
Fix Reddit with Bitcoin - 666_howitzer
https://medium.com/@ryanxcharles/fix-reddit-with-bitcoin-7da3f85fb9ba
======
jedberg
No offense as I'm sure you're a great guy, but I'm really glad they cancelled
the project if that is what you were hired for. There's so many reasons this
could never work (I would loved to be proven wrong though).

1) I'd say about 10% of the reddit user base even knows what bitcoin is, and
far less have any. I don't see people willing to acquire bitcoin just to
participate.

2) At some point you have to host the content on a computer somewhere. Time on
computers costs money. In the case of reddit, this is 1000s of dollars a day
(and would be even more in a decentralized system due to the overhead of
coordination). Right now the bitcoin economy is not robust enough to extract
1000s of dollars a day, and there isn't any provider that will accept bitcoin
in exchange for compute at that level, or even close to it.

3) Fewer and fewer people have the ability to host content anymore, be it at
home or in a datacenter. So you'd be relying on just a few people who would be
willing to host content. This basically leaves you very open to an "attack" on
the network by a bad actor, who could take it over with reltive ease if they
were just one of a few that were hosting content.

4) Child porn. It would be way too easy for someone to put that on the network
and then everyone would be at risk, further reducing the number of people
willing to host (see the list of Tor exit nodes that aren't government spy
nodes as an example of how few people would be willing to participate).

5) Related to number 4, the laws in different countries are different. If I
host in the USA and you host in say Sweden, content that is legal for you may
not be legal for me, again opening me up to liability unless I closely police
the content, and unlike reddit Inc, I don't have the lawyers and common
carrier protections.

Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, but given my experience actually
running reddit, I just don't think the bitcoin ecosystem is big enough to
support it today or even in the medium future.

~~~
yafujifide
> I'm really glad they cancelled the project if that is what you were hired
> for.

The idea sketched out here is not equivalent to the project I was hired for.
That project was never sketched out in detail and probably would not have
involved bitcoin.

> 1) I'd say about 10% of the reddit user base even knows what bitcoin is, and
> far less have any. I don't see people willing to acquire bitcoin just to
> participate.

Today, most reddit users would not participate in this system. But we don't
need 100 million users on Day 1.

> 2) At some point you have to host the content on a computer somewhere. Time
> on computers costs money. In the case of reddit, this is 1000s of dollars a
> day (and would be even more in a decentralized system due to the overhead of
> coordination). Right now the bitcoin economy is not robust enough to extract
> 1000s of dollars a day, and there isn't any provider that will accept
> bitcoin in exchange for compute at that level, or even close to it.

Yep. Probably the best way to do this is to found a company that hosts servers
that host a lot of the content. Anybody could do this, of course, and the
company's servers are not privileged in any way. However, by being the first
and best service provider on a new decentralized platform, they would profit
(I call this business plan the "Satoshi model"). Note how in the article I
explain that the users actually pay to download content - a possibility that
was not available when reddit was founded.

> 3) Fewer and fewer people have the ability to host content anymore, be it at
> home or in a datacenter. So you'd be relying on just a few people who would
> be willing to host content. This basically leaves you very open to an
> "attack" on the network by a bad actor, who could take it over with reltive
> ease if they were just one of a few that were hosting content.

Think of the hosters as being more like bitcoin miners or bitcoin full nodes.
Anyone can do it, technically, but almost no one bothers to. The people that
do make a business out of it.

> 4) Child porn. It would be way too easy for someone to put that on the
> network and then everyone would be at risk, further reducing the number of
> people willing to host (see the list of Tor exit nodes that aren't
> government spy nodes as an example of how few people would be willing to
> participate).

Don't host content you don't agree with. There could even be a flagging system
for stuff like this so that you never download it in the first place where
possible.

> 5) Related to number 4, the laws in different countries are different. If I
> host in the USA and you host in say Sweden, content that is legal for you
> may not be legal for me, again opening me up to liability unless I closely
> police the content, and unlike reddit Inc, I don't have the lawyers and
> common carrier protections.

Yes. As I said, you do not have to host content you don't like (but you also
can't prevent other people from hosting/sending whatever they want to other
people).

> Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, but given my experience actually
> running reddit, I just don't think the bitcoin ecosystem is big enough to
> support it today or even in the medium future.

The bitcoin ecosystem is not mature enough to be as big as reddit today, but
it is big enough to be as big as reddit on reddit's Day 1, or maybe reddit's
Day 365 or so. This system and bitcoin could grow to ultimately be as large as
reddit is today or larger, in 10 or so years (in a hypothetical best-case
scenario).

