> I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."

I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site.

A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit and start working on a site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it gets several hundred posts/comments a day and is progressing steadily. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, send me an email at the address listed in the blog post and I'll be happy to give you one.

This sounds exactly like the kind of Reddit alternative we need. Most competitors right now seem to think Reddit's biggest problem is their policy against user harassment and hate speech (even though this is barely enforced at all).

Just based on your blog post, you seem really in tune with what the real problems with Reddit (and social media as a whole) are in 2019.

It looks interesting. Your blog says it has "Limited tolerance, especially for assholes." I'd like to ask you a question that would help elucidate this ethos. Let's say a user makes a comment about how illegal immigrants should be deported, and another user calls the first racist in response. How would the site respond & why?

It's impossible to answer questions like that. Depending on a lot of factors, the response could be anything from "do absolutely nothing" to "ban both users".

Community management and moderation aren't simple, black-and-white decisions. Anyone that claims they are has never been involved in doing it at a meaningful level.

This is actually exactly the response I was hoping for. Any community that responds in a black-or-white manner on a cultural issue like this one would be completely incapable of supplanting a global site like Reddit.

What if there are no other factors?

User A, new account, posts a single comment: "Illegal immigrants should be deported."

User B, new account, posts a single comment in reply: "You're a racist."

What does Tildes do?

It's not impossible to answer that. And the answer will tell us a lot about what Tildes wants to be.

Love what I've read so far and have sent an invite request. Thank you for your work, I was beginning to lament that all social media would fall into the toxic shitpost aggregator turned VC cash machine role.

(I totally miss my old BBS too...)

Do you have any screenshots of what the website looks like? I'm curious. I'm not asking you to make them just for me, I want to know if they already exist. If they don't and you don't want to make them, that's fine.

There were some at https://imgur.com/c7UWQa9

That screenshot looks pretty bad, since they made the site fairly thin, but not quite thin enough that the sidebar was hidden.

Here's one of the top of my home page right now, in the Solarized Light theme (there are a few other options too): https://i.imgur.com/GbfpnT1.png

The irony of that comic is that reddit had more traffic than Digg when Digg died. The "mass influx" from Digg to reddit wasn't all that massive, because most of those people were already reddit users too.

About 5 years ago, Reddit hired a crypto guy, Ryan X Charles, to make something called "reddit notes"[0] that they could never explain[1]. He wasted his time re-implementing bitcoin in Javascript[2], and was eventually fired.[3]

I guess you could say they were already early pioneers of the "cryptocurrency scam flameout" pattern.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditnotes

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/reddit-notes/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_re...

[3] http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/reddit-notes-is-not-going-to-h...

But why not mine bitcoins client-side with millions of mobile users? (/s)

If that would mean staying independent and free from economic/political interference, why not?

That would require Bitcoin to be free from economic/political interference first, and given the the block size debacle and concentration of power with the Chinese miners, that's not the case.

Because users like their batteries?

Because trying to do crypto properly in a language without integers is recipe for disaster?

(on the crypto note) is something like https://steemit.com/ what you are envisioning?

It does seem like we are stuck in a cycle where we are super into platforms until they become large and too beholden to investors, then we swap. Some kind of truly community driven (open source) federated service does seem like a real answer to this problem. Maybe we will all end up on Mastodon-like services pretty soon.

Steemit is interesting to me, but I'm not sure I'd want something that's so focused on users making money to replace reddit.