9 years ago
6
The next Reddit could be based on bitcoin and impossible to censor
What's next for Reddit? After the abrupt dismissal of a popular staff member saw its volunteer moderators take hundreds of the site's most popular communities offline in protest, some users have speculated that this is the beginning of the end for the community-driven news site. But there's another, far more radical vision for Reddit (or a site just like it): A decentralised, bitcoin-powered community that is impossible to shut down, impossible to censor.
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Can I go on an nonconstructive rant here ? I can ? Wow, thanks.
I just wished people with access to a soap box would stop using the expression "The next <insert popular product>". The next IPhone, The next Reddit, The next this and that. Please, stop.
"The next of <popular product>" implies that a successful site or artist or anything is a generic category, filled with fungible commodities without their own characteristics.
Reddit is not a category of website, just like IPhone is not a category of electronic devices and Black Sabbath is not a music style. When I browse Reddit, I'm browsing Reddit, not a news aggregator. Simple as that.
To add insult to injury, It reeks of superlatives, like "the best thing since sliced bread". When I see such things on a headline, I usually skip it entirely, I fell like the author (or his editor) is trying to steer me to a conclusion he already made, instead of giving me just the facts, or at the very least leaving it pretty clear that the content is opinion.
/rant
PS: Sorry.
Hmm, a decentralized group of "communities" with their own pages, uncensored, and impossible to shut down. Where I have heard this before. Oh yeah it's called The Internet.
Well, Aether is trying to do that. A decentralized, anonymous "site" - but you have to download a client to access, sync, and there aren't really any accounts, so anyone can use the same username as someone else. Oh, and posts aren't deleted, but everything auto-deletes after 6 months, etc. It's interesting, but I don't really see it catching on in its current state.
Aether gets my vote as my ideal path forward. As long as there is a single owner / company who controls the servers of a site, the discussion there will never be truly free from manipulation and coercion.
Hmm, the blockchain approach seems cool, but if I'm not misunderstanding wouldn't this necessitate all users to have a copy of it in order to be truly decentralised? Considering the Bitcoin blockchain seems to be approaching 37 GB, it doesn't seem to scale very well to mobile devices. Though I suppose the proxy model used my SPV wallets would alleviate this somewhat at the cost of slightly increasing centralisation (i.e. there'd still be some service providers, just more & freer competition between them). Such a model seems to put a greater difficulty on verifying actions though, looking at the recent Bitcoin troubles where old versions of the Bitcoin client along with SPV wallets are affected.
You are right, as he said, not all clients have an equal share of the blockchain, just as it is in the bitcoin network as well. There are some bitcoin clients that download the whole blockchain but others rely on a block chain hosted somewhere else. This is a perfect combination i think. Not everyone has to download it but it can be downloaded so you don't have the single point of failure.