~~~
jedberg
> Yep. Probably the best way to do this is to found a company that hosts
> servers that host a lot of the content. Anybody could do this, of course,
> and the company's servers are not privileged in any way. However, by being
> the first and best service provider on a new decentralized platform, they
> would profit (I call this business plan the "Satoshi model"). Note how in
> the article I explain that the users actually pay to download content - a
> possibility that was not available when reddit was founded.

At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy. The
way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things.
Usually we use money as a way to simplify this.

How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough
people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and shelter?

> Think of the hosters as being more like bitcoin miners or bitcoin full
> nodes. Anyone can do it, technically, but almost no one bothers to. The
> people that do make a business out of it.

I think that's just proving my point. There would only be a few people
participating as full nodes because it's complicated, putting the entire
network at risk of a bad actor.

> Don't host content you don't agree with.

That's great but how do I find the content I don't agree with?

> There could even be a flagging system for stuff like this so that you never
> download it in the first place where possible.

Who would flag it? Can I trust them?

~~~
yafujifide
> At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy. The
> way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things.
> Usually we use money as a way to simplify this.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff
with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point,
considering how young it is. But of course it is not as popular as credit
cards yet.

> How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough
> people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and
> shelter?

You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around
/r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use
a credit card when they were only 6 years old?

> I think that's just proving my point. There would only be a few people
> participating as full nodes because it's complicated, putting the entire
> network at risk of a bad actor.

A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central
organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc. makes a
decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin decisions.
It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.

> That's great but how do I find the content I don't agree with?

I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there
would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with.
One way to solve that is to simply not host content at all, and only download.

> Who would flag it? Can I trust them?

This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming
all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems
sufficiently well to make things work effectively, and not solve them 100%.
For instance, flagging could work by having a buddies list, and trusting their
flags, and maybe their buddies' flags. That would be partially effective and
better than nothing, but not perfect either. We would iterate and improve the
flagging system with time.

~~~
jedberg
> I'm not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff
> with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point,
> considering how young it is.

I'm quite familiar with it, but you really can't survive off bitcoin alone.
There just aren't enough vendors taking it, but more importantly, this is
because it is hard for vendors to price items since it so rapidly fluctuates.
Bitcoin is also tax disadvantaged because it's classified by the IRS as an
asset not as currency, so you get taxed every time you transact bit coin and
it has "changed value" relative to the dollar. Can you image trying to do
business with dollars if you had to pay tax every time it's value changed
compared to the Euro?

> You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around
> /r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you
> use a credit card when they were only 6 years old?

Food and clothes yes (although very limited choices). Shelter? I'm not
familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to sleep.

You compare it to credit cards, but that isn't really an apt comparison
because credit cards just represented dollars in another form.

> A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a
> central organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc.
> makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin
> decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.

But then you get chaos and a fractured ecosystem. I would say that's worse.

> I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there
> would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with.

It's not the stuff I disagree with that's the problem, it's the stuff that's
illegal -- ie. my government doesn't agree with.

> This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming
> all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems
> sufficiently well to make things work effectively,

I'm not even sure what to say here. I know this is HN, but this XKCD explains
it perfectly: [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/) (It's the one
about making the computer recognize a bird)

~~~
FatalLogic
> I'm not familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to
> sleep.

From 3 minutes on Google:

[http://www.expedia.com/](http://www.expedia.com/)

[http://www.cheapair.com/hotels/](http://www.cheapair.com/hotels/)

[https://btctrip.com/](https://btctrip.com/)

[http://www.travelforcoins.com/](http://www.travelforcoins.com/)

[https://www.clickjett.com/](https://www.clickjett.com/)

[http://blog.9flats.com/9flats-accepts-payments-with-
bitcoins](http://blog.9flats.com/9flats-accepts-payments-with-bitcoins)

I'm not commenting on anything else you've said, but I really do have to
question your claim that you're "quite familiar" with the bitcoin market

