YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals
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I don't think YT and FB are sad about losing those types of "creators".
I’m referring more to the sheer volume of back catalog older/indie music that users have digitized from vinyl. I’ve talked to several indie label managers who gave up years ago trying to monetize/fight youtube with c&d letters.
There are tons of whole albums which are definitively not "monetized" by their makers.
E.g. old stuff where the band does not exists anymore or all the low selling genres where nobody cares. It is not a bad thing since i discovered a lot of cool stuff like that.
A breakdown of how the system works (they're trying to sell music for you to use, but it's still a good writeup):
https://www.safemusiclist.com/can-use-copyrighted-music-yout...
It's a clearly a consequence of Youtube being owned by a tech giant and having such a high profile, all the right holders are willing to tell their lawyers to pull the trigger if they find their content hosted illegally on Youtube. It's probably easier and cheaper for Google to be proactive about it than dealing with the probably tremendous amount of complaints that would be generated if they waited for right holders to make a move.
If you can steal from Disney, Youtube doesn't care. And no these videos are not being monetized by the creator.
How do you know that?
It may or it may not; I fail to see how that test would lead you to a conclusion here. You're making an assertion and really you have no idea.
The uploaders get through the filters with really strange editing tricks, cropping the screen and editing random bits together. It's not a level of quality that Disney would like to have associated with their brand in even the most unofficial way.
That they do, not wrong there.
I'm personally surprised the "copyright infringement isn't theft" meme is still going strong.
Semantics matter though when even courts start to become confused by the inexact use of terminology.
Here is a copyright infringement case that had to be taken to the US supreme court to reverse a guilty verdict for "interstate transportation of stolen property": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States
You can argue that a person might have gone to see the movie if they hadn't downloaded it, but that's kind of a dumb argument.
In this thread, we recognize the existence of supply / demand.
It is exceptionally ignorant to claim that increasing the supply of a relatively scarce thing has no economic impact on the creator / owner.
What I find really ignorant though, is you've decided that lowering demand is equivalent to theft. Does that mean competitors are "stealing" from one another.
1. Copyright shouldn't exist. 2. If copyright didn't exist, anyone would be able to get any digital file easily without restriction. 3. If you can get any digital file without restriction, then supply is infinite and demand doesn't matter. 4. If supply is infinite, then supply and demand doesn't matter and you're ignorant for trying to apply it.
That's basically the argument you're making, and you're rather trivially just assuming the consequent.
On the second part, that's just a really faulty analogy. Competitors aren't "stealing" from one another for the simple reason that they haven't taken anything. Copyright infringement isn't "stealing" demand. It's stealing an item that has demand. It's the infringement that's the theft, not the consequences. The consequences are just the justification for having the law in the first place. To repeat, competitors aren't "stealing" when they lower demand for the stupidly obvious reason that they haven't stolen anything.
Copying a file is free, it's weird to make it equivalent to theft when there is no loss on behalf of the studio. Perhaps a better example would be one friend sharing a dvd with another friend.
That's what I'm saying though, it is stupid, to call file sharing theft. Theft involves loss on behalf one party. If simply taking profit(file sharing media companies would say) is enough to count as theft, then regular competition does that.
Another analogy: suppose you had a technology where you could clone real life items, you could copy food, cars, precious metals etc. you wouldn't call that theft. However in computing that technology readily exists.
Another thing, you're conflating laws with morality, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's immoral. Copyright has been extended again and again by the Disney company afraid to lose their mouse.
And what I'm saying is that you're simply declaring by fiat that there's no loss to the studio when you copy a file they own the rights to, and from there, building up to a conclusion that there's no loss to the studio when you copy a file they own the rights to.
It's a circular argument that falls apart because I reject the premise that I suffer no loss if you infringe on my right to profit from my own creation. You're not going to be able to argue me away from that by just saying the opposite is true with no further evidence.
Again, theft isn't depriving someone of property. If I go to your house and say, "ooh, cool guitar" and you give it to me, no theft has occurred. You've been deprived of that guitar, but I had the right to take it because you gave me permission.
