Please note, communities are highly experimental and unfinished feature. We're still changing them actively. If you find any bugs or have any feature requests (related to communities) leave a comment below
If you have ever used Reddit - communities are very similar to subreddits.
Basically you can create a community and people can join it. People can submit their own content to the community and the community moderators can either accept that content or refuse it, based on their own rules and standards.
Main page (especially the "new" part) would still show all articles, whether an article makes it into a community or not.
Communities can set their own rules.
Some communities can accept content automatically, but still be able to remove your content later (it stays on read.cash, but it won't show up in the particular community).
What's the difference with topics?
Topics are free-for-all, which means there's a bit of a mess.
Here's an example. This is a topic called "read.cash":
None of these articles are related to "read.cash", but there's no-one to clean it up. This happens nearly in every topic.
We need some moderation here, that's where the communities step in.
A twist on the community names
To avoid the situation, where early users take up all of the good names, so that we have the official "Bitcoin" community or the official "Photography" community, we have a twist on naming.
Basically, you can't register a community named "Bitcoin" or "Photography" (or anything else for that matter), you can only register a community with a few random letters and numbers after it (which you can't control).
Think about it: you can't really register a website address of "bitcoin", you can only register "bitcoin.com" or "bitcoin.net".
This is where Reddit was a bit wrong - Reddit made it possible to have only one official "Photography" subreddit or "Bitcoin" subreddit.
That's what we want to avoid (having "official" communities). There are a lot of opinions, let's have a community for everybody.
So, you can register "Bitcoin (3a7b)" or "Bitcoin (e34a)" - both are as "official" as they can be. What's even better - a person just discovering read.cash in 2025 would still be able to register "Bitcoin (a27e)", which, again, would be as official as it could be.
Actually, this should stimulate people create more specific communities, like "Bitcoin Cash for newcomers (18ae)" instead of just "Bitcoin Cash (18ae)", if there are already 50 communities named "Bitcoin Cash (...)".
How to submit an article to a community
Either use "Write for this community", "Submit your article" buttons in the community:
... or look for "(submit)" button in the article that is already published (you can submit other people's content too). You can submit only to communities that you have joined.
Work-in-progress
Communities are a work-in-progress, so we'll update on how it develops.
Current limitations:
There is only one moderator (the creator) - we'll add the ability to have multiple moderators soon;You need to approve every submitted article (soon you'll be able to set your community to post-moderation);
No notifications about articles in moderation queue;No way to see the communities you've joined except by going inside each community
These should be fixed pretty soon.
Roadmap
This is only a first version, we have quite a few ideas to try, but let's see how it goes first.
Notable things missing:
Filter by user language, show language icons
Post-moderation
Pinned articles
Ability to sort the list by highest member count, age
Search communities
Search in community
Block members from a community
Approved/whitelisted posters?
"Request a revision" in moderation queue
Affiliate links to a community
Ability to remove moderators
Show community tagline, link to the rules
Invite to be a moderator
User should be able to see the feed of their communities
Edit community settings (incl. tagline and rules)
Notifications (badges?) about articles in moderation queue
Moderator submitting article should bypass queue
...and you will also help the author collect more tips.
Comments
any plans to give mods a % of tips? for their work?
There's a big-big problem with funds distribution with this idea. Who gets the money if a theoretical community has 4 admins and 10 moderators (3 moderators and 1 admin haven't logged in within last year, 2 moderators haven't approved anything in the last 3 months..). Just to make it more fun - the article in question got accepted into 5 communities, each as complex as the example above. :) The article has been upvoted... who gets the money?
jsut split 2% to all equally available at the time of tipping? :)
That would stimulate people to create fake communities and add all the content to it. Because that way you can easily earn the majority of the commission without doing any work. Just create 100 communities, add all content to each community (that can easily be automated) and get 99.9% of the fee :)
damn, that's kinda sad tho :( but yes, if it can be gamed it makes no sense
It is unclear to me what the effect of the "Skip it" moderation button is... can you describe?
It's basically "I don't want to deal with it", like "I don't want to reject or approve it, if somebody else from moderators wants to deal with it - be my guest, just don't show it to me anymore". It should be more useful when it's possible to have multiple moderators on the team.
Thanks!
If I reject a submission to a community, can the author fix up their article and later re-submit?
No, maybe that's something that's better done in the article comments before clicking "reject"?
I did that, got no satisfactory response so far.
Maybe I'll give it some more time.
Hmm maybe community owners should get a notification, when someone submits an article to the queue, otherwise we are not notified and we have to stumble into the requests by accident.
Yes, definitely, we just haven't got to it yet.
Hi read.cash.
I need to switch my CashID for my account to a new one. Will it be possible sometime in the future to login with and old CashID and change it to new CashID? Make it confirmable by e.g. entering e-mail for security.
