Not sure where the author got "redditcoin" but here's what we're actually doing with redditnotes (I said the same thing to fortune when this rumor first arose):
We will be issuing redditnotes.
Our research leads us to want to wait until the law and technology around cryptocurrency are further along before deciding exactly how. We want to make sure we can give the community the full value of the equity when they receive it in the future, and today we haven’t been able to find a way to do that within existing regulations.
You should be issuing an official blog post stating this in explicit, unambiguous terms, as there's a lot of confusion around just what exactly are RedditNotes.
EDIT: A new post, to reflect the fact that the current cryptography plans have been halted.
I have no idea if they would be interested, but I would be happy to help write any such blog post, so as to make sure the technology is accurately represented.
Agree. There may be fewer issues with misinformation if you put out the correct information yourself. And using your main channel rather than a comment on a separate site is a good way to do it. (Looks like that's been done in this case though - the blog seems to state the situation accurately to me.)
Ah, I meant issue a new post, to reflect the fact that there are no cryptographic plans currently.
If you read the corresponding Reddit thread to that blog post (http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2pt25f/announcing_redd...), there's a lot of skepticism on whether RedditNotes is actually legal (including in this very HN thread), and there is speculation that the laying off of the one person who could actually implement it indicates that the project is dead.
Can you talk to the new icon style you guys are going for? I'm not a huge fan of the new Alien Blue icon, the Android AMA icon, and this redditnotes icon looks kinda shitty too.
I'm no designer, and I don't mean this in an insulting way (besides the fact that I think the new icons look shitty) at all. Just curious.
I think reddit has outgrown its ability to innovate in this way and suggest it will likely be a competitor not bound by the constraints of being an established player that will allow them to create a more compelling offering.
Can you expand upon some of the known unknowns on the legal and technology side?
I assume that the lead time for creating redditnotes is substantial. Therefore, getting started (even with a lot of uncertainty) is probably worthwhile unless those unknowns are foundational (e.g., does the SEC allow this at all rather than what specific regulation best applies).
Oh come on, that's what a lot, if not most, people have been calling it since it was announced.
Other than that, nothing you write contradicts the Guardian article (in fact, it more or less confirms it), and they're linking to some very public sources.
This is kind of weazily response that only marginally addresses the "wtf is going" question raised by the article, and on top of it tries to discredit the messenger. The latter is really in poor taste.
So basically, Yishan left, he was the big proponent of it, and the rest of you are too chicken-shit or simply not knowledgeable enough about cryptocurrencies to deal with corporate risk concerns over it. Got it.
I have no idea how you became emotionally invested in this, but I am pretty sure not being able to do something legally is a completely valid reason not to move forward with... well, most things.
I'm glad they killed this project. I can't see how integrating a crypto-payment system into reddit would have worked out into anything other than a disaster.
First of all, if it became commonplace that reddit accounts might contain some sum of crypto-money, the bustling onslaught of salivating hackers would become so tremendous that the site would likely be crippled under the weight of user grievances and brute-force traffic. I'm sure mandatory MFA would be put in place to increase security, but it wouldn't change the fact that reddit would become a major target for hackers, and many people would lose their money, despite MFA.
Next, I think the incentives for shit and spam posts would rocket off the chart as scammers, beggars and cam-models would likely flood the site with crap so that they can extract tips from anyone willing to toss penny shavings in their direction. Karma is already a sufficient reward mechanism, adding money into the fray is totally unnecessary and would almost certainly lower the quality of discussion.
Finally, this may be a stretch, but I fear that integrating crypto-money into the site would open the door for pay-to-subscribe/pay-to-view/pay-to-comment/pay-to-vote subreddit mechanisms. I understand that reddit is a business, but I think that this would be objectively bad, and even worse if subreddit mods were able to get a cut of it.
In the end, I don't think reddit needs crypto, it doesn't make the site better in any conceivable way.
