Dtube Chat: Personal Responsibility
Hello Steemians!
Soooo it's time to talk about personal responsibility.
Ughh guys, ughhh.
So, decentralization requires a large amount of personal responsibility, but somehow, someway, the message has been misconstrued that Steemit is a place to just come here and make money and have the platforms remain responsible for all your shit.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
Newsflash yo's:
DTUBE ISN'T RESPONSIBLE FOR HOSTING AND KEEPING YOUR CONTENT.
It's awesome that they do. I appreciate that they do, especially while I am still working on my server and hosting my own stuff, but the expectation of others that newly come here and expect everything to be perfect and the ridiculous expectation of Dtube being responsible for everything is nuts.
Take some personal responsibility guys! Host your own stuff if you're displeased with the speed or the disappearance of your content, which can be explained here by the way:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@evildido/dtube-community-support-update-new-features-and-fix
Thanks @evildido and @heimindanger for addressing these concerns btw.
Anyway guys, just some food for thought! Let me know what you think the comments. Do you agree with me? Do you think that decentralization is about everyone putting in a little, or do you think that a platform should take sole responsibility for these things? I'm so curious...
xx~Beth
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS
I think that all the people contributing to uploading should also have to support the network in someway, true decentralization of the file sharing I believe that would stop a lot of the spam and also make it so you can ensure your videos are viewable plus those you wish to support. Just my two cents.
but..but..but.
I want everything for FREE
and I want it NOW.
(and IceCream)
This is yet another flaw in the design of Steem. There’s no transaction fees to support the periphery nodes which serve up the content. If Dtube is instead taking 25% of the author’s rewards, that is a misaligned incentives because this is supposed to be a decentralized system, not another set of overlords taking share of profits. Transaction fees for serving content should be paid by those receiving the content and should be very minuscule such that nobody cares! Or transaction fees can be minted from the money supply with each user having an allocation (proportional to their wallet balance) to spend for this purpose only.
This is yet another in a long list of egregious flaws in the design of Steem.
Decentralization doesn't mean you never pay for anything. It is unclear if Dtube will always take that fee, but they take it now because so many users rely on them to host their videos. I do think that fee is unreasonable if everyone were hosting their own content, but they aren't. Few are.
That being said, it will take some time to ease into decentralization. I can barely get people to wrap their heads around the basic concepts, much less sign up for hosting content on their own nodes. Dtube isn't perfect, and I have had my fair share of criticisms, but the devs work hard and they are trying their best. All of these concepts are so so so new that it's ridiculous to throw a platform under the bus for some design flaws. Things will improve at each fork, or the site will die. Either way, it's only a step forward for the blockchain itself. These beginning platforms are paving the way toward the future. So we just kind of have to grin and bear it as things inch forward little by little.
Taking a share of the profit is not congruent with the minuscule cost of serving the bandwidth.
That 25% fee is egregiously high and suffers from a lack of competition because the design of Steem doesn’t facilitate competition.
If an average video is 100 MB or less, and the cost of 1 TB of bandwidth is less than $1, then 10,000 views can be served for the cost of $1.
Steem did not include any mechanism for paying those minuscule costs. That is a critical flaw in Steem. If that flaw was not there, then a competitor could host the Dtube content and be compensated for it without requiring the users give 25% of their revenues to another overlord.
This flaw must be disintermediated, same as we are disintermediating other overlords such as the major social media corporations.
However on the positive side, Dtube is grabbing a market opportunity and they are pushing progress forward. The 25% fee will not remain forever because there’s an incentive to find a way disintermediate it.
That is too difficult. Users should not be expected to do that or host their own content. They should have the option of doing so. Anyone who thinks that is what we should be teaching or requiring, doesn’t understand how to onboard a billion real users. I have successfully onboarded up to 1% of the internet population in the past. Everything must be very easy for users.
Decentralization doesn’t mean every user has to run their own full node. Decentralization can mean that no group has control.
That sort of extreme idealism where every user would run their own node is not going to scale. It will not scale volume, nor will it scale adoption.
And what do developers get paid? Nothing? With how little most videos actually bring in, and considering the ones making any kind of money at all are the ones getting mega upvotes from Dtube itself, I really don't see a problem with the 25%. How much is YouTube taking in advertising profits? It is undoubtedly more than 25%.
