I had an idea for a minimal change to improve a Reddit-like site, perhaps you will find it interesting: split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".
Tags: much of the content of Reddit is people reposting the same thing at various times to various subreddits, and many of the comments are people noticing that it fits into "r/whatever" instead. The default behavior should be that posts of the same link to various tags (r/awww, r/catsstandingup) should not recreate a new post but just backlink to the same post. Repeat posts to the same tag should be a no-operation. This removes the community aspect of tags, and some of the worst emergent behaviors of reddit along with it. Treating a tag as both a topic and a community leads to a neverending cycle of people creating niche topic tags for the community aspect, but then finding themselves "invaded" as people will always want to find and comment on content about topics that they disagree with.
But of course the community aspect of Reddit leads to good things. So you make a separate concept of communities. These communities could follow the posts of one or more tags, applying filters to those of their own choosing, and make their discussion visible within community borders only or visible to all, based on their own choices (in addition to internal community posts.) They can control admission to the communities on their own rules (fully public, invite codes only, etc.) The ability to automatically follow the posts of certain tags (and either view or not view public comments) will keep small communities from getting stale for lack of posts.
Reddit is wildly popular where many other competitors have failed. The reddit of today is the result of many years of change and trying to think of ways to manage the size in a better way is pointless without considering the entire journey.
Part of what made reddit successful was exactly the subreddit individualism you're trying to remove. It's why so many people were upset when they removed custom stylesheets for subreddits. It felt like that individualism was being stripped away.
Communities don't just spring up from nowhere. They need common interests to bring the people to them.
> split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".
Tags are brilliant idea until you have tens of thousands of them. Plural forms, hyphens or without hyphens, synonyms, i18n tags of the same thing, mis-spellings, etc.
These problems aren't unique to tags, they're already present in subreddits names. For the most part it doesn't seem to be a big deal. As long as you can see the number of subscribers to a certain tag when creating your post, stackexchange style, then you'll probably end up with the tags you intended most of the time.
I'd like to see some 'AI' assisted tagging, where users are prompted to use a tag from a pool of common tags with the AI making suggestions on what might be appropriate, this would address most of the issues listed above.
I'm not massively familiar with Stack Exchanges tag system, it does have some synonym handling, https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms , that seems limited to one alternative though, is there a more advanced aspect that I am missing, perhaps covering sememes?
Tags can be curated or moderated like anything else, that's just an implementation detail. Sites like Twitter and lobste.rs seem to get by just fine with them..
Yes indeed, cleaning up tag pollution (A half way solution I came up with was to use porter stemming to stem tags) and the deluge of spam were the two biggest problems. It was a bit much to deal with for a solo coder, working part time on the problem.
Any sources on that? Tildes is a young community still tho, voat failed and I don't think it'll be able to reach much success either (where success = massive volume of users). We'll see.
> John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was proposed in the Penny Arcade (web comic) on March 19, 2004 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. It says that when a normal person is allowed anonymity and an audience, they lose social inhibitions and act inappropriately.
If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law. Usernames and comment history seem to help somewhat with people acting accountable for their actions. Total anonymity seems to always lead to a cesspool like 4chan.
> If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law.
Or equally likely-- there are a tiny fraction of bona fide users who act moderately anti-social on the net when granted anonymity, just as they would in real life.
It's just that forums with no little to no publishing friction allow those people to do 100x damage compared to what they could get away with in real life.
Add to that:
* corporate-sponsored trolls doing 1000x damage compared to real life
* nation-state trolls doing 10000x damage compared to real life
That's how you get that inimitable Reddit charm of watching an entire thread on geopolitics seem to change its hive mind as the mods manually strip out all the astroturf over the course of an hour.
I don’t know, there seem to be various levels of anonymity with different social implications. Let’s roughly differenciate between:
1. Full Anonymity (no way to differenciate between user A and B except by the content)
2. Anonymous Pseudonymity (Users can take usernames, but they don’t mean a lot because they can be changed fast and there is no per user post history)
3. Accountbuilding Pseudonymity (Users usually stick to their accounts, Per user post history or karma is visible and meaningful)
4. Mandatory Real Names (on top of the stuff in point 3 you also have to use your real name - but face no consequences if you make something up)
5. Enforced Real Names (same as point 4, but the service provider has to check your identity)
Positive effects of mandatory real name policies could never been proven — as far as I know they haven’t improved civility e.g. on facebook.
