HN Explorer

Ask HN: What other user-driven sites do you think are too centralized?

8 points by mostlysimilar ↗ HN
Reddit's value comes from the users, and especially from having users willing to moderate themselves. Twitter's value is that it's where the people are, especially public figures. etc.

In general the interests of the users and the interests of the corporations running these services are not aligned. Corporations are incentivized to spend as little as possible to accomplish their product goals, especially ones that struggle to make a profit like these guys.

What other services do you think suffer from being too centralized or might be in danger if we don't see a pivot? Reddit is basically a mega-forum in place of a million independent forums, Twitter is a smaller blog in place of tens of thousands of dedicated web presences/blogs, etc.

The first one that comes to mind for me is fandom.com (aka Wikia), especially as people close their self-run wikis to be hosted there. Such a shame to see something as important as communally-built knowledge being sucked up by a corporation.

3 comments

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not_your_vase
Almost everything that's web2? Wikipedia, Github, HackerNews... all these communities hang on the mercy of a very small group of people, hoping they won't pull the plug overnight or do some other crazy thing.
senttoschool
HN. You can't even post a link to Gary Tan's $10k ETH prediction without it being flagged and removed.
noman-land
Basically all of them. They are all ticking time bombs waiting for a change in leadership priorities and disappearing.