Quite a while ago i saw a thread "How to make Reddit worse". Besides adding avatars, signatures, etc, one of the most popular suggestion was to give karma a monetary value. I'm really glad it didn't happen.
Gold is thankfully not exchangeable for any goods or services though - it's really just another tier of karma.
With just karma/gold alone there's already a lot of people who spend a ridiculous amount of time farming it. Imagine if Imaginary Internet Points were redeemable for actual things.
Reddit is a great site in what it does. And due to its nature, it has tremendous amount of niches, some of which are worth a lot of money if handled properly.
For instance, /r/watches is an active area for discussion of watches. The people who post there often share their new Rolex or their treasured Patek Phillipe. /r/watches is just one of many, many such niches on the site which have a lot of potential value.
My thinking has been that reddit could focus on developing the value in its many product oriented subforums.
Also, interestingly enough, reddit has already sort of created its own new cybercurrency - dogecoin. Though it may not be doing well, I think most of the value in dogecoin was how easy it was to use on reddit.
reddit does need to find a way to monetize. I think it could do so quite successfully due to the nature of it having many high value niches.
I say all this as a big fan of the site and have even been considering making a subreddit finder (so that someone who is a fan of the TV show Suits, for instance, can know that there is /r/suits to discuss the show, which they would have simply no way of knowing if they just landed on reddit's homepage with pictures of Very Round Eggs, to use a current example).
It should be noted that this is one of many recent product failures in Reddit's attempt to monetize.
Others include the Reddit YouTube video channel, Reddit Live, and most notably, RedditMade, which was also killed without a trace and the employees responsible laid off.
In essence, this is the direction PH said they're going in. To create niches/communities around products.
There could also be some sort of sub quality indicator, perhaps merely based on submission and comment numbers/frequency, etc. For example, one country sub I know of, there's a lot of submissions and commenting but it's almost strictly politics, strictly in the language of the country, and everyone is extremely negative there. It's a shame for people to land on a country sub and see such things. On the other hand, taking another country sub I know as an example, they have two versions (one in English, one in their own language). The latter, in particular, has diversified quite a lot in the last 6 months or so and there are now many language-related (in regards to this country) subs as a result.
To your first point, I always wondered if there was a way to monetize the individual subs and allow moderators of these subs to somehow take a part of the cut. There are a million risks in this, and I assume the biggest fear would be that it would destroy a lot of the current culture and increase "MOD CONSPIRACY" fears; but it would still be interesting to test.
Regarding the subreddit finder, Pinterest has the perfect model for your first login where it asks you about your interests and subscribes you specifically to those types of things. Reddit should most certainly do the same thing as it did take me a while to get into the site, and the best day on Reddit was discovering that I could unsubscribe from the defaults I didn't care much for and find the communities I cared about.
My issue is most subreddit moderators are young guys who, for the first time in their life, have some small authority over a group of people and are total shitheads about it. They have no credentials other than having thought to make the subreddit before anyone, and have done nothing to deserve a cut of profits of anything. If I owned reddit, I wouldn't want these people to work for me.
This is essential-- mods already have way too much power, and are constantly found to be doing naughty things on a very reliable basis. Selling sidebar links, keeping funds from "charity drives", squashing certain domains, outright selling mod accounts to industry marketers (/r/android) and these are just the things we know about! Moderator powers need to be restricted with constant vigilance by the admins and community.
Adding the potential for monetary rewards will not move this problem in the correct direction.
Why do you believe that a JavaScript port of bitcoin is an important project? What is lacking in current implementations / why would you want to run bitcoin inside a browser / do you think it's possible to do serious crypto correctly in JS[0]?
There is no working javascript full node. I believe the future of bitcoin is brighter if there are many independent implementations of bitcoin running as full nodes.
I want bitcoin running in a browser because browsers work on every platform and can bring bitcoin to more people. Also keep in mind that reddit is primarily a website, to using javascript is a pretty appropriate first choice of language for bitcoin stuff.
Can you do serious crypto in C? Only if you know what you're doing and don't screw up. Same goes for javascript.
