Transcript Highlights from Consensus 2018

Content Monetization and True Net Neutrality at Consensus 2018

Monday, May 14, 2018
2:20 PM - 3:00 PM (40 mins)
Grand Ballroom West, 3rd Floor

• Brady Dale, CoinDesk (Moderator)
• Adi Sideman, YouNow
• Ryan Shea, Blockstack
• Ned Scott, Steemit

Regarding content takedown notices:

@ned:

I think that this issue is platform-specific. If we're dealing with what I'm most familiar with, in Steem, Steem stores text content only. It doesn't store pictures. It doesn't store videos. But there are some apps building on Steem that have a hybrid approach using Steem blockchain for text storage, but also something like IPFS for picture or video storage. Something like IPFS does not have the --

Ryan Shea interjects, "DTube?"

There's an app called DTube. It's a YouTube competitor. It looks a lot like YouTube. It's using Steem for content management system primitives and and token rewards. It's also using IPFS to store video.

IPFS is a different sort of system. It doesn't have the same redundancy and immutability, but it does have great traceability so you don't always have that risk of content not disappearing.

If you're using something like Steem, you do have to worry about the text you put up. And we've definitely seem people have regrets with that sort of thing.

Let's say there's a takedown request. There's a copyright issue. And the company behind an application gets that takedown request. They have to take that content down. The content may come down from the application, but it may not come down from the blockchain. And maybe that's an issue, maybe it's not.

Certainly you can make people happy by taking the content down from the applications, because it removes it from plain sight. So I think there are ways to deal with the greater immutability for content.

But at the same time, it's an interesting issue. I don't know that we've seen -- There may be some cases that get really bad. I have no idea.

The panelists discuss public vs private applications, comparing Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS), where replication is built-in, to a private cloud model, where users could decrypt content by paying for it, or be denied access once a subscription ends. They also discuss the pros and cons of centralized moderation.

Regarding the dark side of the internet, including ISIS videos:

@ned:

I think we really need to understand that there's two layers here. There's the application layer, and there's the underlying blockchain layer, or other database layer. Applications still do not get completely decentralized today. They get served up in centralized ways, just like Steemit and DTube and Rize. And, the operators behind that application can always take the content down. It's very simply, they don't serve up --

Ryan Shea interjects that his company is working on solution

Under what we're seeing today, the application operator can always take down that content. And that fits perfectly within the framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which says that the operator of a social network or website is not responsible for the user-generated content, as long as they are responding to [issues] like takedown notices in the proper ways. So Steemit, for example, is not liable for ISIS content published to Steemit, as long as it responds to the takedown requests in compliant ways.

Ryan Shea proposes some possibilities for the future, including blockchain-hosted decentralized applications, where takedown notices might not even apply. Ryan focuses on how transformative voluntary interactions have been, pointing to the decrease in war since 1945 and suggesting the cause was the spread of liberal democracy and capitalism/free trade. Ned asks if it is not the threat of violence/annihilation via nucleus weapons? Ryan extends his position to freedom of speech, and connects it to the idea that the wisdom of the crowd will become manifest in decentralized technology -- and suggesting that censorship won't be necessary.

@ned:

I agree with you. I think having ubiquitous information in particular spreads information about people's reputations. When you have great information about reputations, you can choose who and who not to do with business with. You can have blacklists of people and that sort of thing. And I agree, that's definitely helping bring peace in this world, and I think blockchain will further our ability to understand reputations of the people around us, help us choose who to do with business with based on, you know, these peoples' philosophies, views, and ideologies.

Regarding whales on the platform

@ned:

It boils down to the stake-weighted system that we've been using, where basically the more coins someone has, the more influence they have, and it sort of compounds the issue of "the whale."

So to really move into a future where everyone's getting opportunity, we've also looked to a new layer of the Steem technology, Smart Media Tokens, giving people the ability to launch new tokens that represent new interests that can curate content in new ways, and in particular have different properties of distribution. One in particular I'm very excited about is account-based voting -- one person one vote -- rather than coin-based voting or stake weighted voting. I think that through the combination of having that property and many coins being distributed to represent interests and different types of content, I think that people will find themselves just awash in opportunity. That's really what I think mitigates the whale problem, where I think whales exist in stagnant systems, we need the ability for many systems to compete against each other for opportunity.