Hey everyone, just wanted to give a quick update.
After opening things up more on Plebbit/Seedit, we got hit pretty hard with spam and some NSFW content. It got out of hand fast and honestly, its worse than we expected.
To stop that from messing everything up, we’re thinking about adding optional email or SMS verification when people sign up.
This isn’t something we wanted to do at first, but it seems necessary to protect the space and avoid getting buried in garbage.
we’re still fully open source, and still want this to feel like a community. If you’ve got other ideas or feedback, feel free to share.
I’ve thought about this idea for my own project, and my best solution is to have a network of trust where people rely on curation from their peers and thus only see the content their peers have approved.
The main benefit is also the main downside: content you disagree with is still there, you just don’t see it. That means there could absolutely be pockets of CSAM and other content on the network, but your average user wouldn’t have that on their system since they only store curated content.
I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I think it’s the best you can do without centralized moderation.
we plan on having as many “web of trust” like features as possible at some point, like for example you could get recommended content / communities that users you upvote participate in, this can be implemented easily, and it’s very open and P2P.
but in our opinion it’s not technically possible to have moderation/discovery that is fully web of trust for a few reasons:
you need to bootstrap from somewhere, you can’t just start “syncing/downloading” content. randomly, and then start manually liking/disliking stuff to build your personal web of trust from scratch. people dont want to download gbs of data and like/dislike stuff for hours to get started.
pure web of trust is easily gameable, you can make millions of bots that upvote each other to rank themselves to gain better rank in other people’s web of trust.
pure web of trust doesn’t have DDOS resistance, someone can completely DDOS the gossip network and prevent you from ever bootstrapping a real web of trust.
also assuming someone would develop a scalable, ux friendly and ddos resistant pure web of trust algorithm, it probably would have a UX that’s very different from reddit (and message boards in general), and our goal is to recreate the UX of reddit/message boards exactly, because we like them. The thing we don’t like about them is the centralization/commercialization/etc. For example we don’t like that reddit killed apollo/rif, we don’t like that they ban very popular subs that a lot of people enjoy, etc.