I’ve been building a web3 Reddit over the last couple months called https://zsync.xyz. It’s a community forum site where the goal is to foster deeper, high quality, in-depth discussion (if you just want 280 characters there’s already Twitter and Reddit) and ultimately be fully decentralized, open source, and community-run.
I have many frustrations with Reddit Hacker News, Twitter (poor comment quality) and other community platforms like Discord, Slack, etc (not indexable, atrocious thread design). Rather than continue to complain, I decided to build my own version of what I think an ideal community platform site should look like. Obviously there’s still a ton of work left to do, but I think this site is at least already better than Hacker News (minus lack of users and search).
Contributors will be rewarded with (ERC-20 / ethereum) tokens for quality posts/comments, which should serve as an incentive to writing high quality content. People can ask questions with bounties, rewarding commenters with the best answers (think StackOverflow where you can actually get paid).
The UI itself is also designed with the goal of rewarding higher quality content. For example, users can add links next to their usernames to their social media handles, personal blogs/newsletters, etc, as well as profile pictures. Users with their wallets connected get a “tip” button under their posts/comments that let anyone tip them if they like what you wrote. Comments will be sortable in a variety of ways. Long-term when the site reaches enough usage, AI and Machine Learning can be used to better show you the content you’re interested in.
Instead of subreddits, posts can be tagged with up to 5 tags (eg. #crypto #investing), and users can subscribe to multiple tags. The subreddit model is fine for communities intended to be private, but the problem is that each subreddit becomes a dictatorship, and it leads to having to pick which subreddits to post/cross-post in and fragmented comment sections.
Of course this is all still super early stages and nothing is set in stone yet.
In any case, check out the site at https://zsync.xyz. Register an account (can be done with ethereum wallet or Twitter if you don’t want to sign up by email, not that I would ever email you), and post in /p/introductions (or post wherever you want), and post any site feedback here. I’m posting dev updates here, and I wrote about the tech stack here. The token is not live yet, but it will be, and contributors will be airdropped and retroactively rewarded with tokens (it will be manual to start to prevent “gaming the system”).
(Again the point of this project is to be a better, community-owned Reddit, not to make a bunch of money. Tokens are simply a mechanism to distribute ownership and incentivize quality content. Monetization would only be pursued to the minimal extent necessary to make the project sustainable, not to pump anyone’s bags.)
J. Savage 