Theft is committing an act of taking something that you don't have the right to take. The value of that thing doesn't determine whether or not it's theft, it determines damages. Regular competition or loaning a DVD to a friend don't consititute theft because you took no action you aren't allowed to take. The law allows you to make a competing product or to loan your books and movies to a friend for personal use. That's the whole reason why we don't refer to that as stealing something.
You can't steal something if you didn't steal something, regardless of the impact your action has on someone else. But in copyright infringement, you took something. You took the exclusive right to distribute a piece of content. That is an actual thing that is recognized by law and by common everyday economics as a real thing that has value. Depriving its rightful owner of that thing can be reasonably described as theft.
I haven't mentioned morality at all. I haven't even mentioned my personal stance on what I'd like to see IP law become. The only think I'm doing is arguing against this notion that it can't possibly be considered "theft" unless there's physical piece of plastic involved.
Obviously I meant unwillingly deprived, now you're just being pedantic.
But let's make your analogy more accurate, it would be more like me walking into your house, drawing it, and reproducing it at home.
> ... The law allows you to ...
You are in fact making the claim that something is (morally) wrong or not because it is illegal.
I will explain why competition doesn't count, because even though you make less money, they aren't directly taking it from you.
If I made my livelihood by designing homes, and I was good enough at that job that people demanded my services, then yes, copying one of my designs and distributing it without my consent is stealing something from me.
And I'm not conflating morally and legality. I'm really not. The two correlate pretty highly here (as most laws do for obvious reasons), so I guess maybe that's what's confusing you. But if I write a novel, and you put the original file on bittorrent, I created all the value here. You dragging a dropping a icon representing the bits on a hard drive isn't valuable work. And I believe that morally, the nearly infinitely greater amount of productive work I did to create that copy than what you did entitles me to more creative control. I believe that completely independently of whatever the legal system says. I also know that the legal system agrees with that determination and sets penalties for violating rules set up to enforce it. But I'm not using that as evidence for my moral position. It's not immoral because its illegal. The causation goes the other way around. It's illegal because the shared ethical framework of the people and society that drafted the constitution found it immoral.
To be fair, I believe I am free in my expectations and declarations. I didn't and don't expect that however.
> right to attempt to sell your friend the file under the terms I want to set
To attempt a sale is not a right, at least not one I am familiar with.
> You dragging a dropping a icon representing the bits on a hard drive isn't valuable work.
Actually, in as much as that is included in the archival process, I disagree.
> It's illegal because the shared ethical framework of the people and society that drafted the constitution found it immoral.
Good thing Disney has nothing to do with it, otherwise copyright might stretch out to over a century.
It's called "copyright". You have the right to control distribution of your creative work. A direct and unavoidable implication of that is the right to try to sell it.
> Actually, in as much as that is included in the archival process, I disagree.
Archival doesn't produce a creative act by either common sense or legal interpretation. You can add value of course by writing backup programs or just doing the work of backing people's files up, so arguably I didn't choose my words carefully enough there. But the thing you created was the process of doing the archiving. You're entitled to control of and credit for that work, but not the actual files that your process created. Writing a program that saves the text of an ebook doesn't make me the author of the book.
> Good thing Disney has nothing to do with it, otherwise copyright might stretch out to over a century.
I completely agree, but it's irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not copyright as a concept should exist.
You may not be stealing directly from the people whose works you are entertaining yourself with, but you are stealing from the people whose works you would have otherwise bought if you didn't have this free entertainment that you consider unworthy of your purchase yet still view anyway.
If you enjoy content and declare "It isn't worth the price, and I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so what's the harm, right?" you are still satisfying your urge to be entertained. If, without this access to free, overpriced entertainment, you would have otherwise sought out and bought other entertainment that you deemed worthy of your money, you are stealing from the people offering worthy entertainment.
If someone owned a practically infinite supply of water from a spring and bottled water for $50 per 12 oz bottle, and you said, "Hey it's fine if I sneak on their land and drink from their spring, because I wouldn't pay for their water anyway, so who am I hurting, right?" regardless that there is tap water that you would have otherwise bought at $0.03 per gallon, but now have no need for.
You may not be hurting the spring owners, but you are hurting the utilities selling the tap water.
