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YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

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Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#121
post #60

What a load of crap. Major channels are not giving up their enormous paychecks from Google to take a flier on blockchain powered alternatives with no audience on it. 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.

But if the 'little folk' who are affected by the monetization changes find they can make money on Dtube or wherever, who will fill the lower tranches of YouTube? Other than those producing and uploading out of principle and without desire to earn anything.

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.

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#122

Yours.org is is my favorite example of this. Writers of articles receive Bitcoin Cash from the community. Interestingly, it costs Bitcoin Cash to upvote content and comment on things. Presumably this helps combat upvote bots and spammers. 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…

Paying for moderation/upvotes sounds like a terrible idea to me, it basically turn all posts into "promoted posts". If the platform becomes successful what will prevent companies and lobbyists from paying to have their content at the top, always? This is already a problem with popular platforms like reddit (and to a lesser extent HN) where this is actually considered inappropriate and against the rules, I'm not sure it's a great idea to embrace it.

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.

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#123

The financial press is obsessed with blockchain. I’m sure there is something to that (payments? Real estate ledgers?), but this isn’t it.

The tech world too... All my freelance dev. friends are learning Solidity and blockchain programming.

It's the latest tech trend, like noSQL/mongoDB a few years ago

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#125
post #15

You know what's interesting? A Decentralised media platform used to be huge and actually is still huge: Torrents. 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 Torrent…

You certainly don't need blockchains and distributed databases to reward creators, centralized solutions like Patreon work perfectly fine. If you want Netflix style monetization, that is not a technical problem but a social one, Netflix relies on the concept of copyright. Any community that does not respect copyright will switch to the free alternative, leaving voluntary donations as the only monetization option. May…

Patreon is better, because a few relatively wealthy supporters can fund zero-cost release of cultural products for the many free riders.

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#126

Surprised that there is no mention of Brave and BAT in the article and in the comments so far.

Whatever your perspective on Brendan Eich's views[0], anything he's in charge of is a powder keg waiting to blow up. Brave/BAT will never go far while this conflict remains. [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 decid…

>powder keg waiting to blow up

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 !

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#127
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT wasn't very sad about stolen content when they were starting up...

They still are anything but sad about it. The amount of pirated music on their platform is mind boggling.

A lot of that is fully monetized by the copyright owners.

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#128
post #15

You know what's interesting? A Decentralised media platform used to be huge and actually is still huge: Torrents. 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 Torrent…

You certainly don't need blockchains and distributed databases to reward creators, centralized solutions like Patreon work perfectly fine. If you want Netflix style monetization, that is not a technical problem but a social one, Netflix relies on the concept of copyright. Any community that does not respect copyright will switch to the free alternative, leaving voluntary donations as the only monetization option. May…

Patreon has on a multitude of occasions exercised its centralized right to block creators and payments across its platform. This is why centralization is bad.

With centralization we're delegating the act and responsibility of filtering to third parties.

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are willing to pay for convience, but only so much. A lot of what gets torrented is easily and very conveniently available on iTunes, Playstore, or Amazon Instant, but it costs 5 bucks. What isn’t convient about HBO Now (assuming you are in the USA)?

Pay per view is not convenient. You have to make a decision each time "do I really want to watch this, is is worth it" and then have buyers remorse afterwards. Pay a monthly, automatically recurring, fixed fee is convenient. Out of sight, out of mind.

I generally feel the opposite. It's much easier for me to buy a movie or box set outright than subscribe to a streaming service. It's pretty much the same with all fixed recurring payments -- I always feel pressure to use the service and I'm constantly evaluating whether its worth it.

Re: YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever your perspective on Brendan Eich's views[0], anything he's in charge of is a powder keg waiting to blow up. Brave/BAT will never go far while this conflict remains. [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 decid…

>powder keg waiting to blow up 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…

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