[HN Gopher] Show HN: Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal t...
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Show HN: Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward
Quality Comments
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with
Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The
main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and
discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it
is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality
discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is
today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any
"forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very
hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto.
(2) HN is basically a single subreddit mostly geared towards tech
and startups. It'd be nice to have an equivalent of "subreddits"
Zsync's version of subreddits are tags. You can tag your posts.
Instead of viewing a subreddit for, let's say neuroscience, you
view the tag for neuroscience. This eliminates the need to submit
the same post multiple times to many different subreddits. The
core challenge is incentivizing/rewarding high quality content (I
don't believe in censorship). Users can have custom avatars and
links to their personal website and Twitter next to their username,
which I believe provides a little more incentive to write a more
thoughtful comment vs. your post merely showing up next to an
anonymous handle with some autogenerated alien avatar (which you're
free to still do if you prefer). Anyone who connects an ethereum
wallet to their account will also have a (non-invasive) "Tip"
option at the bottom of their comment, allowing anyone to directly
tip commenters cryptocurrency (no middleman taking a cut here),
offering a financial incentive. I was thinking of some other ideas
to use crypto to reward quality, but I wouldn't want to implement
anything that could be gamed or exploited ultimately defeating its
purpose. Open to ideas though. In the future, we could use ML to
offer options to sort comments in more useful ways, such as by
sorting by "most insightful". We could determine based on your
upvote history the type of content you'd be most likely to enjoy.
Anyways I admittedly didn't implement this ML stuff yet, those are
just ideas for future improvement. Anyways would love to hear your
thoughts. What do you think of this idea, and what would it take to
accomplish its mission? Regardless of whether my little project
amounts to anything or not, I hope something like this will be made
to exist. And thank you HN for not deteriorating in quality even
remotely to the extent that Reddit has. It was really sad watching
Reddit devolve into what it is today (way before all this recent
stuff). We can do better, and now is a better time than ever to
shake up the status quo and start envisioning what better platforms
for online communities can look like. [1]
https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...
Author : JSavageOne
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-06-12 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zsync.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (zsync.xyz)
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Zsync is already a thing.
|
| http://zsync.moria.org.uk/
| renewiltord wrote:
| Man, what a blast from the past. There was once a time that I
| had to use zsync or jigdo to get an Ubuntu image, almost two
| decades ago. Now, the whole thing shows up in seconds.
| Wirelessly. Magical.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I saw it just before someone started spamming it. I like the idea
| of posts that can have multiple tags.
|
| Will it scale?
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >In the future, we could use ML to offer options to sort comments
| in more useful ways, such as by sorting by "most insightful". We
| could determine based on your upvote history the type of content
| you'd be most likely to enjoy
|
| Honestly, you lost me here. I am so sick of algorithms trying to
| serve me what they think I want. I'd much rather be able to just
| say "Give me X" and get X, not "But also you might enjoy Y". It
| also seems ripe for abuse further on down the line whenever money
| begins to be a problem and advertisers are breathing down the
| site's neck.
|
| Additionally, as long as I'm just giving kneejerk personal
| opinions, I hate that all these reddit clones are copying the
| new-reddit "centered" setup with huge amounts of blank space on
| either side. I think you're right to be inspired by HN,
| especially when trying to foster more high-quality discussion-
| oriented content. Emphasize the text, let it take the whole
| screen!
| pvinis wrote:
| did someone find a way to mess this up? the first 15 entries I
| see are a link to `fxck.you`..
| jimsimmons wrote:
| You have zero innovations promoting quality.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| I have two slightly challenging comments, which I hope you will
| take as constructive prodding to clarify your thinking.
|
| Firstly, you have a bit of dissonance in your thinking that
| you'll need to clear up. You say lots of complementary things
| about HN and suggest that the quality is what you're aiming for.
| But you also say you "don't believe in censorship". Depending on
| what you mean by censorship (people have wildly different
| definitions!), you'll need to reconcile the fact that HN has
| relatively restrictive community guidelines, and very active
| moderation. Many people would credit the high quality of
| discussion to those things.
|
| Secondly, I think your "tags as subreddits" misses the point of
| subreddits. They're not a filtering mechanism for which links you
| want to see, they're a way to let users associate into small(er)
| communities where community norms, standards, shared experiences,
| running jokes, moderation expectations, and generally a community
| identity and spirit can develop.
| pstuart wrote:
| meh, I'm not impressed. You gloss over and dismiss high level
| issues with nothing more than hand-wringing.
|
| Disinformation and hate speech are real problems without easy
| solutions, but it doesn't mean that they should be disregarded as
| concerns.
|
| And as for politics, the evolution of the GOP has gone into whole
| new territory (cult-like), and it's beyond frustrating that
| there's zero room for _real_ discussion about it.
|
| Back to free speech: one of the reasons that HN is so wonderful
| is that "unacceptable speech" is _not tolerated_ here. That 's a
| feature, not a bug.
| EGreg wrote:
| I stopped reading at "Ethereum wallet". Sounds like a crypto scam
| to me.
|
| Just kidding! That is just the typical HN knee-jerk reaction when
| they see "ethereum wallet".
|
| Great job -- we need more alternatives that actually have good
| tokenomics. Would you open source this?
| nwienert wrote:
| The thing is this could easily be done without crypto - once
| again another braindead example of crypto still lacking any use
| case whatsoever and only appealing to fools.
|
| Just kidding (another example of a dumb HN comment you see on
| every crypto post).
|
| A few lines of code and you are accepting payments from any
| country on earth, totally decentralized and p2p! Also the site
| itself is much cleaner and faster than the others posted. Keep
| it up.
| timeon wrote:
| I stopped reading at article with "Andrew Tate is the latest
| victim of the Matrix...". No kidding.
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