>Can you do serious crypto in C? Only if you know what you're doing and don't screw up. Same goes for javascript.
Overall I am sympathetic to your cause, but this raises alarms. JavaScript crypto is nonsense, you could have the implementation silently replaced with a naughty one at the hosts leisure.
EDIT: To respond to all of you at once - everything I've seen so far says that he was aiming for JS in the browser. Did I miss something?
That has nothing to do with javascript-the-language, but rather the way the web works. Obviously even with https, javascript delivered by a web server has a vulnerability whereby the web server may be compromised, which is outside of the users control. Any javscript delivered by a web server should be executed with that understanding. i.e., delivering a wallet from a web server is probably not the right thing to do. Note that javascript can also be run in the form of a browser extension, server-side node, node-webkit, apache cordova, etc. Javascript-the-language is not intrinsically vulnerable to a compromised webserver.
It's fair to say that JavaScript-the-language is not intrinsically vulnerable to this, but how else are you planning on delivering the JavaScript to clients? I may be misinterpreting your goals.
A usable browser implementation of a wallet could be secured fairly well and if it gained any popularity would put pressure on browser makers to deliver better solutions.
That's also true of C with an auto-update framework. That's also true of closed-source C.
There are plenty of ways to avoid that particular trap of JS crypto (or more specifically web crypto). Bundling it inside an extension comes to mind.
All that said, I'm not even convinced this attack is within the threat model of Redditcoin, given that it's resources for a specific website that is also the JS origin.
Yes exactly. I think people who are not whatsoever involved in the javascript world assume that javscript means "delivered by a webserver", which is just not necessarily true.
Bitcoin's cryptologic is open-source; it doesn't have to be secure from tampering in the same way a videogame console has to be secure. A videogame console doesn't want you modifying game code or running your own code on the hardware. Nobody cares what you do to your bitcoin client; you'll just lose your coins in some invalid[1] transaction or maybe you find some amazing flaw in bitcoin's math - which you could have found in any other programming language anyway.
That said, a browser-based bitcoin client does expose its user to potential XSS exploits 'n such; especially if the private key is in the browser's memory.
Yes, that is the primary concern. "We" in the bitcoin community haven't yet figured out how to write 100% correct alternative implementations of bitcoin. We will have to figure out how to do that first before I would ever recommend anybody actually run an alternative implementation as a full node and rely on it for seeing the blockchain.
That's a fair point, except that (contrary to "Nobody cares what you do to your bitcoin client"), I would suggest that most people do not have their own bitcoin client, and are in fact running code written by somebody else. Those users will likely be very upset if a client loses all their coins.
So why create a new bitcoin derivative to do something like creating a divisible bearer reddit stock certificate held in trust vs. something like open transactions or a webservice? Especially since it would be a relatively small network easily taken over by some large mining pool if it ever became useful. Your prone to the US legal system requirements in this case since I'm guessing reddit is a US corp.
Had I been consulted before "reddit is issuing shares on a cryptocurrency" was announced, I would have suggested doing something with less legal headaches first. It would take a $100 billion dollar company, much larger than reddit, to actually make such a project legally possible.
It's been said many times since the beginning, including in this article:
>Announced in September 2014 as part of a fundraising round that raised $50m from VC firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, Redditcoin was a key part of an audacious plan by Wong to give part of the company’s equity back to users.
>Wong wrote in a blogpost: “The investors in this round have proposed to give 10% of their shares back to the community, in recognition of the central role the community plays in Reddit’s ongoing success.”
The only people that cared about this guy were the bitcoin fanatics and the those who where hell bent on making fun of the bitcoin fanatics. No one else on the site talked about it because it didn't affect them.
On Reddit, in my opinion, spin and the degree of transparency matter long after the fact. This is everyone who cares to know right now. What happens when there's a front-page TIL post or relevant blog post in a few months? Reddit and PR can be a time bomb.
