## 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.