Show HN: Reddit alternative – decentralized social news site, no censorship

by frizbee • 11 years ago

104 125 11 years ago

empressplay9• 11 years ago

It's a bit of a stretch to call this "decentralised" when it still relies on software running on a "master" server (your bot.)

Second, if it is indeed fully anonymous, won't it just become a haven for trolls?

frizbee8• 11 years ago

Even though many playlist servers run on the frizbee.co server, some are community-owned.

Feel free to host a decentralized server here: https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati...

You can also block users for spam.

empressplay9• 11 years ago

Okay right, but it's not _decentralised_ -- if it was, I would be able to run a completely stand-alone server, or join an arbitrary network of servers completely unrelated to yours just by punching in the IP address of another member server.

If I _must_ have anything to do with you, it's not decentralised. Distributed, maybe. But _not_ decentralised.

colordrops• 11 years ago

What about using bitcoin as a voting mechanism? That would get rid of trolls, or at least the poor ones.

gruez• 11 years ago

that has the unsavory effect of money = votes

lettergram• 11 years ago

I like the idea, but I don't think the UI design is really all that great.

For example the upvote button is massive, and I couldn't easily find the comment button at all.

Basically, it made me scared to even look at the site... like, "where am I?"

chanux• 11 years ago

Also.. contrast.

jaywunder• 11 years ago

All the buttons get squished together on mobile too

personjerry3• 11 years ago

"We're the only decentralized democratic social aggregator website"

I feel like this is not true.

rtpg• 11 years ago

how can a website be decentralized...

x03• 11 years ago

Maybe if you spread it across 500 AWS instances

personjerry3• 11 years ago

http://ephemeralp2p.durazo.us/

^ This is a truly decentralized website

frizbee8• 11 years ago

Hi,

This is true, the only other decentralized aggregator, Aether, is not a website and rather requires download upon your computer.

Frizbee allows users to host their own decentralized playlist servers: https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati...

empressplay9• 11 years ago

It's not true. It's not decentralised.

Grue3• 11 years ago

Usenet says hi, from the 80s.

monksy3• 11 years ago

Ummm no. You're late to the game. Also, you're not established. If anyone has a claim to this, it's Voat. (Despite their difficulties)

zxcvcxz• 11 years ago

Who runs voat? How do I know it isn't run by Russian spies? or US spies?

monksy3• 11 years ago

Probably both.. and what prevents either of those from running this?

bhouston8• 11 years ago

It is run by a Swedish student, and his friends, from Sweden.

bhouston8• 11 years ago

Why is this being downvoted? Voat.co is really winning this space, mostly because of timing and exploiting an opportunity.

monksy3• 11 years ago

Law 32: Play to People's Fantasies

http://48laws-of-power.blogspot.com/2011/05/law-32-play-to-p...

A lot of people feel that a "decentralized social service" would be great. It hits a techies' ideas: free, open, unfiltered, uncontrolled by government.

I personally feel that it's too much like dispora: Too much tech, too little network, and a bit unproven that its a reliable/convincing network. I believe that Voat [like reddit after the digg-fail] hit a sweet spot. Although they've been a little unprepared and may be a little naive about how dirty their opposition may be.

minimaxir3• 11 years ago

Let's look at what happened to Voat.

After people claimed Reddit was censoring users by banning /r/fatpeoplehate, the more unsavory users flocked to Voat, a blatant Reddit clone.

As you would expect, said unsavory people posted unsavory content. Said unsavory content, while free and uncensored, was not legal, and that causes problems: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3avyem/voat_...

Said issues caused their PayPal account to become frozen: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3augr0/drama...

No, "decentralized" does not magically make you immune to law and punishment.

Natsu2• 11 years ago

Did I miss a post? SRD seems to say that Paypal terminated their account. I don't see involvement by law enforcement, unless I missed a post?