IMO, this is why entertainment mostly sucks nowadays. It's very hard to make any money in it, because people are all watching/listening to crap movies/music, turning their nose at it and refusing to pay, and then going in for a second helping. /rant
Hardly think YouTube is really in a position to be held up as an example of good taste or quality considering the sort of content they've been peddling to kids the past few years until very recently.
I think that is known to be false (although it is repeated ad nauseam on HN). The best estimate around 2011 / 2012, is from this study: https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139
which estimated SR transactions to be between 4% - 9% of the total Bitcoin transactions. Hardly what I would call "The lion's share".
There's a huge community that consumes media that's not hosted anywhere particular and there are apps like Popcorn Time that offer viewing experience almost as good as Netflix.
The problem, of course, is that up until now there was no way to reward the creators and almost all the media consumed on Torrents is illicit copies of copyrighted material that don't bring direct benefits to its creators.
It is a huge topic in the blockchain community to find a way to reward content creators and we see early attempts that may or may not succeed at this.
Another issue is the "Averagisation" of the content. The moment that you make a content that advertisers might find controversial you risk losing your reward for that content so advertising financed media fails to capture anything beyond the mainstream entertainment. This has another unfortunate outcome, which is that people who don't want to get a direct reward for their content but hoping to be rewarded with political influence can afford to continue producing content that tends to be extremist(veganism, left and right politics, racism, conspiracy theories - you name it). So we end up with extremely light content that's something between product unboxing and funny videos not touching any sensitive topic and extremely edgy content that depicts the world as black and white and if you are not one of us you are one of them. Your average monetised content on Youtube is extremely light and your average popular non-monetised conted is extremeley heavy.
At this time you'll find that these new decentralised platforms are full of the extremist's stuff, as it is just another platform to spread their influence but in the long run, I believe that they will be diluted and will offer a platform where non-extremist but alternative cultures can flourish.
Maybe there is a blockchain niche where content is offered freely but ad supported, with the experience painless enough not to motivate users to switch to the ad-free alternative. The revenue would then be necessarily modest, but would be redirected to the creators almost in full, compensating the massive Youtube cut.
Spotify almost works properly as a centralized platform because almost all music is on there. But I know a few albums that aren't, and it's too bad.
For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient.
The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. I know they have it all on a digital platform internally already, format is not an issue.
The infuriating thing is, we’ve already paid for it. Anything BBC should be “free” to anyone who had paid their TV license in the last year it was broadcast. We own it already, it’s sheer extortion to make you pay full price for a DVD.
No you didn't. For the example, the BBC typically only pays independent production companies (which is about 40% of their output) a fraction of what the content costs to make because the indie retains distribution rights afterwards and can make up the rest with sales. Same with scriptwriters, or actors.
No it doesn't. The BBC wholly owns virtually nothing.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140603125500/htt...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/contributor_rights.shtml?chapte...
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2010/nov/25/bbc-archive-onli...
And more importantly, the things it does wholly own, it very rarely knows, legally, that it does wholly own, as the records aren't reliable. So it would involve a vast amount of legal time and risk to investigate.
Because they would devalue new productions. The more license-payers watch old movies, the less they will watch Top Gear or Strictly or whatever it's supposed to be big now. This would mean less interest in new productions, less stuff sold by BBCWorld (or whatever it's called these days), less money going around... like all companies and organisations, the BBC wants to grow, not to stall.
Even today, I was reading that one Black Mirror episode for which the closing song was just so on had licensed it for 15 years. Which is a long time but hardly forever.
Which is quite common (Scrubs for example has had to re-edit library music into most of it's episodes for most uses, instead of the original tracks).
If you own the song, seems like you'd want to avoid leaving money on the table. I wonder how common relicensing is vs. editing.
It's a combination of price and convenience. There's some upper limit to the monthly price you (and everyone else) is willing to pay for content.
It wasn’t the price that moved me away from HBONow, it was their lack of convenience compared to a torrent rig.
It ended up being HBO’s design was more for themselves rather than me (“we want to show you ads” vs “you want to watch your shows”). It was still very old in its philosophy of content.
Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused.
Ultimately, I think only OSS/pirate are closest to the use desires.
