Recent events showed that there is one attack/sabotage vector on Reddit: create threads, trigger a discussion, wait people to spend time and attention, delete threads. Our moderators cannot block such attack because it's impossible to disallow users from deleting their stuff.

This is a good opportunity to think about a Reddit replacement that would also address this and other long standing issues with Reddit, some of them:

• post and comment vote manipulation from possibly any account
• posts and comments can be deleted by author without admin approval even if content was generated in response
• discussions can get hidden by downvotes (possible from external forces) and cannot be shown or snapshotted without javascript
• covert quoting bots and covert promoters litter the subreddit
• groups of randos pop out of nowhere and generate FUD around a small issue or even fake FUD
• no way to backup all good content generated by the community

A replacement can look like Reddit and be based on Politeia, with at least the following properties:

• spam resistance
  • registration has a small DCR fee
  • posts may or may not require a fee -- open to discussion (perhaps just the reg fee will cut most of the junk)
• data can be fetched and audited by anyone by just cloning the Git repo
• posts and comments cannot be deleted without admin approval
  • this protects from attention grab attack
• posts and commens cannot be hidden with downvotes
• transparent censorship

Besides Politeia, another interesting possible foundation is Matrix protocol. It may give opportunities to deeply integrate with chats. I don't know Matrix to see if the solution built on it can satisfy all fundamental requirements.

Discussions:

• 2019-01-21: good and bad sides of Reddit
• 2019-02-11: Decred's community spaces - a crude analogy