Or did they refuse to take it down? I thought the CDA protected hosts as long as they took it down when notified? But I also haven't been following this closely and I don't know where Voat is (was?) hosted.

minimaxir3• 11 years ago

Ah, forgot to include that Voat was earlier shut down by their hosting provider (hosted in Europe) due to the nature of their content: https://voat.co/v/announcements/comments/146757/

They switched to a cloud provider to fix it in the short term.

bhouston8• 11 years ago

Diss Voat.co as much as you want, but so far Voat.co is actually a pretty huge success: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/voat.co

jaredmcateer• 11 years ago

Who is dissing Voat? minimaxir was just pointing out what happened.

iLoch• 11 years ago

I don't think minimaxir was "dissing" voat.co, just stating facts. As for voat's success, I can't see how it can ever hope to supersede reddit - or even come close to competing with reddit - given that it is indeed a blatant clone. There's no real redeeming qualities of voat that are not already present on Reddit.

eevee4• 11 years ago

Reddit is rank 32. Hacker News is rank 1,859. Bulbapedia, the Pokémon wiki, is rank 4,101. Voat is rank 25,171.

I don't think I understand your definition of "huge success".

tomjen32• 11 years ago

Subredditdrama is a not exactly a high quality place.

pervycreeper• 11 years ago

Not sure how that's relevant. Voat appears to have too few differentiating features to be a significant threat to reddit. Frizbee, on the other hand, appears to be something genuinely new. As far as the other claims in that post go, the administrator of 8chan has compiled a more accurate recounting of this controversy here: https://medium.com/@infinitechan/what-do-we-know-about-voat-...

bhouston8• 11 years ago

That is a pretty good synopsis - thanks.

austenallred2• 11 years ago

Had no idea Voat was run by a sixteen-year-old. That's pretty impressive. The poor kid must be peeing his pants trying to figure out how to keep the site up and having no money for servers.

personjerry3• 11 years ago

According to https://voat.co/about it was created by a third year BSc student which would place the creator at around 20?

Though, you specified "running a website" which is not the same.

empressplay9• 11 years ago

It's not even decentralised -- if it was, I should just be able to set up a server, and connect it to any other server, and have a network. AFAICT you're forced to connect to Frizbee's servers / network and register, and that by definition makes it centralised.

zamalek4• 11 years ago

To be fair remember that Atko (the Voat founder) has always maintained that he would act when authorities told him to. This wasn't a buckling under pressure: it was following the law (albeit reactively and not proactively).

However:

The whole scenario is an utter joke: Reddit is thought-policed to the point of unbelievable absurdity. It's like a nursery school filled with Rachel Dolezals. Voat is filled with people who have gone completely off the rocker, given the ability to exercise their rights, and see fit to use their newly acquired rights to speak of nothing but those unsavory topics - most commonly racists.

The website are polar opposites and both are a hindrance to free, critical and intelligent thought - be it on purpose (Reddit) or by virtue (Voat).

It seems like the website format is a flawed concept. I don't take either website seriously.

octobyte• 11 years ago

It's like a nursery school filled with Rachel Dolezals.

I'm sorry, but what does that even mean??? Please, enlighten me on how a community openly filled with racist (chimpire) and sexist (candidfashionpolice, not even gonna list ones involving dead women or children) is "thought-policed."

If you mean there are groups of Redditors that openly oppose such subreddits, then yes, those do exist. That is a far cry from thought policing.

myhackeraccount• 11 years ago

quite slow

__z9• 11 years ago

Grey text is hard to read - needs contrast overall. Finding links and controls by random clicking and trial and error also isn't pleasant. mystery meat navigation.

koko7754• 11 years ago

No censorship as in no moderation?

No thanks.

No censorship as in no punishing the stalking and threatening of others?

Also no thanks.

I want free speech where people are free with their speech, not unrestrained speech (specifically) where people feel free to hurt others.

frizbee8• 11 years ago

Hi,

Just to clarify, the owners of particular playlist servers can moderate them as they choose. The difference is that because of the decentralization aspect, it is not chosen by a central entity.

x03• 11 years ago

If this website is another reaction to reddit, you're only going to attract the absolute dregs of that site — /r/fatpeoplehate, the pedophiles, the gamergaters, etc.

If someone creates a Frizbee server full of child abuse material, and it becomes popular, and is always on the front page, what would you do?

Also, I made a comment on Frizbee that consisted of `[wow](file:///etc/passwd)`, and it let me post it. You probably want to whitelist a few schemes.

empressplay9• 11 years ago

I'm still not following how that's any different than just owning a subreddit. If I own a subreddit I can moderate the posts in it. Under your model, you're suggesting that I can "moderate" posts that initiate from my server, but not others, and once again I'm still not sure what advantage that has over owning a subreddit?

milkworsethan• 11 years ago

Translation: I want free speech except I want people I don't like to not have it.

eevee4• 11 years ago

In what language does "stalking and threatening and hurting others" translate into "people I don't like"?

mc32• 11 years ago

That's the problem with restricting speech. Who defines what is acceptable and not. You can't even say something along the lines of no hate or no harm or no threats as what those terms refer to can change over time and also by locale.

