Document All The Things

Log

Hackathon Day 1, July 31, 2015

In just two days of invites, we've managed to gather 59 people to join the Slack channel!

Priorities:

• Establish minimal product plan, including mockups (subject to change, of course, depending on technical choices and UI decisions - the goal is to just come up with something minimal that provides a good direction for the UI).

• Research technologies, and establish basic technologies for a prototype (technologies are subject to change - there are a lot to choose from, and we haven't had time to research them all yet).

• Establish basic business plan. Although the network is decentralized, there are still lots ways to earn money, because each node can accept payments. The business plan doesn't have to be final, but rather more of an example of the way a business might be able to earn money from running a node.

Brainstorms and thoughts

Thoughts from Niran:

• Using money for upvotes isn't really a feature. It's not necessary to decentralize reddit. What is wrong with reddit that money fixes?

• Subreddits, not tags. Tags mean one submission has several audiences with one comments section. Subreddits divide comments in very useful ways. The moderators define not just the submissions, but the culture of the comments.

• Users should be able to pick their own moderators for a subreddit. A subreddit is a topic and an ethos, but that's orthogonal to who the enforcers of the topic and ethos are.

• Maybe each moderator is effectively a publisher of the entire subreddit. Filtering out garbage content happens on their machine, assisted by rule sets like user bans, anonymity bans, trusted commenters, and trusted fellow moderators to import rule sets from. They publish their results to a decentralized content store, like IPFS or Swarm.

• I think it's going to be useful to think of the backends of decentralized applications as two parts: live data that users send to participate in the system, and servers that collect that data, index it in useful ways, and serve it over read -only APIs. It probably isn't feasible for each client to piece together all the votes and submissions to generate a subreddit, but as long as anyone can launch a server that does that, the promise of decentralization is maintained. If the server relays submissions of votes, comments and submissions to the decentralized backend that the system runs on, this also avoids the dependency on a local daemon that many decentralized tools. Hosting one of these servers is a small to medium opportunity for profit.

• Ethereum, Whisper and Swarm/IPFS. Using the best toolkit for decentralized applications is a huge advantage. It makes it less likely that someone will start a new decentralized reddit project that isn't a benevolent fork of this one. One of the huge advantages of decentralized apps is that if built right, the user base never splits even with competition. Each competitor builds on top of what already exists to benefit from the existing user base. That won't happen if your system is hard to build on.

• You probably only need a blockchain (Ethereum's, hopefully) for a tiny fraction of the functionality. The identity of each subreddit probably needs to be on a blockchain so it's easy to pull down all of them. Once you have a subreddit identity, you can just listen for people broadcasting data for that subreddit over Whisper: moderator candidates, new comments, posts and votes, the location of historical indices, etc.