The 'Frontpage of the Internet' has been in rough waters recently. Its attitude towards free speech, and its position as an open exchange for ideas, have been threatened by new company policies. The new direction has, in many ways, pitted some of the website's core user base against the company itself.

A large part of the online community are calling for the resignation of the company's CEO, Ellen Pao. Many redditors want her and her policies to leave, so that the social network can return to its prior free and anarchic state. But they might not have to wait for the company to make a decision, and are looking to a new Reddit-like website built with blockchain technology.

According to Ryan Charles, who left his job at BitPay to work as a 'crypto-currency engineer' for Reddit, the social network had been working to decentralize itself using the technology behind Bitcoin. He was hired by the company to work on the Reddit Notes project, a sort of digital currency that would be used to reward good content. Both Charles and the project were scrapped after Pao took charge as CEO.

In a post on his personal Medium blog Charles explained the way that a decentralized reddit could work. "Each user has an app, the reddit app, which connects to the reddit p2p network. For most users, the app is a normal web app. Each user funds their own app with a small amount of bitcoin. In order to download content, the user pays a very, very small amount of bitcoin to the peers on the network. This incentivizes people to keep the app open so as to keep servicing the other users. Furthermore, when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content, thus incentivizing the production of good content. If all the content is authenticated, we can be reasonably sure most payments are going to the right people."