LBRY – A decentralized YouTube alternative
lbry.io
lbry.io
The top comment, reproduced verbatim:
Suppose i created address with name of my company lbry/:Mycompany and i bought this address at 1 LBC.
On that address i will be posting my music that i created myself. This address becomes very popular. People often going on that address and buy music created by me. After 4 months it appears my music that you can find on address lbry/:Mycompany becomes very popular. So some guys came in, he sees that many people come in to that address to buy stuff. So he buys lbry/:Mycompany with 1.1 LBC and started posting his content and sells it. So the first guy who created lbry/:Mycompany in a lose position here. He make this address very popular to attend and then he loses it. And right now it is a headeache for him to try buy back this address on greater price or make another name.
So what is the point of such system?
Let's go deeper. There's three parties involved in this market. Users, platform providers and content creators. The users dictate the terms. Where they go the others follow.
What is this whole technology providing for the users? Nothing, at least nothing of mass appeal.
It's a losing strategy.
The best example of this is Ebay/Paypal. They always put the buyers first for the same reason and Ebay alternatives who don't never catch on because the buyers don't want to use a platform that is not biased towards them.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I need to see a more compelling use case than the "small guy producing content", considering YouTube DOES exist
> It is also worth noting that in the event that LBRY received notice that either name contained an illegitimate copy of Spider Man, LBRY would dutifully and quickly put that content id on a blacklist, blocking discovery or purchase via any legal services. LBRY and users of LBRY are still subject to the DMCA and other relevant laws of their respective countries.
These two goals -- being subject to the DMCA (and similar laws), and promising a predetermined, immutable set of rules -- are incompatible.
As long as you intend to abide by $LEGAL_CODE, the set of laws you follow is not fixed since it is subject to changes in $LEGAL_CODE. What happens if the Premier of China, to use the example from the page, decides to make it illegal for some content to be viewed in China?
Of course, this is in addition to the whole problem of the bidding system being flawed since there is (apparently?) no concept of ownership, as opposed to a continuously running auction where the highest bidder as of some time controls an address. The idea is unquestionably elegant, but leaves open the potential of some evil party with significant funds taking control of your address, where you need to buy the address back, causing, e.g. some sort of Gawker-esque financial ruin. The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to have some kind of judicial arbitration. I suppose people still remember the whole Ethereum fiasco.
Besides, there may be two "reasonable" addresses for some content, or more. I find it highly unlikely that there is some kind of economics-assured "existence and uniqueness" theorem that assures otherwise. How about "/wonderfullife" vs. "/itsawonderfullife"? You will need some kind of signing or cryptographically robust identification system to ensure authenticity, because you risk not being able to keep up with a stream of DMCA takedown orders against YouTube-style indiscriminate uploading of copyrighted material.
From what I've gathered, LBRY doesn't offer this same type of decentralization.
I checked out the old GNU MediaGoblin site to see how it's been coming along. It would be nice if we had a real decentralized, easy to use, video hosting service.
I take that to mean that this isn't really controllable by DMCA. So, they are just giving DMCA lip service.
The point is, complete lawfulness and blockchain utopias aren't really compatible.
I'm hopeful, though. I like the idea of a decentralized content platform.
We have one of those, the WWW.
What we need is a decentralized method for the social aspects: identity management, networking (following/liking, etc), etc. We had some of that with the early blogosphere stuff, but we largely let it slide into oblivion.
No. A cranked up, ludicrous vision of the future is not a valid base for an accurate title. The bidding system has nothing to do with YouTube. The only reason why the developers are mentioning YouTube is getting attention, SEO.
The worst thing about these types of venture capital backed pipe dreams is, that they give sane decentralisation ideas, like IPFS, a bad name :(
If anything, this got me extremely interested in what these kinds of decentralized systems can be put to use for. Now I get to look up IPFS, so thank you. :)
AOL keywords is spot on here, the whole concept is rubbish.
> "On the whole, as with the car and encryption, the benefits of LBRY clearly outweigh nefarious uses."
This seems to underestimate the persistence of human malice. But LBRY promises to stop that e.g. via universal black lists and other records. I don't quite see how the "decentralization" label still applies with a universal black list and banning policies. That aside, getting the general populace on-board distributed systems has always been slow-going. Just ask anyone in GNUSocial. The fact is, most people aren't interested. Youtube is easy already. Easy has won out.
This on the other hand... it feels like it was made for a tech audience instead of a mainstream one. You've got the decentralised aspect with its own protocol and app. You've got a weird payment system where someone can outbid the original creator to take over a URL for some reason or another. And you've then got the awkward content filtering/censoring side that somehow still exists in a supposedly decentralised service.
