Well, the important thing is just that requests get sent directly from the browser to the blockchain. If it goes through our servers, it creates a layer of centralization. We do pretty much just store things on our own. When you create a post, it goes out both to our database and the blockchain independently. But I feel that the blockchain should be the source of truth if it's going to be decentralized.
Hey, founder here. Obviously, I feel that utilizing blockchains/decentralization in the case of Q&A/knowledge makes sense. Knowledge is the most valuable asset on the internet. Why wouldn't we want users to have ownership over that? By allowing users to easily post content to a blockchain, they are also able to monetize off of it because they own it. Quora pretty much doesn't pay any users at all even when their content brings in millions of views. So I feel that a need exists for decentralized knowledge and the ownership of it.
Where Bitcoin decentralizes digital currency, we are decentralizing digital knowledge.
Sure, https://github.com/dtube/avalon - It's quite possibly the easiest blockchain to understand. The node is written in Javascript and uses a local Mongodb to handle storage of blocks and content data.
Hey, founder/dev here! We will be fully open-source very soon. Our blockchain is forked from another which is open-source. The blockchain is a model in which there are nodes that are elected/voted in by the community. They are responsible for the validation/consensus of blocks getting produced. Whenever you post a question, an answer, or an upvote, the request goes straight from the browser to the blockchain, and your content gets stored there. That data now belongs to you, and you can earn tokens on it indefinitely.
Write performance should stay about the same even at scale because our network is capable of much higher transactions per second due to having elected nodes. Read performance will continue to be good because we have a caching layer where we store posts from the blockchain in a database and just serve from there. This technically adds a bit of centralization, but ultimately, everyone's content still belongs to themselves and not a centralized org.