How to Run a New Reddit

What’s old is new again. Some people want to make a bunch of money, turns its community on itself, causes outrage. It doesn’t matter for them one bit if reddit becomes irrelevant in a few years time. They’ve already made bank.

Good for them.

Bit of a shame for anyone enjoying such a website.

The core problem is that the incentives completely clash. If you are a VC-fuelled company, potentially looking for an IPO, it makes sense to track everything about your users. It makes sense to force feed them ds wherever possible. It makes sense to kill your API (which often was a key to get traction, but that’s besides the point).

The Solution

While the whole thing of a decentralised system “sounds” good, I don’t see it. I would love to be proven wrong.

Instead, how about this?

Start one organisation, that has the database. And an API. This must be a non-profit!

A second company can be a normal profit-seeking company, which makes a sleak website and phone apps and what not, but it is only using the API of the non-profit. All data and users are stored there!

The second company has the website that users see, the name that normal users know. They can advertise or charge users money or whatever they need to do.

As usage grows, other people/companies can build other websites/apps using this API.

Non-profit should be able to gather some donations. As time goes by, commercial entities profiting from the API use could make some donations.

But it must be non-profit. It can’t be driven by a profit motive.

The second one can, sure. Hopefully it does it well, both for users and for investors. But if it pulls a reddit, all the data is still available and it can continue to thrive with other frontends.

NSFW/Spam/…?

First off, while I’m not suggesting making a direct replica of reddit, I could still imagine something similar to subreddits. These different areas can be tagged to be adult only etc.

Fighting spam is a biggie. I obviously don’t have all the answers in this stupid rant, but this isn’t a new problem.

We now have amazing AI, apparently. Let them weed out the spam/illegal shit.

These are obviously tricky things to fix. But it’s nothing new.

Bla bla

Wikipedia seems to work as a non-profit. This reddit-replacement is much more write-heavy / interactive , but come on?! People in it for the tech should love this challenge, no?

All I’m saying is: replacing reddit with another glorious startup team with hearts of gold is not a solution. That is, if you’re looking to solve the problem for the people.