I'm using tor, many people who care about privacy will be too. Gating signups by IP address seems archaic.
A blockchain ledger seems like the obvious solution for verifying important transactions like account sign-ups over distributed nodes, and it ties in nicely with your present proof-of-work voting system, in that you could use votes to generate hashes for your blockchain.
I assume you know about zerovoat - seems relevant.
Personally, I think the biggest hurdle with notabug is generating critical mass (I know you don't need that now, but you will). Foiling censorship/corruption via distribution is a great selling point, and really I think that's all you need - I'd be concerned about going too crazy with completely unproven systems for website operation, as they might repel users. There are a ton of users out there who are basically happy/familiar with a reddit-like system.
Agreed on most all points. Critical Mass is essential because my goal is to disrupt reddit to the same extent reddit rekt digg.
This is why I'm sticking pretty close to the open source reddit user experience for nearly everything.
Using a blockchain for repetitional management would be IMO more different from the user's typical experience of reddit than what I currently have, it's a big barrier to entry I think.
Great thing about notabug is different systems can coexist and that's really the point.
Using a blockchain for repetitional management would be IMO more different from the user's typical experience of reddit than what I currently have, it's a big barrier to entry I think.
I imagined this working mostly in the background, no big change to user experience, apart from delays in verifying some functions.
This is why I'm sticking pretty close to the open source reddit user experience for nearly everything.
IMO, having almost everyone anonymous with the immediate ability to vote on the same content unlimited times is departing significantly from the reddit experience.
The decentralization forces a tradeoff.
To effectively decentralize the site, each peer has to know everything necessary to enforce the ruleset.
This creates an inherent conflict with privacy if you want to restrict votes to people/accounts.
If everyone submitted government IDs and attached them to their account for instance, that would be one way to get closer to a one vote per person model.
A milder form is you could have a centralized private service that verified accounts as coming from unique IP's at least. If you don't want to share those IP's you then have to trust that provider to be a fair arbiter of alts.
Without any additional effort though that would require all votes to be publicly associated with accounts. You could have this trusted entity become the steward of private ballots and move even closer to the traditional model....
All of that, and the current system can all coexist over the same content network. And that's what notabug is. I start with the simplest, authority-free case, but it can coexist with multiple centralized providers of services on the same content network, with the same account base.
But most importantly (IMO) in the longer term the distribution costs (the really expensive part once hitting critical mass) will be spread out amongst peers, making it much cheaper for individuals to offer those sorts of services cheaply.
Edit:
This is why I talk about eventually assimilating other social networks like voat. I aim to enable all the features of those networks even if they require centralization in such a way that the cost burden can be decentralized.
(post is archived)