Except for the thousands of A/B experiments that incessantly drive you to spend every ounce of attention on Netflix. E.g. the auto-playing preview that starts whenever you stop moving the active selection. It strongly encourages you to start playing the thing rather than being thoughtful about whether you actually want to or not. Personally I hate this - it drives my anxiety nuts - and I find HBO's tactics much less user-hostile (although agreed the ads for HBO's own content are outright stupid).
I find the Netflix UI, especially the one for Xbox utterly slow and too jammed with information. Its not that great.
In jurisdictions where it is available it's often only available as a part of a larger cable package. If you're signed up with another provider that's pretty inconvenient also.
There is a well worn cartoon on this topic that sums up the position of many quite well [0]
EDIT Actually, I'm going to put aside disingenuity for a second.
I actually have the closest equivalent of HBO with my provider, it's called "Sky Atlantic" and it's only available through Sky, of course.
So I'm fully paid up and legit as far as GoT is concerned but only coincidentally. If a competing network were to start showing $competing_popular_tv_show you can be guaranteed I wouldn't be switching, or taking on a second subscription ...
Take my $$$ by all means, but if you get greedy you'll get nothing.
When this comic came out(2011) HBO Now (confusingly separate from HBO Go) did not exist.
click
"To access HBO GO℠, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America."
Some time ago while traveling I actively tried to find a way to pay to watch Game of Thrones. I failed miserably.
Also I really don't like having to have and manage subscription for various providers, nor do I like to be locked in with one. I would love to have a single subscription or even better pre-paid option somewhere which can be used across services and my money gets distributed accordingly.
Same with news media. I would be more than willing to pay a set amount per year for consumption, but I'm not willing to pay that amount exclusively to you.
I think stuff like Netflix, Spotify, Steam, etc have proven that when content is priced right and delivered in a convenient manner folks are more than happy to pay.
News media is one of the worst for not figuring out how to adapt. I'd love to read some newspapers, watch a couple news networks, etc - but i'm not willing to plop down $100 a month and deal with a bunch of different apps to do this so I stick with online.
There is indeed an upper limit for everyone. If I need to pay >50 euros/month and still get ads, no thanks.
What isn’t convient about HBO Now (assuming you are in the USA)?
Pay a monthly, automatically recurring, fixed fee is convenient. Out of sight, out of mind.
What is inconvenient about subscribing to HBO Now? You have to do more work to find/download an episode of GoT compared to streaming via HBO Now. Or you could stream the episodes from Prime. Same with Walking Dead. There are rarely inconvenient streaming options.
1. All clients suck immensely.
2. The catalog is really poor.
3. DRM. I don't think you could describe inconvenient better than with those three letters.
If I could pay, say $30 a month, to legally pirate (not from any official source even) any movie/series I want I'd pay that in a heartbeat ($30 is still more than I consume if I were to buy it in a store). But now I don't have any service because it isn't worth it. I don't get the convenience and I don't get a decent catalog and I would have gotten it with DRM.
And that's just me. The masses of non-tech-savvy people out there don't want to deal with pirating things. For these people, paid services are far, far superior.
With centralization we're delegating the act and responsibility of filtering to third parties.
Assuming that third parties have better information than the average person, that's not a bug, but rather a feature. The issue is that information asymmetry makes it difficult for average consumers to know which third parties actually do have better information and which ones are just gatekeepers collecting tolls.
In general, I'm inclined to believe that centralized third-parties are better at keeping out shysters and low quality content than a free-for-all. People always like to claim that 5-star scales driven by normal consumers are adequate filters, but the fact is that these are easily gamed by sockpuppets or the end-user's ignorance of what they're rating (i.e., you can go to one dentist with many 5-star ratings who was a good bedside manner, then go to a better dentist who has to undo all the fuck-ups that the first dentist made, and which you, as a non-specialist, were ignorant of). Crowdsourcing doesn't triumph over the groupthink, pluralistic ignorance, and other failings of collective intelligence.
Patreon has had, to a much smaller degree, the same issue as YouTube. Somebody posts something somebody else doesn't like on the site. One group argues for removal, another group argues against it. In the end the company can do literally nothing to please everybody. Decentralized solutions remove any notion of implied endorsement and so what is there is simply what is there. And of course there are monetization issues. Companies want to increase their profit, users want to pay as little as possible (outside of what is donated). These interests can and do come into conflict. But more importantly, even if they had not had such issues, experience is showing us that it's only a matter of time until they would. So by suggesting some alternative to Patreon, it's just kicking the can rather than actually solving anything.
