TL;DR: We’re no longer known as Win.
This is a long overdue update about the future of the platform, I highly recommend reading.
Origins
When development on our platform started, we had two goals in mind:
- to create a network of communities where we weren’t exposed to American politics when browsing a feed meant for cat pictures (“apolitical-by-default”)
- to build a platform where communities were free to decide their own policies, to the extent that the law allows
Contrary to popular belief, the platform was not built for any specific community or ideology.
We believe that a community platform which meets the above criteria is needed now more than ever.
How that works
We are well aware that there are issues with permitting all legal content:
- it’s an easy vector for attack, where organized groups can flood the platform with the most borderline, unappealing content, in an effort to push away new users
- the most likely users to join new platforms are users who no longer have a home on other platforms
Despite this, we believe that community platforms are in a unique position where they are under no obligation to remove content and communities in order to achieve an appealing and apolitical default experience.
It’s our intention to:
- present a default experience void of content relating to politics and social issues
- … while also ensuring that users who are interested in such content can easily find their way to those communities
- … while also ensuring that users who just want to see cats, do not get exposed to highly politicized content
We strongly believe that this is possible thanks to the “bucket” system that community platforms are built around.
We have an undying commitment to permitting all legal content, just as we have an undying commitment to creating a platform which is apolitical-by-default. We do not have a commitment to prominently displaying political or otherwise divisive content to all users, but we do have a commitment to treat all political content equally, and make such content easily discoverable for those who may want to see it.
There is no excuse for vibrant community platforms to not provide user-filters for removing unwanted content, with the only valid explanation being that the platform wants politics to continue seeping into every day life.
We understand that we still have a lot of work to do and we don’t know exactly what the end product looks like, but we needed to reiterate the goal.
Our Brand
We've never had a well defined brand. Many refer to us as 'Win', many as 'Communities', others as 'Dot Win', and some as 'Win Communities'.
Going forward, we will be known as Scored, and we will be found at scored.co.
We were not forced to make this change, and there are many valid reasons which make it clear that it’s the right move at the right time.
What This Means for Domains
There will be no changes with regards to existing .win domains for standalone communities.
Communities with their own domains will continue to be accessible via those domains, and we don't rule out future communities having their own domains.
Support & Help
We're taking this opportunity to launch our new Help Desk, which can be found at help.scored.co
It's our hope to answer as many commonly asked questions as possible, as well as to build out in-depth guides on subjects such as ‘Setting up Your Community', which will cover Community Stylesheets, Community Filters, and more.
Policy Changes
All policies have been rehomed to the Help Desk.
We are not making any policy changes, nor do we have any changes planned.
Our Content Policy has been reworded, but the meaning remains exactly the same.
Who Is Welcome on the Platform
We are targeting the silent majority who are happy to share a platform with content that they don't like.
Changes to User-Created Communities
We're opening up community creation to more users at scored.co/create on desktop.
Established accounts are now able to create communities, effectively opening the option to all users.
We reserve the right to close or restrict community creation at any time.
Mobile has less support for mod tools at this time, so we would recommend using the desktop interface when running a community.
Community Creation Flow
We’ve made some changes to the community creation flow.
If you are on the latest update: immediately after creating a community, you will be asked to upload your community logo and header, select Community Topics, and some other settings such as whether the community is safe for work.
The community logo and header were previously only used on mobile, however they are now also featured on desktop. When you set your header and logo for the first time, we will automatically generate your community’s CSS, with your header and logo in place, meaning communities won’t need to set up their CSS for desktop headers manually.
Community Sorting Changes
Communities are now sorted alphabetically on /communities, with the intention to switch to a system ranked by activity in the near future.
It's also now possible to sort the community list by topics on desktop, with the feature coming to mobile in the very short term.
Short Term Future
In the short term, our focus is on dealing with the teething problems that may come with the wider community creation process, and working on our Android and iOS apps.
Hate to be negative but I think this is a bad move. You guys had successfully branded yourself as “.win” (Win)
Legit there was no other point to owning a .win domain.
You could have continued to quite easily dominate the TLD and usher in a new era of (partly decentralised) communities
Scored.co just sounds…. Meh. It sounds like it was picked by a committee of boring people trying to “compete with that Reddit thing”
The branding before SHOWED you marched to your own beat and were doing things with your own unique spin.