This seems like something that's gonna be pretty hard to explain to the average Joe who's merely looking for cat videos and doesn't know what a credit or protocol or client or anything else means.
I also have to wonder who the 'main' target audience is here. People that like decentralised services don't want a system where things like DMCA notices actually work. I mean, can you imagine if torrents could somehow be synced to remove all copyrighted content on request? No one would use them. And the idea of other laws (those related to 'hate speech' for example) being something you can implement on a decentralised service doesn't appeal either.
Meanwhile, you've then got the aforementioned confused average Joes, for whom a simple server/client system is about as complex a deal as they can be bothered with, and both groups wondering why an auction system exists for video URLs.
Feels like an overengineered, not quite intuitive solution to a problem.
Otherwise, technologically, LBRY is interesting, it makes me think of IPFS and ZeroNet (which could have both been used as backend maybe?).
True, but that holds only for a small part of YouTube. I think the majority of videos on YouTube are not being paid for.
So I went to the main page and tried to watch the video (it's just about 2 minutes, I think). The things did not get better.
I am a fairly technical person but I am always trying to look at any idea from the consumer perspective. So here we go...
1. I generate content, say, videos. I upload them on YouTube and I know how it might potentially get monetized. I mean that for X views and Y ads I may get Z dollars. All these Bitcoin/Blockchain kind of ideas always explain some kind of technology improvements but they never touch how the end user would actually benefit from it. Saying "everything will be better", "you will get fair profit", "no piracy anymore", and stuff like that is close to saying nothing. No one usually tells "why", "how" and "what" I would need to do as a user.
2. There is YouTube. There is Vimeo. There is Facebook which is constantly trying to make video integration more efficient. Instagram. Twitter. Etc. So, if the idea is to build another YouTube with some different technology behind the scene, then my question is - who would follow? I won't. Seriously. Because YouTube works, and there are millions of people there. If you build a network with different content, different functionality, different user experience, I may consider switching or using it at the same time with YouTube (YouTube also sucks a lot). But I will never care, as a user, whether it's built on MySQL, Big Table or Blockchain. That's not my business at all.
So, the technology might be great (I am not to judge), but the application of it looks still blurry to me. People just don't seem to come up with any good idea how to apply Blockchain, and they are trying to take any random industry and build a solution which "should work better" than existing ones. But from the user point of view, it doesn't matter.
Your other comments are also valid. Especially the one on content creators moving to this. I think the only advantage to this as compared to other companies that have tried in the past is the underlying technology. If creators don't have to deal with a centralized organization that gives them plenty of headaches, that sounds like a win.
The Reddit AMA is a hoot. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/50tyub/were_the_nerds...
"Since LBRY names are the equivalent to content storefronts, we believe that LBRY names will hold the most value to rightsholders who produce content associated with a given name."
"As names in demand on LBRY will be more expensive, the names themselves will also serve as a signal of reputation, legitimacy, and quality. If a user searches LBRY for Spider Man and sees one at lbry://spiderman and one at lbry://spiderman_russhaxor, there will be little doubt that the latter is less legitimate."
Yes, this sounds somewhat like DNS. First come, first serve, try to snatch up domains first and then sit on them and try to sell them.
But, that places way too much assumed value in the name. All is takes is a search service to resolve "lbry://asdfaljsfd" to a good copy of Spider Man, and now it no longer matters what LBRY URL looks legit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/50tyub/were_the_nerds...
In particular this bit:
>Our goal is to create a system where the URL a user guesses is the most likely to return what they are actually looking for. Economics says this design is the most likely to do so, because the URL is most valuable when it returns what users want.
I very much doubt that orthodox economics actually supports their claim. At the very least it's probably not as simple as they make it out to be.
This has always been a problem I had with crypto technologies. Those who get involved seem to have an attraction towards very simplistic economic notions and an aversion to more refined theory, that is much more able to deal with reality as opposed to that simple sandbox economic world their mindset seems to permanently inhibit.
Problem #1: people aren't in general rational, and willingness to pay isn't always correlated with value derived. How many people benefit from Wikipedia, compared with the number who donate money?
Problem #2 (more severe IMO): if I understand correctly (the white paper is very hazy on details), the bidding process is based on capital, not income. Anyone with sufficient reserves of LBC can squat on a name and extract value from it with zero recurring cost.
They should have focused on doing everything else well, and perhaps introduce voluntary payments (i.e.: donations) later.
Mandatory payments ain't gonna fly; Even assuming they somehow made the technical part work, which I don't see happening, a system that's the same but without the payments is bound to exist. Guess which one people are going to use? If payment is strictly voluntary, however, then a single system is enough.
Doesn't that kind of defeat the whole point of decentralizing it to begin with?