~~~
jedberg
As far as I know every one of those prices in USD and then uses an exchange to
immediately convert bitcoin to USD. I don't count that as taking bitcoin.

~~~
FatalLogic
I think you're correct, but this is a disappointingly blatant straw man
argument, because you were attempting to refute the claim "You can buy food,
shelter, and clothing with bitcoin."

If we were arguing about the overall health of the bitcoin economy, then your
point about conversion to USD would be relevant, but we're only discussing the
utility of bitcoin for the consumer here. From the customer's point of view,
it is irrelevant, what matters is that the company will accept their bitcoin.

------
FeepingCreature
I've done some thinking on this problem, but my own implementation (PeerNews)
is sort of stuck in place because I lost interest.

That said, if "P2P Reddit" sounds interesting to you, I'd love your feedback
on this rough spec document.

[https://github.com/FeepingCreature/PeerNews/blob/master/spec...](https://github.com/FeepingCreature/PeerNews/blob/master/spec.md)

The design takes advantage of the P2P nature of the network to customize
content to the person reading. Using friends and de-friends (hates? unloves?),
you would form your own trust weighting for people's upvotes, thus forming a
network of cliques where everybody can read the same content, but sorted
differently according to their interests.

------
yafujifide
Author here. AMA. Happy to work out the details of how this would work if
anyone would like to see. It takes a little more than just "bitcoin" \- you
don't want most transactions to be on the blockchain, for instance. Instead,
we would do what Streamium did, which is to use payment channels. That will
allow for tiny payments.

Also, how the hosting and sharing of content works requires a lot of effort.
We can use Web RTC to do the p2p communication over the web. Most people don't
yet know this exists - but p2p communication over the web is indeed possible.
The only catch is that you need a rendezvous server. That server would be run
by anybody, so the network would be two tiered - the simple-to-use web clients
that share content but don't provide the rendezvous service. Then the "full
nodes" where the users would also run a rendezvous service, allowing people to
find each other.

To most users it would look and feel similar to reddit. Anyone would be able
to run a "business" by just running the "full node" app full-time and
delivering the content to users.

Of course there's a lot more to it than this. I've solved many of the
problems, but not all, and there is no prototype yet. But I believe the
fundamental technology now exists to create a decentralized reddit, where the
users get paid for hosting the system and providing the content.

~~~
aaron-lebo
What's the need for a true p2p network? Why not just do a federated network of
servers like Usenet? That's more efficient, cheaper, and it had been done
before.

In your model how are unique identities assigned? Do they tie directly to
addresses on the blockchain?

Could you write a more concrete proposal? I know that's asking a lot, but you
said ask anything. I've been thinking about this for some time and a
decentralized reddit sounds really great but the devil is in the details.

~~~
yafujifide
The need for a true, decentralized p2p network is to solve the problem once
and for all so that we can shed all of the moral hazards around having a
company at the center. If a company starts the project, and abandons their
ideals and starts censoring content, users can just download the same content
from other nodes. The ideals are salvaged. On the other hand, if 99% of users
agree that some content shouldn't be permitted, it would be really hard to
find that content.

"Unique identities", or naming, is a hard problem by itself. One way to solve
it for our purposes that I think would be sufficient is to just let each user
own a keypair to authenticate messages, and the names are NOT unique.

As for a concrete proposal, it takes a lot of time to write something like
that, and I just haven't done it yet because I was unsure of the community
interest. However, it seems there is a good deal of community interest based
on this article. Perhaps I could write a whitepaper, or maybe just a longer,
technical document, where I try to solve all the problems. Note I don't
actually claim to have solved them all yet - but maybe I would be able to
solve them all in the course of writing the paper. Having community feedback
really helps identify the problems that need to be solved (thanks!).

~~~
goykasi
How/where would content be stored? As transactions on the blockchain? Seems
like that could be bloated. Maybe an identifier could be added somehow to a
transaction that points to where the content is stored?

Also, how much would you expect each message to cost? Assuming 1 message = 1
transactions, how does that translate to actual coin amounts + mining fees?

~~~
yafujifide
> How/where would content be stored?

Modern web browsers have a real database called IndexedDB. The users store the
content. Most users, of course, would not store most content. Users that
wanted to could run the app full-time on their local machine, where the
database would be leveldb instead of IndexedDB. They would store much more
data. Not all data would necessarily be saved forever.

> Also, how much would you expect each message to cost?

Payment channels reduce the cost of transactions to next to zero. An "upvote"
does not actually go on the blockchain - only when channels are opened or
closed to transactions go on the blockchain, incurring a transaction fee.

