value to each individual user, but in aggregate the numbers of users and content are increasing. Collective value and network effects are higher. This is also leading to more revenue which is critical for a corporation.
I'm sure they lose some users but they've gained far more than they've lost so far.
I wonder what will happen if they ever make old.reddit.com stop working?
I've been on the new design, trying to give it a chance, for over a year trying to give it a chance, and I still have to often switch to old.reddit.com to do some things.
1. The new interface still doesn't have the "other discussions" link to show you discussions of the same link in other subreddits. I think they said something like a year ago that they realized this was important and it was coming soon.
2. The new interface messes up scrolling on Edge on my Surface Pro 4 when viewing a discussion. Actually, for this one you don't have to switch to old.reddit to work around. All you have to do is hit refresh. When you refresh while on a discussion, that switches from the view that shows the discussion in an overlay on top of the thread list, to a more traditional page that just has the discussion. That page doesn't fuck with scrolling. Depending on how much I plan on reading and how long the discussions are, I may or may not get annoyed enough with this to just give up and switch to old.reddit.
(BTW, that discussion as overlay view also fucks up in-page search, because the thread list is still on the page, just hidden from your view--but not the browser's search functions--behind the discussion view, and so the search hits those hidden items).
The only thing I can find in the new interface that is actually functionally better than the old interface is the fancy pants editor. Aside from selecting tools/commands not always always working if it has to put them on the "..." pop-up, and it sometimes losing the ability to scroll the text being edited via the mouse, the new editor is a win.
If they would just put the new editor as an option on old Reddit, I think a lot of people would be happy.
personally I've probably spent an hour on Reddit in the last year. I used to spend a couple hours a day. After it modernized I realized it was just facebook for introverts and bailed.
Depends on how you define engagement. When you set all the videos to autoplay with sound of course users are going to be more engaged. They're either scrambling to figure out where that noise is coming from or "watching" the videos.
I guess that is only the case for the HN bubble and a loud minority. Also, people are always complaining about UI changes. Personally, I prefer the re-design, even though it has a few flaws. The old design was awful.
And yet Reddit is regularly down, and apparently today for hours on end. What's the UX of a service that isn't working? Do users not demand that a service be up?
There have been some really good modern Usenet clients. The biggest issue I see is that current browsers don't have built-in support for Usenet any more, and that's not something I can influence in any way.
Look, I loved Usenet back in 1994, it was one of my first great Internet obsessions. But it effectively died in terms of relevance before the turn of the century. The majority simply preferred web forums.
Usenet was always a pain to use, posts would routinely get mangled or dropped entirely, and the multiple user-driven quoting conventions and wonky clients made any long-lived threaded discussion impossible.
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.
I would much rather have the feed based on trust weighting of experts or people smarter than me, than the feed trying to feed me what it thinks pleases me. Metacritic vs Netflix. Aldaily vs facebook.
You dont need a consistent front page for everyone, but communities of like people should get similar front pages based on what is "best" and best shouldn't be defined as universally popular, but instead popular with some subset of experts.
Well what cwkoss describes would work well for you too: you would choose your experts of choice and have them as trusted users. I would too expect some users to become trust nexuses like that.
Yep! Ideally there would be some getTrustedPeers endpoint that would allow you to transitively discover interesting users 2 hops away. Add them and they become 1-hop and could get their trust list, rinse and repeat to traverse the trust network.
Because users are 'liable' for content they rebroadcast (if you repeatedly propogate downvoted content, your trust score will fall), there is a strong incentive to "moderate" the content you promote. This allows not only the OP to gain karma/trust from a post, but also adjacent peers can earn trust by reliably upcoming content that is later upvoted downstream. Hopefully this would encourage "tastemaker" users who don't create new stuff, but carefully curate what they rebroadcast. Trusting the right users allows you to rebroadcast their trusted content automatically, if you chose to configure your trust algo that way.
I kind of disagree. Thats why rss failed. It requires the user to set it up before it works. And I may never leave my comfort zone, if setting up what to follow is my choice. I dont know what I dont know. If I dont know the experts to follow, guiding me to choose experts seems silly. Just do it for me. Let the experts pick the other experts.
There is a huge benefit to everybody in a community seeing the same page. Whether its hckrnews, drudge report, front page of wsj, if everybody sees the same page, there is a social water cooler effect of "hey did you see" "yeah."
