Ever since Reddit abruptly fired Victoria Taylor, the company’s popular director of talent, the community has been in revolt. Hundreds of popular subreddits were effectively shut down in protest, and thousands of redditors flocked to Voat, a Swiss-based Reddit clone that emphasizes its commitment to free speech. But tensions between Reddit and its community have been building for years. Now, a former Reddit engineer believes he can save the community experiment using one of the core technologies behind bitcoin.
Ryan X. Charles, who previously worked as Reddit’s cryptocurrency engineer, is already working on a prototype of a Reddit spin-off that utilizes blockchain. Blockchain, a database which notably serves as bitcoin’s distributed public ledger, is cryptographically secured against revisions. That hardening means no one can manipulate existing content within the system, which could be theoretically distributed across thousands of computers.
“I think there is a huge opportunity here,” Charles told WIRED. “There is a social moment happening now where people are realizing that something like that would be awesome.”
That opportunity comes from the struggles Reddit has had dealing with community criticisms. Many redditors believe the company behind the popular news aggregator and message board overreaches its authority by closing subreddits deemed illegal or harassing. Just this week, Ellen Pao stepped down as Reddit’s CEO following controversy over Reddit banning at least five subreddits for violating the company’s new anti-harassment policy. The move was seen by some members as censorship.
Under Charles’s system, that would be impossible. By leveraging bitcoin’s technology, a new blockchain-based system could ensure that content cannot be retroactively removed. Instead, it would simply be up to operators of nodes, or endpoints which display data from the distributed database, to choose which information they wish to hide. If any person was upset with which information that an operator was suppressing, they could merely switch to using another competing node or start their own.
Other developers have already repurposed bitcoin for applications beyond cryptocurrencies. Last year, a Brazilian developer released a decentralized, unsuppressible Twitter-like application called Twister. Much like Charles’s project, Twister leverages blockchain, but additionally implemented BitTorrent’s underlying technologies to ensure users would not have to maintain servers to distribute posts to other users. Another project, Ethereum, has raised roughly $15 million to create a platform for programmers to build distributed apps atop of. Ethereum, it is believed, could power everything from distributed ride-hailing apps like Uber to social media networks.
According to Charles, Reddit’s centralized structure—as the company operates all the servers, code behind the site, money, and administration—is a major source of its current woes (though, to be clear, he made this comment before the news of Pao’s resignation). Blockchain is the antidote.
“The turmoil highlights the moral hazard of having a company at the middle that owns the entire experience,” Charles explains. “It’s inevitable that the company and the users will come into conflict sometimes. But with a centralized experience, it’s extremely difficult for the users to have a say in resolving any conflicts. A decentralized approach would give more power to the users.”
Another motivation behind the currently unnamed project is money. Reddit is run largely by volunteer moderators, and some redditors feel exploited by a company that profits off their donated time and labor. In a decentralized system, Charles believes that moderators and contributors could be paid based on the quality of their work. On a post to Medium, which serves as a call to arms to build a new Reddit, Charles outlines exactly how a payment system could work.
Each user has an app, the Reddit app, which connects to the Reddit p2p network. For most users, the app is a normal web app. Each user funds their own app with a small amount of bitcoin. In order to download content, the user pays a very, very small amount of bitcoin to the peers on the network. This incentivizes people to keep the app open so as to keep servicing the other users. Furthermore, when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content, thus incentivizing the production of good content.
Charles’s vision has already received some indirect support from tech investors. On July 5, the same day Charles published his Medium article, prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a blog post analyzing Reddit’s “growing pains,” concluding that there is a “very interesting opportunity to build a truly decentralized media platform.”
However, Charles has a long road to travel. Once the prototype is built, he will still have to enlist redditors to adopt the platform—not that there isn’t precedent for such a community exodus. Much of Reddit’s success can be traced to the demise of the original Digg, a similar aggregator service that alienated its userbase in 2010 following a widely-hated redesign of the product that the company would not walk back. But Charles is not sure Reddit is experiencing a Digg-like moment, saying he is “convinced the current leadership is competent and can repair the damage.”
But even if Reddit regains the favor of its community, Charles is determined to move forward with the project.
“New technology has enabled new possibilities for users to be directly rewarded for their contributions. The opportunity is for something different. Not something that competes with Reddit, but something new that allows a community to have ownership over their content.”