Part of the promise of distributed, permissionless protocols is the lack of top-down censorship.
Also, I think it's better not to depend on a single company for such transactions (remember PayPal, and it's awful censorship?). Plus, I believe cryptocurrencies offer much better liquidity once you start to use any cryptocurrency.
Patreon, like existing solutions, is willing to remove people they don't like. In order to fully disassociate yourself from the whims of a corporation, you need to have a decentralized solution.
How is that solved on the decentralized platforms? How does discoverability work, what assumptions does it make, and can it be "gamed"?
The technical aspect of this is a mostly solved problem (YouTube and other distributors do it) but getting past the privacy aspects will be challenging - the type of person to use a distributed platform will also likely be using it to avoid this sort of tracking. Or they're in a country that has GDPR-like laws.
For any type of media, whether it's songs/bands on a music streaming service, video content on youtube, or even complementary goods in an online store, a good recommender system can and will suggest things that I would never have thought of (because I didn't know it existed) and thus could never have found with any search or tagging system.
How do I search for a song that's similar to those that I listened just now (and genre tags don't really work, they're far too broad, subjective and inaccurate) and that's explicitly not one of the songs which I remembered and just heard already?
I actually find this very same sentence to be extreme..ly.. stupid.
The one caveat to this is that torrents are cool because its a system that can arguably edge cache better than CDN locations but with today's low upload speeds and pings for consumer connections it seems the CDNs do win.
What of the "information wants to be free" faction which is indifferent or hostile to the idea of content creators being rewarded?
I expect there continue to be polarization where most creators of commercially viable content remain within establishment channels despite all their problems. Both hand economic power to distributors over creators, but only the upstarts pursue the ideological delegitimization of creators.
The big winners in a world without copyright are ISPs, who achieve instant vertical integration of both content and distribution -- facilitating end-user lockin to their portals.
Well, yes. The alternative would have been to give the music and video industry a total veto over all consumer electronics, including computers, all operating systems, all content manipulation software, and so on. This would also have included repeated charges for moving media between devices and premiums for certain types of use; setting a song as your ringtone would cost several dollars, for example. There would be no Spotify and no Netflix. There might not be a Youtube, but if there was it would be impossible to watch it on Linux using only Free software. There might be iPods, but you'd have to re-buy all your music for each device. There might not even be videotapes. The end-user lockin would be at absurd levels.
The only middle ground is a scorched no-mans-land.
Did it sound like I was advocating that creators be compensated for every last copy? That would not make sense: copyright holders can and do license content to allow such usage, and of course copyright law itself allows for copying under certain circumstances.
At the rates for on-demand streaming that the labels were demanding in the early 2000s, a Spotify subscription would be several hundred dollars.
As recently as 2012 someone was charged $9,250 per song download in punitive damages. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/minnesota-woman-orde...
I hope for a future where the innovators in this space do find ways to reward creators. (Patreon is a good start, and maybe there's hope in the blockchain.) That might actually win powerful allies as commercially viable content authors migrate, and the long-hoped-for disempowerment of the current copyright middlemen comes within reach.
I don't see that happening when content creators are treated as acceptable collateral damage in the war to found an "information wants to be free" utopia, though. It will have to be a different faction that successfully negotiates the alliance.
You basically get paid in crypto (Bitcoin Cash) for seeding torrents. Inversely, you can also pay BCH to get "high priority" speeds.
as for a platform to reward content creators, check out
I have respect for Vegans despite being a huge meat lover. What I mean by extremism is that Vegans are extreme and controversial form certain philosophies and eating habits and those serious about Veganism more often than not claiming that people who eat meat are murderers and should be treated as such, framing this as "Us the spotless goodies vs them unredeemable baddies". In my books, that's extremism.
But hey, I get your point and I'm more than excited about lab grown burgers so we can have all the meat we want without harming the animals.
We can't stop animals from getting harmed. They harm each other in the wild in terrible ways. All we can do is keep our own hands and mouths clean and avoid trashing the environment with livestock farming on an industrial scale.
https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Meat-Growing-Without-Revolution...