I believe the secret lies more in the feedback systems and how easy it is to flip or flop your position away from what you historically said. It helps if all community interactions or rules are clear and minimalistic instead of arbitrary and arcane.
All of this together weakens or strengthens the impact of the kind of user you mentioned. So in short: the emergent culture on really bad image boards is also part of their systemic design, just like it is with hn, facebook, instagram and any other online plattform. I think the type mentioned in point 3 (accountbuilding) paired with clever measures to keep the aims of the community aligned help a lot.
You're coupling registration process with posting process. What evidence is there that a fully anonymous image board writable by Debian maintainers would follow this so-called "law?"
Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links.
I miss the late 90s when you had a lot of small, independent websites. Sure there was always a war against spammers and scripts, but I feel like you could find more independent content from individuals instead of these big link aggregation platforms (remember web-rings?)
There is more to think about today when making something that hosts other's content (or links to that content). I'm surprised ActivityPub networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) haven't had more issues with spam and bad actors.
When starting a project like this, I think a few small things authors should consider right off the bat: implement some Captcha (preferably an open source implementation that's not Google mandated tracking, if you can find something decent), for at least account creation .. maybe posts too. I'm not sure what Lobsters uses for spam testing/filtering, but it'd be worth looking at that and other projects for any quick solutions. Prismo (https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo) also comes to mind.
Most Masto/Pleroma instances are too small to be worth the trouble. I get about 1-2 spam bots signing up per week, usually deleted automatically or within 1 hour of signing up (longer if all the admins are sleeping).
Small instances that don't do anything about spam usually get defederated fairly quickly.
With the way federation works, your reach is very unpredictable and you need to attach to very large instances if you want to have any effect. And large instances have more moderators to more quickly handle them.
Per-user mastodon probably has more moderators/administrators than comparable services (twitter), so it's a bit more clean.
> Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links.
Not that I need further proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and still am attracted to "anonymous" "free" "speech", I'm using TOR at work to avoid being flagged for such accidental visits.
Hosts of ActivityPub based platforms have all kinds of troubles with users and instances that are abusive and/or datamining.
Thing is, the instances are generally small and good admins communicate, dropping known abusive IPs and reaching out to server hosts when abusive instances violate local laws like the CFAA.
This is limited: what about all the people who like the unique community that formed on anonymous imageboards? There's no posturing or attempts to build a reputation. You just throw out your piece and it stands alone.
Internet fuckwads are fine as long as they stay limited to their own communities.
What you and I deem a 'fuckwad' will vary greatly. While somebody spamming 'hitler did nothing wrong' is certainly a fuckwad, it is only an issue which this fuckwadry is exposed to those who were not expressively looking for it.
I see zero issues in fuckwads congregating if they stick to themselves.
We all hope the troll spewing "Hitler did nothing wrong" learns better somehow, but there isn't a quick and effective "somehow". The Internet enables us to connect with people all over the world, or at least the English-speaking world, but all we've constructed is more echoey echo chambers. Fuckwads sticking together is how we got to the current state of politics. Someday, someone smart is going to figure out how to do better than deleting/hiding fuckwads' comments and giving them their own echo chamber.
It's the best solution we have now, but it's a pretty bad one.
It doesn't matter if some of them keep to themselves. What matters is that those communities continuously spill out and if that has detrimental effects. I contend that they do and they have.
In addition to that, allowing those communities to exist legitimizes them and allows them to recruit impressionable people.
The combination of these two things lead to things like gamergate and "doing it for the lulz" and ends with things like the march in Charlottesville and the El Paso shooting.
Haven't we by now found out that in reality, it's really only an audience that is needed? There are many inappropriate comments posted on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter posted using people's real names.
And also, of course, it just holds for some otherwise apparently normal persons.
I think people are more toxic in private even if they're now willing to be semi-toxic in public.
I say this as someone who was very good at research back when people didn't understand stuff like not using the same handle across sites, not using same email across sites, not giving out so much info the property of intersection narrows them down... it's amazing to see someone's public and what they think are private thoughts and how they contrast.
I've kind of given up on total anonymity when saying anything of substance given advances in stylometry - anonymous receiving is solved, but speaking seems the real challenge.
Register user but don't show any identifiers when they post. They can speak freely as the user can be anonymous but their data is still stored somewhere so they can't act without any thoughts.
Penny Arcade was complaining about people on Unreal Tournament 2004, which was pseudonymous. The real driver of toxicity was the hyper-competitive nature of the game he was playing.