Please email us at hello@read.cash - we'll try to see what we can do.
Is there a way to put a short description on the community you start? It would be nice for me to be able to explain the purpose of the "writing" community I started.
Soon (it's the "tagline" in the list)
Greetings I would like to talk about religion, could it be that you can create a community about religion a church of the network or something?
Sure. Anything, as long as you follow the rules - they are pretty simple.
Just wanted to comment that this is awesome! I like the solution with the extensions, very simple and I expect it to work quite well.
Great job! I've already created a community for uploading pictures of pets and animals
Nice! That's nice!
I like the communities but I have a suggestion. I think they would look way better in a "tile" look, just like the articles. Maybe add some images as banners and stuff. This plain "link" view is kinda boring. But Great idea overall!
Thanks for the suggestion. We'll probably implement the switcher, just like on the main page (tiles<->text), but for the first version we've decided to try a more toned-down approach first :)
I got you, simple and if it works, upgrade is an option ;)
cool!
This sounds great!! now I'm curious what's the future plans for topics? phasing them out or not sure yet?
I think maybe we'll eventually downgrade them, so that they are less important and visible, but I don't think we'll remove them. Maybe somebody we'll think of a way to easily or cheaply keep them clean :)
No idea yet. They seem to add a nice bit of chaos to the soup of read.cash :)
Wow that's great news and improvements! Keep up the good work!
Thanks! :)
I have been messing around with communities a bit, was wondering if this was a bug or just how the system works.
I have created two communities with the name "Opensource", they are the following links.
https://read.cash/c/opensource-0cc0 https://read.cash/c/opensource-7cc7
I did this to see if one user could make the same community multiple times (you can). The I wanted to see if I could delete one, or disband it, leaving the 7cc7 community did nothing, it just exists with no members.
Can communities be deleted? Will 7cc7 never have a moderator again? Will the next person that joins 7cc7 be a moderator?
Anyway, awesome feature, keep up the great work.
Yeah, as a creator of a community - you are always a moderator. At least you should be..
Yeah, you can never think of everything :) There's no way to delete a community. For the reasons that we're not sure what to do about the community. It's usually bigger than the owner and everybody who contributed would feel pretty bad about community being removed.. So, I'm not sure what we can do here. Of course, we can delete an empty community.
Alright, feel free to remove 7cc7. It was more or less just me testing how communities worked, so no need to keep it around.
We're also kind of testing how communities work :) That's why we're releasing it early in the most basic form - to see whether it's of any use, how would it be used, etc...
Yeah, I think it will be hard to tell with the currently limited feature set, though that isn't a critique of the early release. Personally the idea of being able to find targeted content on this platform seems extremely beneficial. I'm actually writing a short little piece on growing the read.cash community, I'll touch on categories in it. :)
👍
Done.
Wow you guys continue impress me with your forward thinking time and time again. I figured you were going to unleash some subreddit type thing but man this is even better. Awesome work. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves.
👍 Thanks! :)
When dark mode? ;)
Not soon. :) It's pretty hard to do with the technology that we use. We've tried, but it would require a lot of effort. In the meantime you can probably use something like this: https://read.cash/@aschatria/readcash-nightmode-theme-memocash-darkmode-color-palette-3f5d62a1
I personally use "DarkReader" plugin (for firefox) which makes practically all websites be in dark mode.
Read.cash looks great with it. Only subtle details like the little arrow icon to the upvote button are black on dark-grey. But I can totally live with that.
Thanks. Hadn't seen this.
I have created a community for Developers and programmers:
https://read.cash/c/developers-and-programmers-c0e2
,,You are doing that too fast'' :D
2 submissions per author per 60 seconds :) That's about 3000 submissions per day. Should be enough.
Feature request:
On the article listing page of a community, please show a language icon next to each article for easier user navigation. Preferably just in front of the article title.
This really helps communities like Mythbusting one where we have articles in many languages.
Sure. We actually thought that people would want single-language communities, but I don't see why not. We'll probably need to filter by "user languages" too.
Filtering would be a nice-to-have for later, visually it would help a lot to just see the flag.
Makes sense. Done.
Thanks, looking better!
Are you eventually heading to compete with Patreon? Crypto lends itself to public bounties for content creation.
I don't think we'll ever compete with anybody :) We're just doing some stuff that seems interesting. However, "bounties" are on the Roadmap 😉 But I won't hype it too much, since we don't know when and how it's going to look.
To get existing articles into the 'Mythbusting (8b0b)' community I've created, I need to contact each of the authors, right?
You can submit articles yourself, actually, look for "submit" button in the article.
I think it is a neat idea. Kudoos to you for the effort!