Reddit-like forum

[xaur]

Recent events showed that there is one attack/sabotage vector on Reddit: create threads, trigger a discussion, wait people to spend time and attention, delete threads. Our moderators cannot block such attack because it's impossible to disallow users from deleting their stuff.

This is a good opportunity to think about a Reddit replacement that would also address this and other long standing issues with Reddit, some of them:

• post and comment vote manipulation from possibly any account
• posts and comments can be deleted by author without admin approval even if content was generated in response
• discussions can get hidden by downvotes (possible from external forces) and cannot be shown or snapshotted without javascript
• covert quoting bots and covert promoters litter the subreddit
• groups of randos pop out of nowhere and generate FUD around a small issue or even fake FUD
• no way to backup all good content generated by the community

A replacement can look like Reddit and be based on Politeia, with at least the following properties:

• spam resistance
  • registration has a small DCR fee
  • posts may or may not require a fee -- open to discussion (perhaps just the reg fee will cut most of the junk)
• data can be fetched and audited by anyone by just cloning the Git repo
• posts and comments cannot be deleted without admin approval
  • this protects from attention grab attack
• posts and commens cannot be hidden with downvotes
• transparent censorship

Besides Politeia, another interesting possible foundation is Matrix protocol. It may give opportunities to deeply integrate with chats. I don't know Matrix to see if the solution built on it can satisfy all fundamental requirements.

Discussions:

• 2019-01-21: good and bad sides of Reddit
• 2019-02-11: Decred's community spaces - a crude analogy

[xaur]

Another instance of comm data loss:

https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/an4b6z/forbes_no_more_trading_or_listing_fees_decred/

Either someone deleted his post, or his account, or Reddit deleted his account. It doesn't matter. What matters is Reddit content is ephemeral. Subreddit moderators have no power to forbid this nonsense.

[xaur]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/993hno/bitcoin_core_0170_is_almost_ready_release/

[–][deleted] -36 points (126 children)

That one comment even (quite ironically) took down with it a few heavily upvoted comments from prominent BTC figures. That comment tree cannot be archived because it is collapsed and cannot be shown unless you turn on javascript or log in.

[xaur]

As discussed here, the forum-like discussion can be either hosted separately from the main/proposals Politeia instance, or be a special space on it.

[nottrunner]

👍🏾

[s-ben]

Very much like this idea.

[atvonsc]

Love it.

[xaur]

There were ideas posted (here and here) to have stakeholder voting features integrated in Reddit-like forum, like signaling in favor of a certain thread or voting in polls.

The idea is worth exploring, but I suggest to limit the scope of the initial "Reddit-like forum" implementation to just a communication platform with simple thread and comment up/down votes. Ticket voting requires signing messages with your private keys. This will require careful design and programming in both forum software and client signing software (Decrediton/dcrwallet/politeiavoter). Such voting should be taken into consideration (e.g. making data storage general enough to add voting later) but not actively pursued initially.

Any ideas related to stakeholder ticket signaling I suggest to collect in #33.