I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is:

1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it

2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the various information sources and present options that users find interesting is the biggest reason lurkers&voters (90% of it's users) keep returning.

You missed the most important point:

3. Discussions

Try discussing anything on a random website.

Discussions, just like on HN, are usually better than the linked content.

Honestly, I have a strong interest in US, Chinese, European, and now Russian politics, and how they relate to the future of the humanity and all life on earth. It is clear that most real innovation happens much more quickly and decisively if centralized under a government that decides to spend a lot of money on research, so those are discussions and reading materials that I have to find on places like reddit. Ultimately, many of the decisions and things occurring today, while political, have deep personal philosophical roots. Discussions in particular spaces regarding that simply can't happen here due to the rules; rules that differ on different subreddits and for each community I agree with.

Reddit is the best place to find those, IMO.

I wouldn't be too sure about the statement that innovation happens faster under centralization (especially government). Rather I'd guess you get certain types of innovations.

How many years after we went to space using a central authority did it take before private enterprise could do it? How much did private enterprise depend on the technological development that arose from central and shared commitments to scientific development in that space?

We can have the same discussions about the NIH and new drug development (since most drugs simply can't make money). The internet, chips, Google itself was started as a federally funded post-grad project.

Things move much faster when we devote shared resources into risk taking that cannot make money. It might sound like waste, but government spending, I surmise, is what creates great economies. This occurs because technological advancement, especially those that can't obviously be exploited for financial gain in the market, are the true drivers of our economy.

Either way, we will soon begin to see who is right. There are several countries now competing with the US who were far behind when we went to our current model of low taxation, high free market. It should be interesting to see if their centralized scientific/technological systems outdo us over time.

And then no more. The real innovation happens today is more real and substantial. Whenever you use public fund even under dictatorship like Soviet Union and china today you just have a legitimacy issues - children vs space. I am on the space side but have Soviet Union got voyager ? And I also understand the stress NASA has.

You need both and totalitarianism never pay.

Clearly pure centralization doesn't work, and pure decentralization is chaos. The sweet spot is in between. Right now China seems to be in a better position than the US in that sense. They promote the same type of startups we have in Silicon Valley, and yet have an overarching centralized policy for the long term. In a way, the Chinese government acts as a sort of Facebook or Google.

Since you're interested in Russian politics I'd recommend checking out https://www.ridl.io/en/ if you haven't already. Online forums are great, and it's nice to combine that with some gatekeepered stuff

Please share some links to those materials. I’m interested in the same.

What I would recommend is that you spend some time on reddit and find them for yourself. Reddit has so many well-built communities, that it's difficult for me to suggest some. Even really vile parts of the site are good for understanding propaganda and how it works, and what it's saying today.

I've found that Reddit (in terms of content, not UI) has gotten somewhat better in recent years, while most discussion venues have either gotten much worse or gotten rid of commenting altogether.

In relative terms, it's superior to most of its alternatives (present site excluded, of course).

I really don't see much actual discussion on Reddit.

For all that it was a ghost town, if you could find some good conversation hosts / moderators on Google+, that site had some really good discussions. Probably mostly because it didn't try to scale.

(Yes, this was a hugely subjective experience, and depending on who you did or didn't follow, quality varied dramatically. The core G+ user group was probably ~100k or so English-literate participants, of whom a good 10-20k have ended up on the Pluspora Diaspora pod.)

I've both tried to start and gone looking for conversation on Reddit. The site conspires against this, in several ways.

If you're aware of specific subs that really shine and aren't afraid to name them, I'd appreciate it. (I can completely understand not wanting to out good discussion.)

Mind I'm contrasting discussion with merely good information, which Ask Historians, Ask Science, and a small set of other subs manage to achieve, with draconian (and much needed & welcomed) moderation.

I didn’t see a lot of discussion at Reddit. I saw echo chambers. I have since deleted my account and abandoned Reddit as a result. If I want focused discussion I find somewhere without a visible vote marker like HN or IRC.

Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field.

See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc.

This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

And the obverse is r/sanfrancisco with moderation that has turned the sub into a sunset travel pic slide show punctuated by golden gate bridge pictures. What a wasted opportunity for something interesting. And it is leaking into r/bayarea ruining it as well.

Interesting phenomenon. It's eerily similar to r/Boston.

You overestimate the skills of moderators... I doubt very much that true experts in their fields would spend any time doing moderation Reddit... most likely, people doing that would be recent graduates trying to learn and impart their recently gained knowledge upon laymen.