What you describe sounds more like polarization.
However, what I mean by "Averagisation" is that all the content begins to look like the previous one and as the trend is to drift either to the most monetizable or most politically extremist.
I wouldn't call this polarisation because these are not polar opposites. The "nice, advertisers friendly" content is not polar opposite to the extremist content, they co-exist without any conflict. So, the content becomes more from the same, just they are in two categories.
You get one set of creators who want monetary gain and so their content fits within certain limits. Over time this will create more similar content as they watch what works for other people.
The other set of creators have different goals and don't care about monetary gain. The popular parts of this content will also tend to local maximum based on the level of extremism that's popular.
I wouldn't call this polarisation even if it can be described as the polarisation of income models because my concern is about the content of the videos.
I find it disturbing to see comments on HN completely disregarding the content and context and default to monetary optimisation.
I believe that people and their creations are what matters and the business models around those are incidental, despite the fact the business is influencing the content.
People always sing songs but the way they profit from this keeps changing over time. Selling tickets, selling recording, selling streaming, selling right - all change as the technology and society changes.
Therefore, I think that the polarisation is not the right word here as there is no polarisation of the content of ad-friendly and controversial content. They might be polarised among themselves tho, like iPhone vs Samsung and MAGA vs Antifa.
The polarization isn't about income models, it's about the different kinds of content (light hearted safe content that aligns with advertisers vs extreme content that doesn't). I may have confused things by mentioning gain. The different goals of the creators was just my basic explanation as to why similar content continues being created because the effect is already in place.
I find it disturbing that you disregard the effect of capital. Advertisers are 100% focused on monetary optimization, and they're very good at driving creators to what will work best for them.
Of course content and context is important. But, money drives the content creation. Even when it isn't used to pay for the original content. Advertisers want impressions and clicks. Content creators want more viewers. The type of content aligns with advertisers goals -> money becomes involved -> more similar content. And other creators see this and want part of it.
Anyway, the content is a cultural product and if not treated as such you'll end up losing your business to someone who does. In that case, if the blockchain people figure out a way that to reward content in a different way than pleasing advertisers then there's a huge opportunity to disrupt Youtube.
At the end of the day, despite what your analytics software says, it's not just impressions what your product gets - it's people watching videos. Content creators don't necessarily want more viewers, they want more influence or more money or more appreciation.
After all, there's a reason why don't consume the same content since the invention of camera and advertisements.
It is, but its also more.
OP wrote:
> The moment that you make a content that advertisers might find controversial you risk losing your reward for that content so advertising financed media fails to capture anything beyond the mainstream entertainment.
This described self-censorship. Wikipedia has a nice article about that, including many examples. [1]
It's a process that maintains the existing polarization.
(Why ice-cream stands on a beach bunch together in the middle instead of being conveniently - for customers - distributed.)
Instead, I coin a word and proceed to explain it. I find that using words with precise technical definitions or words that are jargons is dangerous in an informal context.
There are certainly examples of things like UK newspapers downplaying reports of crime by their advertisers [2], newspapers with advertorial "the real russia" supplements being less critical of russia, local newspapers that rely on ads from estate agents not reporting on crime by local estate agents, and suchlike. There's not much reporting of this stuff online (who'd report it, after all?) but if you can get a paper copy of Private Eye, there are regular reports of this sort of thing.
And of course, you can easily imagine Youtube video creators not wanting their videos demonetised - while demonetising seems pretty inscrutable, "don't offend advertisers" seems to be the name of the game.
There's also a subtler process at work than reports just not getting run; it's that journalists know they won't find it profitable to focus their career on scrutinising big businesses, and youtubers know channels that talk about sexual health and prescription drug costs tend to not do well - so they focus their careers/channels in different areas.
In this case, there's no spiked report or tagged video serving as a smoking gun - just a "lack of interest" as interested people focus their energy elsewhere.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=self-censorship+advertisin... [2] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-media-telegraph-id...
Yet even I recognize the tech is nowhere close to be user friendly for even the most basic use.
Youtube loosing anything to blockchain solutions ?
Yeah, in 10 years maybe.
Right now we are still working hard to figure out how to makes things work, and make money without scamming people.
