Reddit, the open community based social networking, news and entertainment platform has been going through a rough patch lately after it fired Victoria Taylor who was the talent director and instrumental in managing Ask Me Anything (AMA) subreddit on the platform. In response to the sudden dismissal of Victoria, the moderators of r/iAmA changed the status of the subreddit to private, thereby shutting people out of the subreddit. Following the suit, other popular subreddits like/r/AskReddit, /r/gaming, /r/science, /r/history, /r/movies and /r/Art also turned private to express solidarity.
The management of Reddit have responded to the reaction of moderators by issuing an apology for failing to communicate properly and announcing various improvements they are making in order to facilitate better communication between moderators and admins.
In a recent blog post on Medium, Ryan X. Charles who used to be the cryptocurrency engineer at Reddit mentioned about the platform’s earlier plans for decentralization. According to Ryan, he approached the then CEO of Reddit – Yishan Wong earlier last year with an idea of decentralizing the platform. Wong was excited to head the idea and confessed that the company already has plans of decentralization. According to Ryan’s idea, the Reddit app on each user’s device would connect to a P2P network. Users will be depositing a small amount of bitcoin into their account which will be used to pay the peers for content downloads. The amount of bitcoin paid will be very small, not burdening the users while managing to incentivizing people to keep their Reddit app open to keep the network active. Also, upvotes on Reddit will be incentivized by sending a small amount of bitcoin to author of the content. It will also lead to more number of people verifying their accounts, so that they can receive the bitcoin incentives.
Ryan, who was previously will BitPay quit the job to join Reddit where he started working on creating a decentralized platform. But the project took a major deviation after Reddit successfully raised $50 million funding within days of initiating the project. When Reddit announced share scheme for giving back to the Reddit community using cryptocurrency, his focus shifted to building the Reddit cryptocurrency. Ryan’s new project didn’t last long as he was let go within a couple of months into the project after Wong resigned from his post as the CEO at Reddit.
Now, Ryan has made the source code of the foundation of decentralized Reddit public on GitHub. People interested in knowing more about it can access the code on GitHub. The foundation was built-in collaboration with various other people.