I just think with the "infinitely customized to you" we are trapping people in a constant cycle of always consuming more of the same, while also fragmenting our sense of community and identity. We get stuck in the filter bubbles we choose. These two articles combined together make me feel trapped.
do you guys use reddit's frontpage? I never. I hang out in a few subs i check very often and try to be part of the communities. frontpage is just so random
Sounds like Aether[1]. In contrast to the Usenet, it is peer-to-peer, instead of federated. It does also have moderation, voting, and a pretty UI – things that are arguably missing in the Usenet. (And it doesn't use blockchain.)
Exactly. Will this new platform provide a safe space for the brilliant minds at /r/fatpeoplehate? /s
The problem with all anti-censorship platforms is that they become hate platforms by default, because only people who get deplatformed have an incentive to move there, and it’s mostly hateful loudmouths who get deplatformed.
Personally, I think the solution is just to give users options to censor others from their perspective instead of just trying to create some utopia that is free from hatred of any kind - which is impossible.
Personally, I prefer having these disgusting people out in the open. When they do something horrendous, the paper trail can be long and damning - making it much easier to convict them. These people are usually proud of their deviancy and advertise it without shame.
The notion that if we just ban all the sick people they will just go away and never do anything evil is ludicrous. The evil is already in their hearts, hiding it won't heal it.
I think self managed censoring is equally impossible.
It is twitter’s model, and it puts an incredible burden on the most targeted or vulnerable users.
Or to get back to reddit, the model works for people who stay focused on a very limited set of subs (default filters are horrible); I think that would be close to your idea of personally tailored censoring, but it goes too far in the other direction IMO, unexpected information becomes very hard to reach people.
Hearts and minds are not fixed. People can be recruited and radicalised. For every one person who'd do this stuff on their own there's a hundred who do it because they think it's popular.
> the paper trail can be long and damning - making it much easier to convict them
This usually comes out after they've carried out the mass shooting.
I think self managed censoring is equally impossible.
It is twitter’s model, and it puts an incredible burden on the most targeted or vulnerable users.
Or to get back to reddit, the model works for people who stay focused on a very limited set of subs; I think that would be close to your idea of personally tailored censoring, but it goes too far in the other direction IMO, unexpected information becomes very hard to reach people.
This creates echo chambers like 4chan, 8chan, pleroma.site, gab.com & /r/The_Donald where likeminded people gather and decide bashing in the heads of LGBTQ+ people like myself is perfectly acceptable, and proceed to act out their hate in my community (Ballard, WA).
My fellow trans and gay friends have lived in Seattle without issue for decades, but now Nazis are coming here from rural Washington to attempt to murder us. This is a huge change from the past, and SPD's hate crime statistics are up significantly due to this.
chans are completely open, uncenssored forums - from either side - not even remotely similar to what I'm advocating for.
I have never once seen on The_Donald, even before their quarantine, any highly voted posts or comments advocating violence. The moderators regularly release transparency reports that show exactly all the things that they remove and their have been plenty of instances of people creating alts to post inflammatory things to get them in trouble. The vast majority of users condemn violence of any kind other than lawful self-defense.
I also see plenty of openly LGBT people on there, and they are just as welcome in the forum as anyone else.
"'plonk' is the sound of you hitting my kill file" is what we used to say. It worked pretty well at the time. I've yet to see a moderation system that works better.
It's the need to make money that makes things go awry, so Aether doesn't need to make money. No servers mean costs are fairly negligible, except my own time spent.
That being said, I've always thought that the right way to implement a distributed social network would be not with blockchain, but with IPFS, or something similar to IPFS. Pinning someone else's IPFS hash would be the equivalent to an upvote for that item.
Mining would have no monetary incentivization, so the people left controlling the network are the ones who are incentivized to push a message on your new distributed reddit.
Like with all things that have a vacuum of power, it will be filled by someone - most likely not who you really want to fill it either.
Could your system break the back of r/sanfrancisco? It has turned into tourist pics of the GGB, sunrises and double rainbows at the hands of moderators that want no dissent
Yeah but that's kind of nitpicking. If you're looking for a "decentralized reddit" on blockchain, it's pretty hard to argue Steemit isn't this.
There's others too. People are free to fork it and make a new platform. Most of the hard work is already done unless you want to change absolutely everything about it.
We could implement it with blockchain.