I mean, come on, I regularly have to compile wallets from source to make them work, sometime fixing the build process in the meantime. I have dedicated app armor profiles that I have to custom make for each one because you basically can't trust any of them.
Why is this article even on HN ? Who upvote that ?
Either we have a lot of new users with a completely different mindset than a few years ago, or we have PR agency pushing some agenda. And given the article is on Bloomberg...
I think it's way more likely for Youtube/Google to implement some sort of blockchain based system to reward creators.
But yeah, we are likely to see a lot of people using the "blockchain" label for marketing reason, not using the tech for any of it's benefits.
But that's silly even from a technical point of view: if you don't need decentralization and transparency, then a blockchain is a very poor alternative to a blackbox built on postgress.
(on the Internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.
The development community needs to stop building "alternatives", with the hope that they become the next big thing, and go back to building things that we want to use ourselves.
Mainly just right+ extremists. No need to beat around the bush.
Because it's objectively a straw man and isn't based on anything except your ideological preconceptions?
>the initial factor they use for putting someone against the wall is economic and not race based.
* Huge citation needed
Isn't this exactly what Gab is though? It was built from the ground up to house a very specific type of content being banned on Twitter.
We might not agree with what they're doing or who uses it but it is exactly an example of a developer scratching their own itch.
[1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube [2] https://mastodon.social/about
Edit: forgot to mention that if you upvote content, later upvotes of the same content earn you money. This incentivizes people to discover and promote new content they think will be popular on the platform.
Being able to "tip" the content creator to reward their work is good however, but it's not particularly novel.
>forgot to mention that if you upvote content, later upvotes of the same content earn you money.
Now I can't imagine how anybody could think that's a good idea. It incentivizes you upvote not content that you deem interesting but content that you think other will find interesting. In other words the website pays you to play into the hivemind.
Imagine reddit (which already has huge hivemind and low quality content issues on big subreddits) if you rewarded people for upvoting popular content and punishing them for upvoting more unusual posts that might not fare as good. Sounds like a terrible idea to me. See a funny cat gif being posted? Quickly upvote it to reap an easy reward. See a post about a very interesting but complex essay on the geopolitics of Botswana ? Better not risk and and lose some money.
The cost?
Let's assume their content is essentially an ad that has no value to anyone on the platform. To get to the top, they'll need to outpay a whole community of people who are incentivized to upvote more interesting content.
Besides how much money would the average user be willing to spend daily on such a website? $1? $2? That already seems like a lot to me. Compared to the amount of money being poured into advertising or politics I don't see how the balance could hold. Besides couldn't you recoup a lot of your investment in a voting ring if later upvotes partially pay for earlier ones? Especially due to the positive feedback that popular posts are more visible and therefore tend to become even more popular? And even more so if people are incentivized to vote on quickly rising posts in the hope to make money?
From a game theory standpoint it doesn't seem workable at all to me, at least if your objective is to promote insightful and interesting content over memes and pictures of naked ladies.
With crypto you can perform instant sub $1 payments with minimal fees (blocks aren't full so it's super low atm). It also saves not having to handle chargebacks, fraud, etc.
Then there is this:
> , a growing swath of creators have fled to sites such as DTube to avoid the constraints. Like other upstart sites, DTube runs on the blockchain network Steem, and users can pay creators and commenters in digital tokens.
The article doesn't go beyond Dtube and Steemit at all, even though it tries to quote them as examples. So the question is - what such sites other than Dtube?
Actually, on reading it closely this is a submarine piece if there ever was one.
It's a PR piece masquerading as a news article, supported by the reporter's relationship with PR reps for the named companies. Not that it was planted or bought. It's just lazy reporting. Write up a summary of what your friends and/or acquaintances say, don't do any real background, and definitely don't be skeptical of any claims. Accept terms like "blockchain" as something it makes sense for video streaming sites to be built on. You end up with an article that took little time to write, gets plenty of clickthroughs thanks to its great headline. Another deadline met.
Who is going to vet 400,000 hours of video per minute Youtube apparently gets or the volume of posts Facebook gets? It's not practically possible.
Before no one really cared, but as the real world consequences of a centralized platform, surveillance and propaganda become clear the cost to free society becomes too great.
