Hello everyone and particularly magnora7, I hope this message finds you well.

I apologize if this is long winded and I hope you will take seriously what I propose.

I have enjoyed finding saidit, but to be honest ruqqus has found some more traction with me. I am spending time in many places on the net though, like here, ruqqus, 4chan, voat, reddit and some other places. It absolutely breaks my heart to see what is happening to the net. A place once extremely free for anyone to express themselves without consequence has little by little become less free and with far worse consequence.

I have been looking at some of this problem for a while. That is how should people be able to express themselves. Well it is my strong opinion that given the reality of text and media etc are not the cause of actual harm that they should have no restrictions. The problem then is why is it we have restrictions? Well I think it's because it's obvious most people have a view there are some things that they do not want to be exposed to. On the extreme left and right that to me would be anything that disagrees with them or they would consider offensive. I know for me personally, I don't like spam, I don't like some forms of trolling, some trolling I find funny, I don't like certain people and their opinions, usually the stupid, I also don't like gore and many types of violence. I know many people are like me but many more are different.

From what I can gather we all usually hold a variety of opinions on a variety of subjects. We have some views that are left and some that are right. The problem is how does one create a platform that can handle everyones opinions? Well you would first have to allow all opinions, so that means zero censorship, because if you exclude any opinions you are not including everyone! But that alone will not work as you have to have moderation and if the moderation is suited to one group it will not work for another. So what is the solution? I call it

Optional Moderation

To me this is a complete rethink of how we do these platforms. Instead of subs or groups where posts and comments go you would have an open stream of all comments and posts. They would have tags to specify what user they come from, what subjects they cover, what they reference or reply to, etc. Much can be thought on this but the secret sauce is the optional moderation. That is you don't have fixed moderators necessarily for anything, though you may have default moderators. What you have is moderators you can select, which will work like filters. Much like you can have an adblocker and choose your filter list, this will work like that. I guess you could call it filters if you wanted, but that's just semantics. How it could work is people would be free to create moderation groups like they can create subs. These moderation groups would advertise what they are for so people could choose. They may have some other metrics, like amount of subscribers or some rating system to help discern moderators. Moderators could sell themselves as global, or only covering certain subjects. I envision that there would be some default word filters and moderation selected by default to keep things looking quite civil. There would be extreme left and right moderation. But the beauty of it all, is anyone should be able with a click to turn off or switch any moderation. That means everyones voice can have a chance to be heard.

You could implement this with the existing sub system, where people could choose a moderator inside a sub or to have none.

The second part to solving all this problem ,although optional moderation alone will go far on it, is to opensource all contributions to sites. What this means is sites won't own the content that is contributed to them and that they will have to make it available (I think in dumps and maybe also live) so anyone else can take the data and start a new site. So for instance imagine if you could just copy all of reddit and run it your own way?

The third part is a completely distributed system. I am thinking the distributed part would be best just on the pure data side and the moderation could be either local ,as in site to site, or distributed as well.

To add to this all I think that voting should be under the moderation groups. You could even have a variety of ways to vote, like with saidit has no down votes.

Last I have little idea to the technical challenges to implementing any of this. I am sure even some of it in some form though will make for a much better system than what is current.

Thanks