There are several subs I'm aware of which do seem to garner expert-level moderation.

The Asks -- Science, Historians, possibly Economists (I'm trying to decide there -- the mods talk expertise, though quality IMO lags). Several of the Fitness subs are quite good. Various technical subs attract high-quality contributors, and the CSS support sub (specifically for styling old-style Reddit custom stylesheets) is simply superb. I've dug into energy topics, and though there's a bit of BS flung about, there's also quality expertise.

Posting online actually is a form of shingle-hanging and getting a sense of issues people are facing in the real world. There's value to that.

I wouldn't use science as a paragon for moderation, they were involved in a huge vote manipulation controversy just last year

/r/askscience is well moderated.

Within a narrowly defined range of acceptable debate (see: Noam Chomsky)

I feel like I've seen more of the opposite (piss poor moderation) than the good. This is why on your average subreddit, the average quality of discussion is extremely low, with the top comments being low-effort one liners. In worse cases, sometimes the moderators because straight up authoritarian, censoring opposing views even if they're well-reasoned and thought out (any politics-related subreddit).

I'm not defending reddit at all, however to be fair certain topics are almost guaranteed to have very heated comment threads, politics for example.

And 3. Quality Control As problematic as the voting system is, in the end the quality of the contribution is better vetted than any Google result. I often search even for products only on reddit first to get real customer insights and contradicting options than the overoptimized Google and Amazon reviews.

Also, a (mostly) consistent user interface.

As long as you use old.reddit.com.

Do you know if old.reddit doesn't do the horrible trick the "normal" Reddit does when you hit the browser's back button, where it fucking reloads the page or something so you get up to the top of the page instead of to the part of the page where the link you'd clicked was, so you could go to the comments? Specially on mobile, that makes me hate Reddit!! Trying on desktop, old.reddit seems to not do that.

You can just go to preferences and disable redesign, no need to change the url itself.

I'm faintly surprised reddit's redesign didn't kill it, like Digg's did.

There have to be some folks there fully aware of the dark-pattern hell of their redesign, and smart enough to keep old.reddit running to appease the people who appreciate what the old style offers. And I hope they keep it up! Reddit is pretty much the last forum I frequent other than here, and the day they kill off the older version is the day I stop visiting.

And disable subreddits css.

Which contributes to the easy of use/good user experience factor

You don't come there for because "it has a consistent user interface". You come there because "it's easy to use!" (and you find it easy because it's consistent, like you said)

> Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder

So let's fix that?

I don't know how much easier it can get than it already is.

See https://www.netlify.com/

Basically, just put a bunch of html/css files in a GitHub repo, then use the above page to let Netlify publish that on the net... it can even set up DNS for you so you can your own domain.

If that's still too hard, you can use a drag-and-drop option: https://app.netlify.com/drop

Just drop a folder with your website and you're done.

That seems appropriate for people who understand terms like “continuous deployment” and “serverless functions”, but I thought we were discussing a far, far more widespread audience. Nerds can set up websites with just an ssh password - we need something for the remaining 99.9%

Is there a way for doing that, just instead of using html/css files, you'd use a docker image?

You don't even need Netlify. You can host basically any static sites directly on GitHub. I've got one pure HTML/CSS site, six React apps, and two Jekyll sites running on GitHub Pages.

What are the best current options for 'creating your own website'? Are we talking primarily blogging, or are we seeking a more general solution? As a geek, my first instinct is github pages, but that’s far from user-friendly, as-is.

I guess, if we’re talking about 'creating your own website', we do literally mean any site, not just a limited subset. Clearly, server-side scripting is out of scope, so we're talking content rather than apps - so any form of HTML+Js+css, with a very accessible UI, and lots of 'templates' available for each of the three technologies.

The hard part is getting users to visit.

You can't upvote though. One of the nice things same Reddit is that you can go to a subreddit about something you want to learn about and sort for the most popular posts from last year (for example). Some kind of system like that for websites could become a killer feature.

You could treat a link to the post as a proxy for an upvote, and then rank posts based on how many other posts link to them. Of course you wouldn't be able to charge for this service so you'd have to sell ad space on the front page.

That would be an exceedingly thin signal. Very few posts will have incoming links, so you'll get very little scoring data.