Slang in one place may refer to something rather innocuous and that same term may refer to something entirely different in a different place or dialect. Also some terms can be endearing in one place and quite crude on another.

So, unless one represents an official standard, like a company or a government, censoring content is a bit of a wild goose chase.

Now, that's not to say I want to read crude or hateful content, as I find it a turnoff, but the alternative on balance seems worse. I'd say leave it to the indiv communities and their admins to establish norms rather than a site wide policy.

When I go to reddit or another community, I want civility within the subcommunity I'm interested in, if an alternative community wants to spring up with a free for all approach, so be it.

zamalek4• 11 years ago

I want free speech except I want people I don't like to not have it.

No, actually, koko very loosely defined actual free speech. In a nutshell free speech means that you can say whatever you please so long as you don't venture into what the American courts call "fighting words" (words/images designed to cause harm to another person or words/images that inspire others to cause harm to another person).

Example:

Let's say that I am prejudiced toward piglets (those damn curly tails!). I can express my extreme disdain for the swines to my heart's content. I can talk to people who share my bacon-related woes in the open.

However, I can't encourage people to go and harass or do harm to the hogs. I can't dox Babe and let everyone know the specific pen of residence: that would be encouraging others to harm, harass or make breakfast out of the pig.

*May not actually apply to pigs.

carsongross• 11 years ago

Haters gonna hate, but eventually something like this will win. It's too obvious an idea and hard drives are getting too cheap.

pyrmont• 11 years ago

I'm confused how the licensing of users' content is intended to work.

The site states that you own your content[1] but then on its manifesto page[2] states that all information is in the public domain. The license itself[3] is not particularly clear.

Putting information into the public domain does provide for maximum freedom in terms of how the information can be used, but that's because the copyright owner renounces their rights.

[1] https://frizbee.co/#WhatMakesFrizbeeDifferent558b273db212a

[2] https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5

[3] https://frizbee.co/#LegalLicense5589af95a67c3

__z9• 11 years ago

"you own the copyright to your content... all the content on Frizbee is in the public domain... you can use and redistribute [user content] in any way, completely free of charge."

Yeah, really really strange. That makes no sense. The whole thing in general seems to confuse copyright with responsibility of content. Of course I could have got the gist wrong because it was very confusing and contradicted itself.

keedot5• 11 years ago

I honestly hope one of these takes off. I don't want to ever go there, I don't take amusement in other people's suffering. But seeing so much outrage on reddit from assholes bitching that they can't be racist/bigoted/loathsome on a private forum screaming about freedom of speech which belies their own ignorance makes me long for the days of gopher. I find it repugnant, and I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted.

bruceb• 11 years ago

" I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted."

hmm...

steveeq12• 11 years ago

English translation: "I believe in freedom of speech. . . except for things that I find offensive"

There is no such thing as hate speech in a free speech environment. There is no guarantee you won't be offended.

eevee4• 11 years ago

English translation: "I want to be as big a jerk as possible and blame it on everyone else when they don't like it."

flashman• 11 years ago

More like, "Nobody is going to stop you saying what you want... but they're going to hold you responsible for the consequences."

That's all any of us wants.

keedot5• 11 years ago

That isn't the argument. Racism, bigotry, exploitation, bullying are all examples of speech that has no place in an enlightened society in my view. Freedom of speech is limited in America too, the rest of us think that if you're going to have limitations, then set limitations which promotes human cooperation and understanding, and excludes speech which only serves to promote violence and the insularization of arbitrary groups.

duncan_bayne5• 11 years ago

"I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted."

I'm going to be optimistic for the future of humanity, and assume that was a (masterful) troll.

saryant• 11 years ago

Throwaway with a blatant canard. I'm calling false flag.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

That's a very common sentiment in eg England.

Americans tend not to realise that their free speech laws are sometimes seen as extreme in Europe.

It's not surprising they used a throwaway, they already got downvoted.

(It wasn't me.)

soneil2• 11 years ago

This dichotomy always exists. Very few rights are without their limits. Their front page already makes a perfect example of this: "Our manifesto is clear: we protect your right to privacy and freedom of speech".