You should see how some people act in real life playing hockey or soccer. Everybody knows their real names, but that doesn't stop them from being assholes.
Good luck with moderating this thing. Everyone bitches and moans about Reddit, but the fact of the matter is that sites like Reddit cost a ton to keep up and running and without some sort of revenue, they go down. Without some sort of regulation, sites QUICKLY divulge into a collection of scrupulous and illegal activities, and become blacklisted from advertisers.
I get how everyone wants a community that they can posts and share things anonymously, but the fact of the matter is that unless you have unlimited money where you can fight legal battles and absorb the cost of running it yourself, at some point you are going to need outside resources to keep the thing online and that comes in forms of donations or advertising.
I was skeptical of your cynicism at first, but then I I loaded up explore, and in the first 20 results was r/incels, r/loli, and r/beastiality. I do appreciate how this project seeks to improve on reddit at a policy level, and if enough (sane) people migrated from reddit, I would consider switching over. However, currently as it stands, I only see this website becoming reddit's 8chan, where reddit users who are banned or otherwise censored go.
I wonder if there's some way to do it in a decentralised way? But that'd be susceptible to 51%-esque attacks too, and no one wants to provide resources for the site.
I think we're gonna be stuck with shitty walled censored communities for a while. At least there's hn?
"I wonder if there's some way to do it in a decentralized way" - Everyone has that same thought until it's put into practice and you find yourself hosting stuff "from the community" that can get you dragged into court or prison. BTW... if you think "the community" is going to come together and help you through the financial and legal hardships you will be sorely mistaken. They will just pack up and move on to the next thing and you will be let to fend for yourself.
Decentralised by providing computing power, not hosting content. Would that still constitute as illegal if the bits aren't on your computer, and hence are unviewable by you, but you have somehow donated computing resources to run the network?
Maybe this is an opportunity to use machine learning to filter this stuff out? It could be done on the client side for every user connecting to the network. That way each user would have control over what comes into their machine, rather than just being an open dropbox. You could also force everything to be plaintext and just block anything encrypted or in an unrecognized file format.
I think this "reddit-with-4chan-features" approach is more viable than 8chan's "4chan-with-reddit-features" approach, since I don't think the imageboard model is very compatible with the "community-run boards" feature. It's also a good thing that (it appears that) this website is "fresh" and apolitical rather than coming forth from a political rift in another community (e.g. 8chan, gab, voat).
I'll definitely be following this website with interest; I'm a huge fan of sites that allow anonymous posting as well as how Reddit can create active communities around very niche topics (which is a lot harder on e.g. 4chan).
EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.
EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")
>EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.
Loli/shota porn mainly. Other forms of borderline cp. The problem is, specifically stating 'hey don't upload THIS CONTENT', will result in people specifically uploading that content to buck the rules. I'll probably still add the clarification.
The gray area clause allows operational leeway.
>EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")
I see a lot of people suggesting this. tbh I kind of like teh association with the "leddit" term, I find it amusing. From a ui perspective, the /i/ might make more sense though.
Personally I think you should skip the /r/ or /i/ part of the paths. Always bothered me that reddit has it - communities are central to these sites so IMO they should be the first part of the path
> It's also a good thing that (it appears that) this website is "fresh" and apolitical rather than coming forth from a political rift in another community (e.g. 8chan, gab, voat).
Only one group likes image boards anyway, this won't matter.
I think that the point of the gray area is to differentiate themselves from the kinds of things that went on at 8chan without getting banned. None of them were technically illegal but many were abhorrent regardless.
For a site focused on transparency and privacy, it's parked behind CloudFlare. I can't view the site past the about page without JS enabled and allowing CloudFlare to probe and track me.
> Decentralized platforms are not an ideal solution for
> internet communities.
Hard disagree. Communities are about give and take, the early internet was driven by people hosting bulletin boards, IRC servers, web servers, etc. There are people out there still willing to be part of the solution if you give them the chance.
> TOR is also not an answer, the technical barrier in
> accessing hidden services alone disqualifies them as a
> practical alternative, before even considering the
> bandwidth/latency limitations.
TOR is plug-and-play these days, although using TOR effectively requires a change in mind-set, both for the server owners and users of such servers.
> As seen with youtube, reddit, &c. With transparency and
> accountability, and without a significant profit incentive
> to do otherwise, the model still works.