What would you have had them do? Make a full blog post for every single employee they hire or layoff? Have the entirety of the site (which is already hypercritical of the admins) mull through and critique every single personnel decision?
They didn't try to hide the fact that he was laid off, and he's now obviously free to come talk here and on twitter about the circumstances surrounding his departure from the company, I really don't see how this is a transparency issue.
Yes, agreed. I don't think there is necessarily anything bad or wrong about what happened. Writing a blog post about "we're cancelling cryptocurrency and firing the enginer" would have made it into an even bigger deal than it is. The way it is happening, people who care about it hear about it, and people who don't care don't have to bother.
That's a good question and point. The thing is, you're right: It's not a transparency issue in the real world and it wouldn't be for any other company. But Reddit's not the real world. Reddit's much angrier and much more conspiratorial, especially when it comes to things that ostensibly are about the "community" and "giving back" on behalf of the admins.
Yes, but that's hardly reason to purposefully feed the flames of reddit conspiracy theorists by making a more high profile announcement. And if there is a /r/TIL post down the road that starts a witch-hunt it's not like they have a ton of fuel, the guy who was fired talks about it in a very calm and non-accusatory manner.
Sorry, but again, what would you have rather had them do? I don't see anything wrong with the admin's choices on this
Another piece of drama that happened last year was that reddit let a former employee go, who made an AMA about it, and then Yishan publicly criticised the former employee. The new leadership is probably very, very hesitant to say anything about anybody who was let go - they don't want to repeat that mistake.
Why isn't what being brought to the reddit userbase? That they fired me? That reddit notes is now paused? They are probably waiting for the right time to make an announcement I guess. They probably didn't realize that by firing (or letting me go, whatever) that they would draw the interest of the media.
Sorry - it's really all of the above. To be more clear, I will break this into some sub-questions that are hopefully less obsequious.
The "reddit is giving 10% of its shares to its users" thing was very positively received. My understanding was that redditcoin was part of that effort. Is the 10% thing still going to happen in some way? If not, why not?
Regardless of the answer to the question above, hearing that redditcoin is being cancelled would likely lead members to conclude the new leadership doesn't want the community shares system that was so touted previously. Is that the case, if you know?
And then the final, more meta question is: Why would Reddit's staff, of all people, think they could do something involving Reddit quietly?
> The "reddit is giving 10% of its shares to its users" thing was very positively received. My understanding was that redditcoin was part of that effort. Is the 10% thing still going to happen in some way? If not, why not?
I think they intend to make the 10% thing happen eventually, although the project is currently paused. I estimate 1+ year before any aspect of the project resumes. However, I am not privy to the conversations the executives have had about it, so I don't really know.
> Regardless of the answer to the question above, hearing that redditcoin is being cancelled would likely lead members to conclude the new leadership doesn't want the community shares system that was so touted previously. Is that the case, if you know?
I don't know.
> Why would Reddit's staff, of all people, think they could do something involving Reddit quietly?
AKA The Fappening, the massive celebrity photo leak/hack last year. Just in case anyone else didn't pay enough attention at the time to have heard of both terms. Apparently Reddit was in a bit of a pickle because subreddits were created to spread the photos and not all of them were strictly against the site's terms.
It's pretty simple. I was hired by Yishan and reported directly to Yishan to lead the cryptocurrency engineering wing of reddit. This was his idea - and I was happy to lead it. Yishan then suddenly quit, and new leadership took over. The new leadership is not interested in pursuing cryptocurrency at the moment.
Well I'm not really sure, because it felt extremely turbulent while I was there for my brief 4 month tenue. I think the culture will change. I think the culture was a little more loose, autonomous, and with little management before. I think it will be more hierarchical and managed moving forward. However, please realize that I have extremely limited experience at reddit and may simply be wrong about that.