~~~
dida1337
Could ipfs.io be used for content storing? Together with filecoin could it be
better fit then your proposed solution?

------
flashman
How would this system approach, say, child pornography? If it is truly
decentralised, then there is no way to keep such content off the network. But
there _must_ be a way for users/nodes to avoid hosting or encountering such
content, otherwise the risk of participating in its distribution, even with
plausible deniability, makes 'Reddit on the blockchain' a legal/moral/ethical
non-starter.

~~~
yafujifide
If you have a reason to be suspicious of some content, don't downloaded it. If
you discover some content is illegal and you have already downloaded it,
delete it and don't send it to anyone else. This is probably best handled with
a flagging system. Such a system would not be perfect, but could be improved
with time.

~~~
Nursie
In many countries, UK included, you have already broken the law and could go
to prison over that.

~~~
rlpb
Rubbish. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea)

There are exceptions
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_%28criminal%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_%28criminal%29))
but they do not apply here.

~~~
Nursie
It's not rubbish. At the time the laws were last tightened there were serious
discussion to the effect that simply being sent illegal images via email would
be enough to get a conviction.

I'm not saying it's a good law.

Even if mens rea applies to this area of law, it includes categories of
recklessness and negligence, which could quite easily be argued along the
lines of "you were browsing an unregulated P2P network that is known for
containing contraband images".

~~~
rlpb
> "there were serious discussion to the effect..."

Ah, unsubstantiated claims of Internet speculation over something? That must
make it true!

> I'm not saying it's a good law.

What law? Where?

> ...it includes categories of recklessness and negligence, which could quite
> easily be argued along the lines of "you were browsing an unregulated P2P
> network that is known for containing contraband images".

"You were browsing the Internet, which is unregulated and is known for
containing contraband images".

In reality, you filter when you browse the Internet, and that defines your
intent. The same would apply here. Access the "HN" sub-P2P-reddit for
unflagged posts then nobody can claim that you had intent. If the "HN" becomes
rife with unflagged contraband and you stop using it when this starts to
happen as a consequence, then nobody can claim that you had intent.

If the whole network becomes unusable because it's rife with off-topic
unflagged contraband, then what you really have is a different argument. You'd
be claiming that the network would be unsable because of off-topic unflagged
contraband. You wouldn't have any argument about the risk of criminal
liability from unintended contraband download, because no law-abiding user
would ever get that far.

In short: if functional network then no legitimate risk.

------
Animats
There already are federated social networks. Wikipedia has a long list.[1] You
never heard of any of them. Buddycloud, Diaspora and Friendica got far enough
to have a number of servers in two digits. Buddycloud seems to have pivoted
into a system for in-house use. Diaspora seems to be dying. Frendica is
running, with a very modest number of users, and trying to replace itself with
a new system called Red.

It's quite possible to do this, but so far, nobody has been able to get
anything like enough users to make it useful.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking)

~~~
yafujifide
None of the federated social networks integrated p2p payments because that
wasn't possible until bitcoin. The entire existing internet economy was built
around the assumption that p2p payments were impossible. That assumption no
longer holds.

~~~
Animats
No, the early Internet economy tried micropayments. First Virtual, Cybercoin,
Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Beenz...

All failed.

Anyway, payment isn't the problem with distributed social networks. Asshole
amplification is the problem. If one jerk can easily annoy hundreds of users,
there's a problem. Trying to build a federated social network which can
survive spam nodes is going to be tough. Especially if users are anonymous and
can create additional identities easily.

------
davidgerard
Ryan's work at Reddit was reimplementing bitcoind in JavaScript on node.js:
[https://github.com/ryanxcharles/fullnode/graphs/commit-
activ...](https://github.com/ryanxcharles/fullnode/graphs/commit-activity)

Here's where he sets out what he was trying to do:
[https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_rea...](https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_reason_ryan_charles_was_fired_from/co6r4q9)

The takeaway is: if you start with "... but with Bitcoin!", then iteratively
putting different words before "but" is unlikely ever to result in something
that is actually useful, not just interesting.

------
gruez
>when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the
author of that content

Doesn't this lead to a problem where money = votes? What would be other
mechanisms to combat vote fraud?

>In order to download content, the user pays a very, very small amount of
bitcoin to the peers on the network. This incentivizes people to keep the app
open so as to keep servicing the other users

I don't think this is necessary. The bitcoin network shows that alturism alone
is enough to sustain over 5000 nodes.

