This is why I'm hyped about the fedi. This is what it'll finally take to break our dependence on a centralized web. Essentially, the email model. I wish we followed this model earlier in the web 2.0 days.
Signal Processing was that subject I found difficult and I found no reason to be interested in audio filtering, so I didn't find an incentive to work through that difficulty. Then I see applications of signal processing, like this, that goes beyond simple audio filtering, that makes me want to learn it again. Honestly, this looks like wizardry! It is no surprise, MIT is on the bleeding edge of signal processing and it mainly is due to Dr. Oppenheim . He wrote the textbook on DSP and runs the DSP Group at MIT.
If that first feature is true, it will bring me back to TypeScript. Honestly, my major deterrence of TypeScript was managing both 3rd party libraries and typing files.
I too was thinking of this article as well. A team might not always know what the boundaries of their data & code classification will be ahead of time.
Since we are on the topic of effectively distributing JS code to clients...why is there no push for delta updates on the web? There was a proposal for delta caching back in 2002: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3229
To a lot of you arguing that Progressive Enhancement doesn't apply to "web apps," as Jake Archibald argues[1], that really isn't an excuse if you can't distinguish it from what you consider a "web site." Is your content static? Is interaction core to your content (like a video game or a data viz explorer)? Even if interactivity is core to your content, why not first offer something like a product page. Describe about your interactive content in text or in images or in a demo video. Just the minimum static content a user can quickly download before the rest of the richer content is loaded. It's not much of an extra effort; you aren't back porting your interactivity to less capable devices. Instead you're using static content to show what your game could be.
You're correct, getting paid for posts is a strong incentive. In the end, we won't know unless we try.
Personally, when I think of a decentralized reddit, there's nothing monetary about it. Simple points equate with popularity and that's incentive enough, but it's hard to build up a large audience like reddit did. Honestly, when I started reading your article, I was expecting to read a proposal for something like Namecoin, but for a decentralized reddit. Then the monetization part took me by surprise because that would totally change the social dynamic of the site. I would feel it would be less about the content and the popularity and more about trying to make money.
As I commented on the article, I think this whole monetary system might deter adoption of the application. Either way, check out Freenet if you want to see prior art in creating a decentralized web: https://freenetproject.org/
In that p2p project, all you contributed was storage and bandwidth.