Yeah $50m is a lot. We would have hired several more cryptocurrency engineers. Not any more. I'm not exactly sure how they are going to allocate resources moving forward, but you can see who they are hiring here:
I think "laid off" is probably the better term. The new executives are not interested in pursuing bitcoin or cryptocurrency at the current time. I was going to be the lead engineer of the cryptocurrency engineering wing of reddit, but they have let me go, and removed the other "cryptocurrency engineer" positions from the job page. The executives have their hands full with things like mobile and improving reddit.com infrastructure. Not to mention the legal difficulties of reddit notes.
> HN has rate limited my responses so I can't respond to questions.
Your account definitely isn't restricted. Can you shoot us an email (hn@ycombinator.com) and tell us what you're seeing? We'd be happy to try to fix it.
So, this is literally the post where I find out that my account has been restricted in some way, and that is why I keep having conversations cut short because I can only reply to a half-dozen or so things in a day. (I had assumed that this was a new thing that applied to everyone, since to my knowledge there is no reason for you to be restricting my account in particular, this way.)
Why the secrecy? Why not just tell people all the various passive-aggressive BS you perform to degrade experience for certain users? If you don't want me posting here, why not just tell me or ban me or whatever? Bonus points if you give an actual reason, but that might be asking for too much.
How many different bans do you have in the toolbox now, is there a list somewhere? Is there a way to check which ones apply to my account, aside from finding out second-hand?
edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964992 <- several posts here I wanted to reply to, it was an interesting discussion. I was not able to apparently because I caught the wrong admin on the wrong day in the wrong mood? And of course I have no idea what post of mine caused this... Despite whatever 'efforts' you're putting into this site, moderation here is bad and steadily getting worse.
I was about to edit my comment to mention that: HN delays showing the "reply" link on deeply nested comments. It's an ancient flame retardant. You can, however, get around it by clicking "link" on the comment you want to reply to.
You can always click the "link" button fer the specific comment and then you'll see a reply button -- it's nothing account-specific, it's just one weird trick to slow down flamefests proportionally to comment depth.
Thanks, that's exactly what it was! That's why the "reply" button was not appearing, and I thought I was rate-limited. This very thing happened to your comment - I am replying by visiting the permalink.
I'd just like to say that I don't like the idea of limiting people just because of low karma or whatever. A lot of people do get downvoted just for having ideas that don't "go with the group" even though they're well thought out.
Turns out I wasn't rate limited - I wasn't seeing the "reply" button because of a completely different mechanism on HN that makes the reply button not appear for some comments that may be involved in a flaming or something.
Hacker News is the most poorly maintained forum I've ever seen. Too bad the original creator left and the new maintainers can't make any significant improvements. Just empty promises from the guys who took over, who have no real authority to make any major changes. Too bad.
I've had a registered account here for just shy of 7 years now, and you're not giving the current moderation team nearly enough credit. dang and company have resolved a lot of long-standing user complaints, they are proactive on policing the site, and they are generally exceedingly fair and even-handed.
I didn't read the post as a criticism of the community but rather a criticism of the technical workings of the site. Which is correct, HN is lacking a lot of things that make even the most basic modern forums more user friendly. The site performs poorly on mobile, you can't collapse comment threads, the reply button disappears sometimes unless you click "link", etc.
If you know much about the bitcoin world, implementing a new "cryptocurrency" is not exactly a technical challenge. I never created one because I could have done so during any one-week or so period of time. The problems were entirely legal.
Also note that my primary goal, misunderstood by everyone but Yishan, was not just to make reddit notes work, but build reddit's cryptofinancial system. p2p payments on reddit had enormous potential, now substantially delayed.
Because they are a for-profit company. Generally investing in stuff and then scraping it immediately before it could possibly work, is not a very good idea.
We will be issuing redditnotes.
Our research leads us to want to wait until the law and technology around cryptocurrency are further along before deciding exactly how. We want to make sure we can give the community the full value of the equity when they receive it in the future, and today we haven’t been able to find a way to do that within existing regulations.
Edit: here's the last official blog post on the subject. http://www.redditblog.com/2014/12/announcing-reddit-notes.ht... We were not contacted by this guardian reporter didn't contact us for comment. So it goes.