Servers, time and expertise usually cost money. Staff running the show need to put food on their tables one way or another - there will always be a financial incentive. Unless, of course, you reduce running costs to near zero.
>For a site focused on transparency and privacy, it's parked behind CloudFlare. I can't view the site past the about page without JS enabled and allowing CloudFlare to probe and track me.
Unfortunately I have no choice in this regard. I do no have the means to resist any sort of ddos. I remember at one point you could set the 'cloudflare security level' to low, but when I looked in the UI today I could not find such an option.
If there exists a solution to either not using cloudflare, or some option hidden away that allows me to tell clouflare o fuck off with how it treats traffic, I'd love to know.
> If there exists a solution to either not using cloudflare,
> or some option hidden away that allows me to tell clouflare
> o fuck off with how it treats traffic, I'd love to know.
The method I use to avoid CloudFlare altogether (probably wrong as it's bespoke) is to do the following before "handling" the request:
* Store all connecting IPs, last request time and the rate at which requests are being made in a serviced-buffer. If the request rate becomes too high, give them a timeout (return a very small page telling them to come back in a few minutes).
* If database hits are high, drop non-important requests first, starting with views, then up/down votes, comments and then user security. Views and votes can fail silently and most people won't be any of the wiser.
* If static content requests are high, drop generated content first, followed by large files (all JS, most CSS, images, etc). For the generated content, you can use a recently generic cached view.
* Lastly, if all else fails, just return a redirect to some static server hosted somewhere strong (like GitHub pages for example), explaining that demand is high at this current time.
This approach has worked for me so far. Under high load, you need to handle requests as soon as possible, even if it means not returning something. Holding onto a connection is what will sink your ship.
In general most sites seem to die because they spend too long dealing with individual requests. especially when the database is hit. As soon as you overload a WordPress database for example, it's screwed. And this is just for displaying content to the website!
Do you even need to store ips? Just count accepted connections and every, say, 1000th connection check current time, if less than a second elapsed since previous check, close the listening socket. Isn't ddos caused by packet congestion rather than server processing?
> Just count accepted connections and every, say, 1000th
> connection check current time, if less than a second
> elapsed since previous check, close the listening socket.
Then you risk killing genuine traffic. Above average hit from a handful of locations is more likely to be abuse.
> Isn't ddos caused by packet congestion rather than server
> processing?
From what I understand, a DDoS attack any pat of your system, usually the part that is the slowest. You want to kill attacking traffic as quickly as possible without affecting genuine traffic. As for attacks on the network itself, this is where you rely on your cloud service provider.
Some forms of ddos are focused on layer 7, but these are not the problem.
The ddos attacks that are actually difficult to deal with are the layer 3, multi-hundred gigabit attacks. Which in our new IoT reality, are not uncommon.
By the way, sorry for sounding harsh. You've done a good job.
For lowering the costs of running, there are tonnes of pretty cheap options out there. I personally quite enjoy running my C1 instance at Scaleway [1], I get dedicated hardware, 4 ARM cores, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD (with the option of additional storage) and 200Mb/s external network.
The benefit of the C1 solution is that I can have it screaming 24/7 (mine instance really is) and the price is fixed. If you buy yourself a Raspberry Pi, you can do testing at home and then deploy your solution to the cloud with relative confidence.
there were a ton of technical issues earlier that are now 'mostly' fixed
in terms of the nsfw content, the index page is basically /r/all without nsfw. marking something as nsfw in a sfw sub hides the thumbnail.
this was posted here while i was sleeping... i went to bed thinking nobody had noticed my previous post and wasn't being attentive. the original post i made to Show Hn was 15 hours ago... I'm guessing a mod 'refreshed' this?
This is how I still browse the site. You can also disable subreddit theming in your preferences and you’ve got a much more lite version of the site like the old days.
This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
> My next question though is what stops reddit from implementing them?
They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's required.
> They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's required.
As far as I know, it's still not required. When you're at the signup popup and it's asking for your email, just click next. It's not a required field.
I like the idea of anonymous posting and at the same time on Reddit I've found challenges with brand new accounts with agendas showing up en mass with little regard for the local community and just wanting to push their agenda.
It's a rough thing to allow anonymous comments and also foster a community online.
I got excited by your post because I'm building a reddit-clone too.
It's called Dinomia and it's a just-for-fun concept with a transaction system.
Each time you upvote something an "upvote / credit" is transferred from you to the author of the post, like sending money.
When you create a post/comment/community you loose X "upvote/credits" etc.