The signal will be hugely susceptible to outlier bias -- The Post That Goes Viral, and generates a huge number of incoming links -- will dominate the rankings.

Because the signal is so thin, distorting and manipulation (through link farming) will be cheap and difficult to detect (a small number of links across a large number of sites).

Don't get me wrong: looking at incidental behaviour is useful, and can often be much more beneficial than direct actions. But remember that all of these signals are actually proxies for some ineffible quantity you're trying to measure, quality.

(The very definition of which should leave you crying on the floor after a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years....)

May minds have attempted this task. All have fail.

Your correspondent included.

(Small site, many moons ago, since surrendered its electrons back to the Great Disk in the Sky.)

If I may go on a tangent, I’ve thought a bit about the problem of link farms and how it might be addressed.

The problem is essentially this: since pagerank is basically the probability that a random walk through the link graph will end up on your site, linking back to yourself, and no other websites, gives a big boost to your pagerank because a random walk will get stuck on your site. Of course it’s easy to just ignore self-links, but you can get essentially the same effect through clique-like groups of websites and this can be more difficult to detect.

What’s interesting is that an algorithm based on how electrical current flows (so a link is a one-way resistor, i.e. a resistor in series with a diode) would not have this problem. Attaching a conductive loop to some point in a circuit does not change how current flows. Electrons don’t get stuck in loops because they don’t drift around randomly, they move from lower voltage to higher voltage.

Tangents are disallowed. But I'll grant you a hyperbolic trajectory.

Link graphs remind me of lightning descending leaders. If you can have a sense of charge potential between cloud and ground, there might be a circuit equivalent which drains largely self-referential link-farms.

Or is that rephrasing your description? My circuit physics / EE-fu is exceedingly weak.

"Or is that rephrasing your description?"

I think so? There is an obvious circuit equivalent where links are interpreted as one-way resistors. You get a charge potential automatically given the circuit and a choice of source / sink nodes (which you need to decide on anyway to apply pagerank).

The notion of a potential & sink seems to be key, and the idea that if you identify a collectively chained circuit, it cannot be both source and sink to itself. Which is what link farms (self-referral) or "mutual admiration societies" are. The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness. Since DNS obscures true ownership relations, that's a challenge.

Cluster analysis generally shows such relations though.

(I'm pretty sure these questions have generated multiple PhDs at Google.)

“The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness.” I’m not sure what you mean by this. The algorithm I'm describing doesn't require any data beyond what is already used by PageRank.

I have a feeling that you think the electrical potential must be defined by some ad-hoc method before applying an electrical algorithm, and this requires fancy techniques like cluster analysis and the like? This is not the case. Let me re-emphasize that you only need to specify the network of resistors (which is the link graph) and the source and sink, and then the potential is defined automatically in terms of those things (the same way as in physical circuits).

Thanks. I need to think about this.

The source and sink are arbitrary? Or do they need to correspond to some actual reality?

Hacker News starts to severely rate-limit replies in deeply nested threads so if you want to continue discussing this you can email me (email in profile).

In regards to the question, the latter. The source corresponds roughly to the E vector of the pagerank whitepaper. It's a set of websites that's axiomatically good. The pagerank paper suggested the Netscape home page and John McCarthy's homepage as examples, or alternatively making every website a source, although the last option is more prone to abuse. The sink is harder to find a good analogy for. I think a reasonable choice would be to add a new node to the graph representing the sink, and then connect every website via a directed resistor. Then websites could be ranked by how much current flows through the resistor to the sink.

Edit: By the way, upon thinking about this more, I've just realized that I'm not sure about the exact mechanism by which link farms boost pagerank. As far as I can tell there are two possibilities:

A. The original "stuck in a loop" explanation, by which you can illegitimately magnify legitimately earned rank.

B. With the every-page-as-source strategy, you can boost the rank of a website by creating a new website and linking to it, even if nothing links to the new website. Then the other extra links in the link farm just exist to avoid detection of this sort of thing. So you are illegitimately creating rank from scratch, rather than magnifying existing rank.

Admittedly the electrical circuit thing only addresses mechanism A. Mechanism B can be addressed by being more discriminating about which websites are in the source. That applies whether you use pagerank or the electrical thing.

My comment was a tongue in cheek reference to early Google. I can't tell if you missed the joke or just one upped me on a heroic scale.

The possibility had occurred.

