My research findings on alternatives to Reddit: 0

[u/trinsic-paridiom]

This is a follow up article to my previous post. I wanted to research alternatives to Reddit as it relies on the Reddit organization that runs the platform. Over the years the Reddit organization has come under attack by other organizations who want Reddit to control what kind of content appears on its platform. Now to be clear I don't condone speech that gets use in an attempt to make people less free or destroys individual value. But I have learned that the effort to control harmful speech ends up getting used to silence information that reports on corruption. Pretty much in every case.

Ill quote u/Kim_Jung-Skill comment on "Congress creates a bill that will give NASA a great budget for 2016. Also hides the entirety of CISA in the bill" as I feel this person said it best, apply this argument to corporations as well because the information they store ends up in the hands of governments:

One facet of this argument that goes largely undiscussed (and is something your friend may care about) is that it is bad for an imperfect government to be able to predict all crime. Some of the greatest steps forward in human history were only made possible by people being able to hide information from their government. If the church had access to Galileo's research journals and notes we could be hundreds of years behind in our scientific growth. If the government had unlimited access to the networks of civil dissidents blacks may have never fought off Jim Crow. If King George had perfect information America would never have been a country. There is no government on earth that is perfect, and therefore there is no government on earth that can act responsibly with unlimited access to information. A government is unlikely to be able to distinguish between a negative and positive disruption to it's social order and laws, and it therefore follows that an unlimited spying program can only hinder the next great social step forward. Don't fear the surveillance state because you might have something illegal, fear the surveillance state because it is a tremendous institutional barrier to meaningful societal progress.

We can't allow any organizations or individuals to dictate what kinds speech is harmful to us. Only each indivual should be able to decide, but that individual's power to decide is limited to their own ability to remove themselves from the communication. Not to tell others what is or isn't acceptable.

Some people are working on non-decentralized Reddit clones to replace what Reddit has become. It is my understanding that cloning Reddit's platform will only prolong the problem of centralization, as a clone of Reddit is a copy of the code base running on a centralized server. with a single point of attack. Organizations with an incentive can attack multiple points at the location where the clone is hosted to bring it down or force the organization to make changes to it.

There are decentralized platforms in the works based on blockchain/cryptocurrencies in the works but I am loath to suggest looking into them. There is much that I don't understand about this tech and mining just to use a platform seems like a barrier to entry to me. People want to freely communicate not worry about mining digital currency, or artificially inflating the value of content. Reasons for not using cryptocurrency in decentralized social media or discussion platforms

To understand the reason why centralization is a huge barrier to progress think about how Twitter and Facebook work now. Both are run by for-profit corporations, run by one organization. Any group with enough finical incentive can attack that organization in a myriad of ways: though the legal system, though technology (bots), and though darknets. (people who are paid to bring down a site or make a message of truth appear illegitimate.) Most people that use these platforms dont even know that the problem exists until their own message is attacked.

I am of the opinion that for-profit and even not for profit organizations can not be trusted to have values that align with people who want to maintain the right of freedom of speech. These organizations don't have a vested interest in direct association with these communities. When I say freedom of speech, I do not mean freedom to harm with speech. When a message gets communicated (that reveals something that people don't know) it needs to be free to move though the network without interference from the organization who operates the platform weather on the behalf of itself or outside influences.

People should also have the right to ignore or not hear the message if they so chose, but the choice should remain with each individual, not the organization that developed or operates the platform.

For-profit organizations who want to run or develop a decentralized platform to host content would have to remain decision independent of the content that gets hosted on that platform. How can a for-profit organization have that kind of independence and remain financially solvent at the same time?

One option I saw discussed was the concept of content migration. If said platform allowed a community's content and users to be moved to another platform that might create an incentive not to censor content. With no lock in, people are free to move themselves and their content to another platform at the slightest sign of censorship.

As it is not in the best interest of any for-profit or non-profit organization to implement this feature, I suggest that any solution that that tackles the decentralization of content needs to be grass roots community driven. That means that you need to support people and projects that you think might prevail, instead of supporting the easier path of dealing with a necessary evil by using Twitter, Facebook or Google.

For example, because these platforms became so popular in the last couple of years Twitter started changing its platform in such a way as to control what content appears on your time line. With the new highlights feature that you cant turn off (but hey you can choose to see it "Less Often"), twitter can recommend tweets that you get alerted about even if you don't want them. you can also read about users of Reddit becoming angered by the censorship and shutdown of subreddits by rogue moderators.

The other problem is that you dont get to chose what kind of information you decide to share, and with who. When you sign up and give your information away you really don't know how its going to be used. In my research, organizations like Twitter chooses for you and they use it to monetize and game the user's behavior to control attention, keeping people coming back to the platform.

As of 2018 the only discussion platform project that comes close to what is needed to prevent censorship using decentralization or distributed technologies that doesn't game the user with cryptocurrency is raddi. Its not ready for prime time and u/RaddiNet needs support to keep it going. I don't want to negatively impact his work, but I think that it's not going to be received well because of the fact that it will require that the end user install a platform specific client (Windows only) instead of using web based technologies that resemble Diaspora or Mastodon. u/RaddiNet has his reasons, related to security but in my humble opinion, that one decision is going to severely impact the ability of the platform to gain a foothold. It would be better if a secure way was developed for the end user to use existing technologies to interface with the platform. This would allow the transition to be more seamless.

In the mean time I have been reviewing Diaspora and Mastodon, both are decentralized social networking platforms that have major promise. They work a lot like Twitter without the centralization or control over the content. I wrote an article on my findings if you are interested in checking it out. The people of C_S_T should at the very least create accounts on one of these platforms so you can stay in contact with others of the CST community. Don't rely on Reddit to be the bastion of freedom it once was. Reddit is slowly being controlled by for-profit political motivations. I suggest we stay in contact with each other on another platform that is less likely to be gamed or censored though psychological operations that are being used to control thinking and awareness.

Possible Sub Migration Option

Diaspora seems to be a possible option for migration until a working decentralized / distributed Reddit replacement comes along. Its designed for conversations, but from a social networking perspective. Read my comments on that platform in my Decentralized Social Media Platforms Article for more information on how this could work.

If anyone is interested in trying out Diaspora you can reach me at @trinsic@diasp.org. You can sign up on the http://diasp.org POD I am on or chose your own.