Libre – an Anonymous Social Experiment Without Likes, Followers, or Ads

being a haven for sharing very illegal content is probably how it's going to evolve... unfortunately

Also no freedom, with all your content restrictions.

Why are your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy a collection of empty bullet points?

It currently leaks cross-site user tracking information to Google (www.gstatic.com).

Oh, yes, you did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44656840

I've seen a ton of projects like this. It will get deluged with spam and shitposts and people will stop caring once the novelty wears off and leave once it becomes a cesspool. Probably for 4chan which at least has a culture and established userbase. And porn.

All of us humans are fundamentally racist, spammy, and have some form of hate in us. Depending on the state of society, it can suppress or bring it out. Anonymous boards like this bring out the worst in all of us.

Just as the current administration has catered to our bigoted, racist selves. Anonymous boards have more or less the same effect.

But what's wild is that when you say it always turns into 4chan, everyone knows that it means something bad, something bs.

the fact that 4chan has such a bad reputation is absolutely valid though, there is no denying of it, and maybe these other experiments also prove it that such reputation maybe exists because of the reason that the underlying system is flawed regarding anonymity, but that's just my hunch.

I like anonymity as an ideal, but 4chan (anonymity irl) not so much...

Seems legit.

It seems pretty clear to me no one that cares is on the other end of this.

If you've got this space where dozens or hundreds of people all have a high overlap of favorable content, but there's this one turd who comes in and downvotes everything, always... he's not just a little different, and he's not assimilating. He's trying to sabotage. If this was visible to a moderator, that moderator could decide he doesn't belong to the group. I don't advocate that he no longer be able to view the content, but maybe his votes just stop counting. Maybe he's no longer able to post content of his own (would be up to the moderator, I think, perhaps his content was always good enough, but his voting is counterproductive).

I think that on places like reddit they avoided this functionality because it would give moderators too much control over their communities, and outsiders would be unable to come in and eventually take over and force the original group out. Being admins, they could of course have done this anyway, but it would require them to be heavy-handed and obvious.

There are quite a lot of message boards and imageboards, large and small, which check the same boxes. Many of them have not gotten enough traction to catch the attention of the mainstream (e.g. lainchan), and have a distinct vibe.

I think that as soon as your userbase expands into a representative sample of the Internet user population, your platform's culture will become increasingly similar (i.e. "average out") to the largest platforms, e.g. 4chan.

Serious question is how often would you tolerate if those randomly displayed posts are absolutely out of your interests? Would you click or skip? Plenty of fish (Canadian-based dating site), programmed by Markus Frind, had a function: during onboarding you could choose types of people you think you prefer (e.g. brunette/blond etc.) and if you haven’t clicked later on them, algo had started to show different results…

That's a long way of agreeing with you that there is positive in the duration bias of HackerNews and other sites.

Of course anything can be hijacked, and metrics proverbially tend towards becoming targets (and hence a dumb arms race), but the general concept of the value of curation is sound.

I also do have some methods baked in for doing exploration. "Epsilon greedy" is a common simple approach where x% of the recommendations are purely random. I do a bit more of a linear thing where I rank all the posts by how many times they've been recommended, then I pick a percentage 0 - 100, then I throw out the top x% most popular (previously recommended) items. that also gives you some flexibility to try out different distributions for the x% variable.

The source is at https://github.com/jacobobryant/yakread

You've just invented much-hated engagement-maxxing The Algorithm.

So the most reliable way to get your music known is to have your personal network buy/comment on your music or share it elsewhere. There's _lots_ of music on there that is fantastic that nearly nobody has purchased.

The same goes for indie games on steam. Other people will buy your game if it has enough good reviews (past some threshold) to get a thumbs up icon. So whenever anyone launches a game they need to do networking, there's a desperate scramble to get their followers to review the game so that it reaches critical mass where non-network people start paying attention to it.

Algorithms can (I think) detect similar styles, but style is not quality, and what people look for in new works is the parts that they do differently and therefore cannot be correlated by algorithm.

I don't think there's any way about it other than getting people to try some things purely randomly, even if most of those are awful. Maybe some way to reward people for taking a look at random selections?

I'm building such a system for prizeforge and am several more steps ahead on this solution. You need a decent background in probability and a more robust understanding of what a "good" outcome is to work on this kind of thing. https://positron.solutions/careers if you do Rust and care a whole lot about this problem and can deal with the challenges we're going to have with PrizeForge.

Personally, I would just mix posts with a hot sorting, with different time spans, like 24h, 4h, 1h, one third of each.

Or maybe display two time spans on the front page.

Personally, I use many multi reddit, like 15 of them, I don't see other platforms offering that.

Have you ever browsed /new with showdead turned on? A large fraction of the submissions are either spam/SEO, self-promotion, or just plain off topic.

And yet those same repercussions are the reason why social media is full of inoffensive slop. No one wants be the one who get fired for leaking their employer's unethical practices, after all.

Pseudonymity is not enough, sadly. Given enough time, you'll leak enough data points to be identified.

> Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world

The idea that the "internet" and the "real world" are separate has been outdated for a long time.

Perhaps the more fake and curated the internet becomes, the more people will act out when given the chance?