In high school, an acquaintance of mine made the website "e-imagesite.com" [1]. It was a very easy-to-use image uploading site (and honestly less irritating than ImageShack and predated imgur). It was just being hosted on HostGator, I believe, and written in PHP and used jQuery.

I believe he had to eventually shut it down because people kept uploading horrifying stuff to it, and it was never even that popular. Child porn and bestiality were constantly being uploaded and I don't think he liked having to constantly report stuff to the FBI.

After building a proper comment section for my blog (including tripcodes!), I've thought about making my own "chan" site, since I think that could be fun, but I am completely terrified of people uploading horrible stuff that I would be forced to sift through and moderate pretty frequently. User submissions open up a huge legal can of worms and I am not sure that's a path that I'm willing to commit myself going down.

When there's strong anonymity, I suspect that this problem could be even worse.

It's a little depressing, because decentralized and distributed computing is one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, but it feels like whenever I mention anything about it, people immediately assume piracy or illicit material.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090313063155/http://www.e-imag...

Yeah, I’m fully in support of a decentralised web but the internet is old enough now that being naive about this stuff has become equivalent to being maliciously incompetent. Without designing for things like community or self-governance and moderation, you’re designing for trouble. Thinking about ways to healthily cultivate a peer-to-peer web doesn’t make someone a Nazi, it makes them a responsible member of a community.