• I will update the text here as we agree on and articulate goals and objectives in the comments.
• This document should be expected to evolve and is intended to inform and guide the technical side. The what vs the how. It's fine if it's rough for now!

The Problem

Online communities and their participants currently suffer innumerable threats: censorship and removal by site administrators or authoritarian moderators; brigading and manipulation from external actors; incessant spam and manipulation from advertisers and promoters; being forced to accept unwanted changes with no governance mechanisms to reject them.

Goal

Provide the decentralised tools needed for online communities to choose self-ownership. Built upon that foundation, a suite of fun and community-economy promoting features would also be available for communities to pick and choose from. The primary initial target for application of these tools will be subreddit communities.

Plan

Pre-build (now)

• learn (solicit reviews)
• build community (funding? organisational structure and tools?)
• dialogue with Reddit team
• refine goal, plans, and values based on community feedback

Phase 1

• non-transferable karma/rep token minting is on-chain
• transferable token minting is on-chain
• tipping
• multi-sig to accept distribution
• multi-sig to upgrade

Phase 2

• content voting (up/down/un) recorded directly on-chain and used to generate weekly distributions 100% trustlessly
• multi-sig to upgrade

Phase 3

• dao with general and governance voting
• mechanisms for instantiating or migrating existing communities
• vote to upgrade

Phase 4

• community elected roles (ex. moderators)
• community elected rules and constitution

Phase 5

• badges
• harberger style community-asset ownership (banner)
• side-chain/main-chain bridge

Phase 6

• token-based post curation mechanics

Values

• flexibilty - communities should be free to select the features and models that would work best for them
• decentralized - no single point of failure or power
• trustless - everything can be verified publically incase it breaks or someone cheats
• fun - we're fancy monkeys that wear cloths and live on a spec of dust suspended in a sunbeam... let's not take ourselves too seriously and be so adverse to risk that we stop having fun :)
• easy - users don't need to download an app, extension, or do anything beyond having an ethereum wallet and reddit account
• open - anyone can comment on, build on, or break the protocol in the small game through code or a larger game via economic/social incentives - a community that welcomes experimentation :)
• upgradable - the community can vote to submit changes to the protocol and/or change/migrate the smart contract backend
• generalised - broad application and support for communities external to Reddit