This may not be a bold prediction, but I imagine that more and more fake users will continue to exist on reddit. No action will be taken to remove bots that are used by governments, marketers, researchers, and soon script kiddies. Reddit employees will know that this is a massive problem, but the business will not want to do anything to stop user growth and jeopardize the value of their platform and its size. Most real people won't know how frequently they are talking to bots, and conversations will be drawn down into the gutter. Within 5 years, 50% of all posts and users will be bots.
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Well said. Good content contributes a lot.
You're right too that niche communities are less inviting targets. This isn't really surprising since the 90s vision of the internet was always a decentralized place where people run their own site/blog without large, centralized platforms. We know how this largely turned out with a few sites/companies dominating the internet. There are engineering and economic reasons why centralized systems will always be more efficient, but those who seek freedom and privacy will prefer the decentralized systems.
I don't know what the solution to this is for communities like phuks if a larger community develops. Besides the engineering and economic forces that push for centralization, there might also be an element of selection bias in these communities too whereby mainstream sites attrack more casual users.
I did not know Steemit had that feature, that's pretty interesting. I think there are some issues with it though, paid votes are not going to attract someone who hasn't thrown their lot in with the site. Nobody is going to put money in if they're on the fence. I think it also places an emphasis on the voting system, whereas to me, the voting system should only really be there to handle post sorts. In our case, we have a couple of extra things like the sub creation and captcha limits to deal with alts though.
I actually brought up the idea of a crypto based decentralised video host to @InnocentBystander in the hooktube/youtube discussion. Paying content creators with coins created by views with the transaction fee going to the site. Obviously there are a ton of problems in getting something like that to work.
There is a decentralised aggregator called Aether. The only issue with it is it has a client, so its growth is always going to be limited because it's a hassle. Decentralised networks can often be slow, and depending on what the network actually is, could be harder to make changes and maintain in the same way you could with a normal site.
If we were to implement anything crypto based here, it would probably be the ability to tip users in something like dogecoin, in sort of the same way that Reddit gold works. I know pembo has brought up crypto tipping before in the past.