And I'll claim my prize to the second ;-)

Isn't that PageRank? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank Or did I miss the subtle joke.

twenty years later we're back to Yahoo's directories

It’s a little more than just auth. Websites have different codes of conduct, different attitudes to humour/off topic content, and crucially different moderation and user safety policies. Remember on most random web forums you have no idea who can see your IP address (if anonymity is important).

Much of this is true on Reddit too, except mods seeing your IP address, but most of the important info is consistently in the subreddit sidebar.

"There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please"

But can your grandmother do this ... or just the common person?

With something like squarespace or any of the umpteen other design by wooden block site generator companies, or even Wordpress or Blogger... probably?

But those aren't free necessarily and they're detached from one another. The thing that's attractive about Reddit is:

1. It's free 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum

Websites are great for displaying information but they are not ideal for discussion

> 1. It's free

Blogger is free. LiveJournal is free. There's plenty of free offerings. Taken as an ecosystem, they are decentralized.

> 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join

The question was for a decentralized service. You can't really have everything under one site and be decentralized, because that one site can filter anything they want. I agree that people want that, but it wasn't the question.

> 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum

Not really part of the question, which was whether the average person can make a forum through a web page.

I think your points have merit, but they don't necessarily apply to the question that was posed, at least as I interpreted it and intended my response to apply to it.

> It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join

In theory you can find new subreddits starting from the main page, but it's more often because of people cross-posting things from somewhere you weren't previously aware existed.

There isn't any technical reason why a decentralized system couldn't work the same way. Basically just need a standard way to designate posts as permissible to repost on other sites with a link-back, and then a button on the site that makes it easy to do that.

> You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum

Small sites should go the other way and use an email as the login name (distinct from the public display name if you want). Then you don't even have a password, to sign in you get an email with a token in it. Paste the token or click the link from the email and you get a cookie that keeps you signed in. Lose the cookie or want to sign into another device and they send you another email.

Then "signup" takes five seconds, there's no login to forget (it's your email) and no password to forget (it doesn't even exist), so doing this on a hundred independent websites doesn't matter. You don't even have to use the email you actually read, you could use one exclusively for this type of account and then ignore anything that comes to it that isn't a site login token.

Once upon a time, yes.

It’s easier now than ever. The difference is that normal people don’t venture off the big websites now.

It is easy to set up a site, to blog and people can comment and you do not get drowned in auto spam?

Where and how?

...and enough people find your content to have a decent conversation without you having to learn marketing?

Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today.

(edit: it is now 23!)

Won't make me rich.

But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.

If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.

You won't get rich but you will be part of something.

I did, for 7 or 8 years. It was good for my writing skills (and fun) but it was a little like talking into a vacuum.

Activitypub is one solution. Write.as implements a blogging platform that federates with other platforms using the same protocol, such as Mastodon or Pleroma.

They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.

https://wordpress.com is relatively simple, prevents SPAM, and has tools to discover and follow other blogs.

WordPress has been around for quite a while, yes.

Seems like that'd be a good way to avoid the eternal September of the modern web. If "normals" are massing on Reddit and Facebook, maybe the wild west of independent websites is poised for a Renaissance?

It seems like some subreddits are already those jumping off points to other places.

r/sffpc has https://smallformfactor.net/forum/

r/JDM_WAAAAT has serverbuilds.net

Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.

Some might say the difference is that normal people are using the internet.

We could end up with an interesting solution with constraints like:

  - Self-hosted mostly-static sites
  - Open protocol

Maybe:

  - Own domain
  - Own site is portal for aggregated views
  - Extensions (Install events, chat, ...)
  - Rust (minimal RAM)

micro.blog is something like this, federation for personal blogs

> There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called

...newsgroups...

> and anyone can start one and run it as they please.

Could something like keybase be adapted for this purpose?

Why? Published an oauth API and let peeps go nut! I bet if some one like reddit did that I bet that there would be PHP modules and the like in days! There would be ways to cover the costs either by landing page or charging the child site per block of calls.

Accepting Github's, Reddit's and Google's Oauth allows you to have frictionless registration as well on any website.

Maybe a federation of blogs is needed? Everyone has their user pool so that a user on `blog-a` named `user` can post on `blog-b.com` as `[email protected]`.

Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.

that sounds like mastodon for blogs. you can have an account on the main site mastodon.social & message someone on a different instance. Your username will show up as [user]@mastodon.social. you can also follow people on other instances & in turn content from them & others on their instance will be easier to find on your own instance.