The only half way measure that may work now is to stop hoovering up data, stop trying to make endless correlations and inferences to offer micro targeting. Similarly advertisers can target by location and immediate textual context but micro targeting should be disallowed. With proper legislation this can easily to enforced.
Only the payment is via cryptocurrency. The content delivery is as centralized as ever, so this does not change anything wrt to "privacy concerns, censorship".
Both
"Because of the decentralized nature of IPFS and the STEEM blockchain, D.Tube is not able to censor videos, nor enforce guidelines. Only the users can censor it, through the power of their upvotes and downvotes."
You are probably right, their wording is pretty confusing, with that part : "[...]and the STEEM blockchain"
[0] Which he refused to clarify, leaving people to make heuristic decisions based on available info and personal experience with homophobia. He is, of course, free to think and feel however he wants and not share details. Others are free to decide what to invest time, energy, and money in.
I don't get it, what do you mean ? Is this related to his homophobia ?
I don't understand why so many people can't judge Eich without pointing his homophobia, how is this even related to his tech abilities ?. The guy is a visionary, I mean he was defending privacy when privacy wasn't an even a mainstream issue, he invented in-browser scripting
BAT will be mainstream, no doubt about this !
I've been using it since 10 days, it's really well made
https://github.com/holochain/clutter
Holochain is a blockchain alternative designed to avoid blockchain’s scalability and energy consumption issues.
So does not look like it making a debt.
WRT to the article - YouTube may have clamped down on blockchain ads and extremist content, but what happens when DTube (or whoever) starting getting in to hot-water relating to the content, or the ads they're showing. Or someone decides to go hard about cryptocurrencies and taxes and they get caught up. Then it's just another YouTube without as many users.
All that said, I applaud anyone that tries to compete against a monopoly. Just think the odds are very much against them.
If you're interested in our technology and product, everything we build is open-source and MIT licensed. Our GitHub is at github.com/lbryio
There is a contributing guide at lbry.io/faq/contributing . We send cryptocurrency for all accepted PRs.
There isn't any other reason for these platforms to have any kind of usage whatsoever as of today. The creator of one of those so-called blockchains is a known scammer himself, so I guess it makes it full-circle.
It's the latest tech trend, like noSQL/mongoDB a few years ago
According to stories I read, there's some dark stuff going on at Youtube, e.g. [1], discussion [2]. So I wouldn't be surprised if they'd downrank or delete your channel if you start linking to external video sites. (Note: I have no personal experience with this).
[1] https://www.maxlaumeister.com/blog/google-is-deleting-your-f...
And how well do they work with existing services (e.g. can I post a link to a video on Facebook, will it open the native viewer, etc.?)
As a Dtube user, It's true that there are more and more content creators everyday on the platform.
The amount of content is still veeeeery far away for Youtube's, I'm pretty sure Youtube/Medium/Twitter don't really care about their blockchain-based counterparts right now, because of how small and hard to scale they are
On that note, are there any mainstream blockchain based sites or apps right now? Would be interesting to know.
Not sure, Furious Pete has moved his audience to Dtube and he is a fitness vlogger
>On that note, are there any mainstream blockchain based sites or apps right now? Would be interesting to know
I think that Circle is the most mainstream blockchain based app right now, because no one using it know that it's blockchain-based !
PS HN should snip the tracking part in OPs automatically.
Usenet post next? :P
The only people switching are people who have a vested interest in everything blockchain or those who are being driven off Youtube by the ad policy changes.
Unless you can ramp quickly to 4,000 hours of viewing per year, YouTube is a penniless grind. Whereas other sites offer pay-per-view right from the first viewer.
My channel is about guitar stuff, I joined an existing community and am easily finding viewers on Youtube. It might be an uphill battle for me on one of those alternative platforms, and frankly I have no interest in even giving them a shot. I know there's millions of people viewing millions of hours a day on Youtube, and I know how the game is played there.
Those other platforms are unproven and frankly I don't know who's behind them. Just as Google decided to implement policies that favor their advertisers, these blockchain based alternatives may decide anyone with any tweets that can be perceived as being unfriendly towards cryptocurrencies get shut down, just as an example.
The devil you know....