All you really needed to do was settle on an “official” title eg “Win” or “Dotwin”
You guys are doing a good job and your choices have guided you this far but just my 2cents. Hope you consider it
Exactly. I also liked the way "Win" sounds. Exactly like a forum that has next to no censorship. "Scored" just sounds like a Reddit clone. Other sites that tried to be "free speech forums", such as Voat, or Poal, have names that don't sound like clones of Reddit.
scored.co sounds like an adserver i blocked.
idk. i think thats the end of of the site for me really.
No longer can say to less than close friends "hey check out this site" or post them a link or anything. They show up and see nigger/nazi/commie/faggot on every post. they're going to close the page and think i'm an asshole.
Guilt by association. Not just the leftys do it. Even tho we seem to be pretending so...
Free speech. It's a fine line. And they just blundered all over it like mister bean on crack.
A lot of people who might hear the name are going to end up going to score.com, which I believe is the website of a porn mag.
So there's that.
http://score.com/
Not a porn mag website
I think the admins may have fixed that problem by quietly fixing how other communities are displayed?
In my sidebar I only see a handful of “other communities” now. None of which are poison pill communities created by retards/feds
Thats not removed enough for the vast majority of people.
This place will be the same as poal.co in ~3 months.
by next election cycle it will be on every social media site blacklist. and dead. another forgotten little echo chamber of hate.
I'm tired of being old. I've seen alllllllllll this shit at least once already. :|
Well that’s why the move calling the whole platform Win and giving each community its own domain was brilliant….was.
From the announcement it sounds like the goal is to go for a more centralised community which will ditch the armour of being decentralised
U have never seen it done like this I promise u that.
Pretty sure it was already on every social media site blacklist.
Exactly. That slippery slope will send us into icy waters to chill for eternity. I'm so disappointed and disgusted by this, it's not even funny. All you have to do is click the Communities link at the top of the page to witness every single damned thing we are fighting against in this world.
Yeah, agreed. I miss the old name.
This may sound logical, but there are big logistics considerations that make this move a bit more explainable to me.
First I'm pretty sure that the founders are not identical to the true controller of all .win domains, namely whomever is the official .win registrar. The founders are merely good planners who've gotten control of many, but certainly not all, of the good .win names corresponding to their extant and new communities. For that reason calling yourself Win or DotWin leaves you representing yourself as having power you don't rightly have.
Second the founders have an unstated anonymity principle as well. The current legal LLC name is visible in the sidebar but appears to be the minimum necessary for taking legal responsibility without personal traceability. And it's clear that although "Communities.Win" might serve as a passable overall venture name (and has some advantages over Scored.Co), one disadvantage is that "Communities Win" is so generic a thought that it yields lots of false positives on search from outside and Scored.Co has much less of that problem. But in any respect the goal of staying at least slightly nebulous is to be understood; it's a lot different from putting all your eggs into a single trademark basket named something abysmal like Reddit.
I will want a proviso. I would assume that since the biggest communities have TLD redirection (Patriots.Win), this privilege can still be offered in future even if the redirection isn't in .win (and maybe that's already happened). If so, then there is no loss changing communities.win in every URL to scored.co, and there is no loss from the fact that some communities have mirrors in their own domains.
I hope they keep communities.win to avoid breaking external links, especially image-links.
Is Deleware the best place to establish the type of LLC that you mention?
That's conventional wisdom, meaning I have no way of knowing for sure.
Not necessarily. Delaware is used because it has a parallel legal system that is meant to be used by, and is favorable to, large corporations. I've asked the site owners before and their answer is that this site is registered in Kentucky and organized under the laws of Delaware. Nevada and Wyoming are also popular.
A lot of people reported that .win domains were automatically banned by many filters under the category "gambling" because that TLD was used by a lot of online casinos and so forth. Imagine if there were hundreds of .win communities and it became easy for the left-wing internet to start pushing global *.win bans to get rid of them in one fell swoop.
While I agree .win was a fun way to brand, I think trying to build around lesser-known TLDs is problematic. Generic TLDs like .co are far too large for anyone to pigeonhole them.