~~~
yafujifide
"Upvoting" on such a system would be a little less like voting and a little
more like tipping - think Changetip. There are some real problems here. What
if a user pays theirself, thus voting their own content up? One way to solve
this is for funds to be locked in some sense before they can be used. A user
would have to lock up a significant amount of funds for a while before being
able to vote, so it would be really annoying and expensive to commit fraud.
There are also bitcoin transaction fees for putting bitcoin into and out of
the system, so there is always that disencentive to fund a bunch of separate
accounts for the purpose of committing fraud.

~~~
goykasi
What about all of the thieves that have already locked up a significant amount
of bitcoin? Wouldnt they be able to use that to easily overshadow a user?
Maybe that would give rise to DaaS (downvoting as a service). Miners wouldnt
care since they are getting their block rewards + mining fees -- which
presumably the thief would gladly play.

~~~
yafujifide
> What about all of the thieves that have already locked up a significant
> amount of bitcoin?

That is a risk, but it is hard to do and wouldn't work most of the time.

> Maybe that would give rise to DaaS (downvoting as a service)

There is no downvoting in this system, only upvoting. (How would you take
bitcoin from someone?)

~~~
geofft
I'm sure this is a question you all thought about, but.... If there are no
downvotes, does community moderation work? Does this even resemble the Reddit
we know of?

A lot of good posts and a _lot_ of good comments are at a single-digit number
of points (quite often 1), because clicking the upvote button is effort. I can
only imagine how many posts will stay at one bitpoint if it takes actual money
/ work / computation to upvote. And those will be indistinguishable from
genuine spam, trolling, off-topic rants, etc. (Given that the current Reddit
uproar is about poor tooling for moderators, I don't think that shifting even
more moderation burden onto the mods is fixing anything.)

There might be an exception in the voting patterns on the very large / default
subs, but decentralizing the defaults alone is a very different goal. Most of
the value of Reddit, especially if you care about anti-censorship, is in the
long tail of subreddits.

~~~
yafujifide
> If there are no downvotes, does community moderation work? Does this even
> resemble the Reddit we know of?

This system would not be the same as the reddit of today. Whether moderation
would still work - see all my other comments in this thread about flagging.
Basically, flagging would serve as downvoting and would be partially
effective. Would love to find a better way, but flagging may be good enough.

~~~
goykasi
Honestly, the more and more I think about this, I just dont think its worth
doing with bitcoin. There are too many poisoned coins tied to bad actors. If
youve ever worked on a sizable community of forums (and Im pretty sure the
"Bitcoin Engineer" for reddit doesnt count), you would know that trolls will
troll. Simply because they can, and they will just keep coming back -- bitcoin
makes that too easy. All they would need to do is create a new address,
account and shift coins around (or tumble them to obfuscate the source).

Lets just think about how many coins have been "stolen". Those are all
available to crap all over your p2p blockchain forum. The normal users could
never compete. So now, not only do you have to maintain enough hashing power
(as suggested above), now you need to maintain a sizable wallet of btc that
can outspend a thief's reserve of coins. Just so your users can post on a
decentralized forum network? Sounds like a losing battle. Good luck.

~~~
rlpb
> Lets just think about how many coins have been "stolen". Those are all
> available to crap all over your p2p blockchain forum.

In a Bitcoin economy those are also available to spend on useful things, just
like money. Put it this way: would rich trolls spend significant cash to troll
you? I don't think so - they'd buy valuable things with their money for
themselves instead.

~~~
geofft
"Troll" is an ambiguous wprd here. The question is whether anyone would spend
significant amounts of money to control what gets upvoted and what doesn't.
Given Reddit's recent $50M round, I'm hesitant to say the answer is no.

------
clemensley
Love the idea. We are working on something similar, but without the
decentralization at this point. In our system users can invest bitcoin in a
post by upvoting it. If that post gets many upvotes subsequently the investor
will make a profit, otherwise a loss. [https://github.com/rolandnsharp/node-
bitcoin-reddit](https://github.com/rolandnsharp/node-bitcoin-reddit)

We are looking for collaborators for this project. Please feel free to get in
touch if you are interested (@clemensley).