I hope Ieddit has great success and congratulations again for the work you have done.
Looking at the code base, it doesn't look like there's any CSRF protection in place. Not sure what other security issues there are but I'd be careful about using this. You probably want some tests in there as well. Overall looks like a promising project but you might have rushed to get something in front of people when a bit more polish would have made a better first impression.
Almost every single action signs me out. Creating a sub gives back an 'invalid' error message', which then signs me out.
Have clicked on less than 10 links and have already been exposed to bestiality images. This post in question has been up for half an hour, where is the moderation?
How do you avoid becoming like other Rediit clones like Notabug http://notabug.io/ where you get toxic posts and comments? You give people anonymous access and they show their dark sides.
Looks like this is getting a lot of HN hug of death.
Let the username landgrab begin. Apparently they are called SubEddits instead of Subreddits? Not much in the way of r/android or similar but time will tell if this lasts or vanishes. Seems nice enough so far.
How are you going to prevent your reddit clone website being overrun with lowest-common-denominator content? i.e. how you will maintain quality long-term, after the initial rush of novelty wears off.
This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
How is this relevant? The project does not seem to be violating any guidelines. Are you suggesting an illegal and unethical reporting of a sites donated income because you don't agree with it on a publicly indexed forum? If so, thats really messed up.
...and there is no /r/bestiality. Come on, people...if you are going to make a forum for your interests, at least learn to spell the name of those interests. The word comes from the Latin word bestia.
You're on a site where at least half the commenters are anonymous, and evidently the discussion level here is good enough for you to stay. Conversely, Facebook is not any less cancerous because they have a real name policy. So no, I'd say the least N years have not shown that.
I think the most important aspect of a community is its members. Reddit, Facebook, etc have all tried hard to grow their communities and have reduced the quality of them as they increased the headcount.
The best communities don’t strive for the hockey stick growth.
Reddit and Facebook are not a single community, they are many communities some of which have a very high bar for quality, and some of which are a free for all that tends toward low quality memes and trolling.
I found that removing any community of more than 100K subscribers from my reddit experience made it much more tolerable.
In the old design you could go to /r/subredditname/comments and see an ordered list of comments regardless of which post they were associated with. It really livened things up and let you track the conversations going on given that there wern't that many new posts in a given day. That's gone with the new design unfortunately.
People change these logins like gloves despite what the "spirit" of HN is supposed to be. In fact, an anonymous community that is strictly moderated for quality is better for being anonymous (or at least pseudonymous). If the average quality of contributions is reasonably high, you judge comments on their merit and aren't excessively reverent toward some and excessively skeptical toward others purely based on the contributor's history (and therefore set of beliefs). And people self-censor a lot less.
I haven't used Reddit in a very long time, but does it not allow anonymous posts and comments any more? My account, at least, isn't tied to my real name or identity in any way, IIRC.
Anyway, I'm not sure anonymity is a great feature. The lack of accountability is a good part of the reason why Reddit became such a cesspool.
This used to be a lot easier. Now reddit doesn't let you create an account without an email (and most burner email tools are blocked like https://www.mailinator.com/.
To me it seems like there are features of the site or certain subs that essentially shitlist you until your account is of a certain age or upvote quota. You're not wrong that posts by brand new accounts seem to be invisible sometimes.
They are employing a dark pattern to make it seem that way, but it isn't so. You can just click "next" without actually entering an email. But there is no indication that the field is optional.
Tags: much of the content of Reddit is people reposting the same thing at various times to various subreddits, and many of the comments are people noticing that it fits into "r/whatever" instead. The default behavior should be that posts of the same link to various tags (r/awww, r/catsstandingup) should not recreate a new post but just backlink to the same post. Repeat posts to the same tag should be a no-operation. This removes the community aspect of tags, and some of the worst emergent behaviors of reddit along with it. Treating a tag as both a topic and a community leads to a neverending cycle of people creating niche topic tags for the community aspect, but then finding themselves "invaded" as people will always want to find and comment on content about topics that they disagree with.
But of course the community aspect of Reddit leads to good things. So you make a separate concept of communities. These communities could follow the posts of one or more tags, applying filters to those of their own choosing, and make their discussion visible within community borders only or visible to all, based on their own choices (in addition to internal community posts.) They can control admission to the communities on their own rules (fully public, invite codes only, etc.) The ability to automatically follow the posts of certain tags (and either view or not view public comments) will keep small communities from getting stale for lack of posts.