If a user wishes to 'doxx' me, my right to privacy and their freedom of speech are at odds. Which wins?

keedot5• 11 years ago

It always surprises me when Americans think their concept of free speech is the only model. Much, if not most of the rest of the western world does not share this view of unchecked speech.

ethana• 11 years ago

Apparently you can clear your cookie and up vote again. I can see the spambot coming already.

thefreeman• 11 years ago

Can anyone clarify what is decentralized about this? I clicked around a few threads on the site and they all appear to be hosted at frizbee.co.

empressplay9• 11 years ago

It's not decentralised. You have the ability to run a node. Your node communicates exclusively with frizbee's servers.

liamzebedee• 11 years ago

If people are interested in P2P decentralized discussion systems, check out http://getaether.net made by @nehbit . Beautiful UX, wasn't released yesterday either.

blfr• 11 years ago

How does login/registration work? Once I changed the moniker, added a password, how do I then log in?

frizbee8• 11 years ago

You login using the same menu you used for adding a passphrase- you enter your passphrase form another computer.

jedberg• 11 years ago

The top post as I write this: "Delete your cookie and upvote forever".

protomyth• 11 years ago

I'm starting to think the sufficiently complicated Lisp quote applies to USENET.

austenallred2• 11 years ago

It looks like you're off to a good start. There's design cleanup to do, for sure. Ya, there are buts that people can clear cookies and vote again - welcome to the world of building social news software.

There will be two key moments with this: 1. Will people stick around after this is off the front page of HN?

2. When people decide to game your site, how well do you handle voting rings? The reddit founders have mentioned that nearly half of their code catches voting rings; that's not trivial to do. And of course, it may be premature optimization, but it is something to consider that anyone with a few minutes of time to build a bot could completely destroy your site.

__z9• 11 years ago

Wouldn't "handling vote rings" be a form of "censorship"?

NeutronBoy• 11 years ago

You have a right to say what you want, you don't have a right to manipulate the ranking of the content.

moron4hire• 11 years ago

I don't know, is censorship the problem with Reddit?

adamrezich• 11 years ago

I don't want to be That Guy, but I really don't think the UI is very intuitive. A lot of things really bug me about it. It's hard to peruse a list of posts and scan headlines, unlike on Hacker News or reddit. You compose comments with a serif font, and then the comment is posted with a sans-serif font. It appears as if all URLs are just frizbee.co/#SomethingGoesHere, regardless of what it is. This makes me lost a lot because I'll click the logo in the upper-left corner because I want to go back to the homepage, but it doesn't work. It also means that I have no idea what a link is before I click on it. When I see reddit.com/u/takua108, I know that it's takua108's user page. When I see reddit.com/r/dota2, I know that it's the Dota 2 subreddit. When I see https://frizbee.co/#ICameHereFromHackerNews558b70ef40cdf, I have no idea what the hell to think. Plus, there's no comment permalinks, and it looks like every link is using javascript or something, because I can't even hover over the link to see where it leads!

I like a lot of the ideas behind this, but I feel like the execution is very, very poor.

__z9• 11 years ago

Its even worse than that. Navigation is just totally broken. For example I clicked your link then on that page I clicked Our Manifesto. The URL changed to https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5 but the page content did not change! This seems to happen all over.

Totally dont need to re-engineer hyperlinks. They are hyperlinks!

(logo in the left hand corner does change the url to https://frizbee.co/#HotPosts but as you and I said it just doesnt work)

frizbee8• 11 years ago

These glitches have since been fixed.

SrslyJosh• 11 years ago

If you're a bad enough person that _Reddit_ will ban you or your favorite subreddits, by all means get the fuck out! =)

empressplay9• 11 years ago

The original Frizee submission from 32 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593729

empressplay9• 11 years ago

Also, the "view counts" on the website are pure BS -- the comment view counts don't grow at the same rate the thread view count does, for example. The thread view-count grows at almost a clockwork rate, etc.

I know, I know, Reddit pulled similar stunts in its early days but it still feels a bit dodgy.

frizbee8• 11 years ago

Hi,

It's not a stunt, and you are purely speculating. The reason for the view count for the comments being different is very easy to explain: a comment may not have been posted at the same time as a post, and therefore has a different number of views.

Show HN: Reddit alternative – decentralized social news site, no censorship

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