~~~
kang
Such systems are prone to political effects. For example, a pop song would get
much more upvotes than a genuine discussion. Over time intellectuals leave
because of the noise.

~~~
clemensley
That is true. In a sense that is the truly democratic effect: more people care
about pop music than intellectual discussions (obviously our system would be a
twisted form of democracy where money==votes; then again that's too different
from real world democracy).

I obviously have no idea how this will pan out, but it's just far too exiting
to not just try.

Edit: Our idea is really to "give bitcoin to the people who provide value".
Nothing is set in stone yet, but our current thinking is that there are two
ways to provide value in a Reddit style system: submit new content or upvote
valuable content. We want to find a fair way to pay rewards in both cases.

~~~
c_prompt
> That is true.

I don't agree. You're going to have different communities, just as reddit does
now. Intellectuals are (likely) not going to be posting in /r/I-love-taylor-
swift; they would post to their own communities as they do now. If you're
concerned about what makes it to the front page, you use a different algorithm
than reddit uses. Or, better yet, you allow mods (or even users) to customize
the algorithm their subs use.

~~~
clemensley
I hope you are right. One would really have to think about how to give users
more control over the content they see. Allowing mods to tweak the sorting
algorithm is a great idea to do this by the way.

Ultimately I think it is wrong that people put so much effort into social
media and do not get rewarded for it in a meaningful way (and no, I don't
consider a "like" or an "upvote" a sufficient reward). If we could find a way
to reward people monetarily for producing and finding valuable content, that
might lead to a huge increase in quality.

I have this theory for how companies could be built: look for where value in
transferred on the internet (for example if someone watches a video on
YouTube, value is transferred from the video producer to the viewer); then
send bitcoin in the other direction. This model seems much more efficient to
me compared to today's model where the value from the content consumer to the
content produces is transferred through a sequence of intermediaries (social
media sites, advertisers, advertising networks) that all take a cut.

Obviously one needs to think about the incentives for all actors, I do not
think that donation based networks will work because there is really not much
incentive to donate.

~~~
c_prompt
> Allowing mods to tweak the sorting algorithm is a great idea to do this by
> the way.

Already built. The front page algorithm section at valME.io allows you to
select reddit's as the default [1] or choose your own customizations (include
NSFW, max hours to evaluate post, num of posts on front page, num of karma by
karma type and weightings, OP's karma balance and weighting, OP num of
comments, post views, OP age, num of OP flags, etc.)

[1]
[https://gist.github.com/touhonoob/2923094](https://gist.github.com/touhonoob/2923094)

------
tannerbrockwell
This is already in development and has been through a genesis block colored
coin issuance based on Bitcoin:
[http://www.synereo.com/](http://www.synereo.com/)

They will reward content creators and participants with the colored coins:
AMPs

Advertising will also be supported with a market in the AMPs. Thus bringing
equity to holders of AMPs.

------
ilovecomputers
As I commented on the article, I think this whole monetary system might deter
adoption of the application. Either way, check out Freenet if you want to see
prior art in creating a decentralized web:
[https://freenetproject.org/](https://freenetproject.org/)

In that p2p project, all you contributed was storage and bandwidth.

~~~
yafujifide
I think the monetary system not only wouldn't "deter" adoption of the
application, but would strongly incentivize its adoption. People will love
being able to be paid for their work, rather than letting other people who
they don't know get paid for it.

~~~
ilovecomputers
You're correct, getting paid for posts is a strong incentive. In the end, we
won't know unless we try.

Personally, when I think of a decentralized reddit, there's nothing monetary
about it. Simple points equate with popularity and that's incentive enough,
but it's hard to build up a large audience like reddit did. Honestly, when I
started reading your article, I was expecting to read a proposal for something
like Namecoin, but for a decentralized reddit. Then the monetization part took
me by surprise because that would totally change the social dynamic of the
site. I would feel it would be less about the content and the popularity and
more about trying to make money.

------
utunga
There are undoubtedly a lot of problems to figure out. But you absolutely have
my support to run the experiment to try and figure out how to, finally,
actually build the front page of the internet in a truly decentralized way.

You (*or rather, relevant people) will have my bitcoins in support on day one,
if this ever launches.

------
dev-da0
At first glance, I thought the title read:

"Fix Reddit with _Bacon_ "

but no, decentralized reddit sounds like a better idea... maybe until figuring
how how to distribute moderation and other privileges.