As far as everyone owning their own hosting server, I do think that's the future. That's the only future. The whole point of decentralization is to have the power in as many hands as possible. The fewer the hands, the more concentrated the power. I don't see why this is an issue at all. It would be totally possible to OS a program that was automatically incorporated into a server that was automatically added to a PC. It may cost a little more, but it's totally doable. Someone wouldn't even necessarily need to know how to operate it, or programmers could make it as easy as pie to. We have already made it possibly to do so many complex things that this just seems like a cakewalk.
All this pastry talk is making me hungry. I'll catch ya later.
Hey Beth I appreciate you standing up to me and making a transparent discussion/debate. Kudos to you! And I think we both have good intentions in that we both want maximum decentralization, freedom, and a capitalist system that rewards meritorious production. You can view some of my other comments recently if you want to get a sampling of my philosophy. I admire that you’re lady who is apparently into obscure technical knowledge such as configuring servers. I’m sure you’re aware that high testosterone males tend to be less trusting and more confrontational because we understand that other such males are motivated by opportunity cost, not always prioritizing ethics. Our evolutionary biology makes this so.
The power-law distribution in nature guarantees that not everyone will run their own hosting server in their own data center. This is simply a fact of the way nature allocates resources. And if you mean that everyone will pay for a host in a data center or connection to an ISP they don’t own, then the decentralization is reduced to those who control the data centers and ISPs. So this is why I posit that the decentralization must occur at a meta layer where the resource involved is only human coordination, which is what the new (not yet released) consensus algorithm I designed posits to accomplish. IOW, the resource intensive nodes will not be decentralized to extent of one for each user, but the controlling power will be. I posit that conflating those two orthogonal facets is a fundamental flaw in the extant consensus algorithms.
As for what developers get paid, we agree they’re being paid 25%. My point is we can copy their open source and disintermediate their 25%. So they do get paid, but we don’t get stuck with that egregiously high fee long-term. If they’re not (eventually) making their system open source, then users should understand they’re investing in a system they may not be able to force improvements to in the future.
I would prefer those who fund the developers hodl STEEM and fund the development work because they want the value of their STEEM to appreciate. This funding could be a smidgen of their total hodlings. For example, @smooth is a STEEM whale and I think he funded the creation of
busy.orgwhich doesn’t charge anything. Presumably he did it to create an alternative UI tosteemit.comto prove that the Steem ledger can be accessed via GUIs other than the one controlled by STINC (Steemit, Inc.). And I would prefer there is some mechanism in Steem to pay transaction fees for the peripheral nodes, so that there can be a wide diversity of people who operate those nodes. The Dtube paradigm means only those developers are paid and only they run nodes. Which is very very bad outcome in terms of centralization and overlording. For example, someone alleges that videos which do not receive enough rewards are discarded and not archived.Also the developers could do a Kickstarter style fundraiser by creating blogs on Steem that users can upvote if they want to fund Dtube’s development. Maybe they could argue that Steem is not yet significant enough to fund a large Kickstarter fundraising. But did they even try? I bet they could have raised $100,000 if they tried and then they could have purchased STEEM with it being long-term bullish on the platform given the potential impact of Dtube on adoption. That they didn’t go this route tells me that they probably see the flaws I see in Steem and are in a defection mode of extracting the most they can from the platform. With the change to linear rewards 7 months ago, everyone has an incentive to only vote for themselves and Steem is now a defection paradigm.
Or at least they could have hardcoded in the protocol of the software a sliding scale reduction in the share of rewards taken as the volume increases, so that they had committed in code for the fees to reduce to say 0.5% at high volume.
Since presumably Dtube was not funded that way, presumably they have some more nefarious/greedy intentions and/or they don’t trust the long-term appreciation of the value of STEEM. However in the defense of their ethics, if they’ve open sourced it then we could make a reasonable guess that they’ve just looked at the reality of the flaws in Steem and decided to take their ROI in the way that makes the most sense in light of the dubious future of Steem.
The generative essence or general underlying problem in the crypto sector is the opportunity cost for not defecting is higher than the opportunity cost for non-deleterious production.
I hope my stance is more clear now.
EDIT: a follow-up tying this post in with Torrents.
I do have to agree with @bethwheatcraft here. The developers ought to be paid for their time. I do freelance web development and from experience, I've hated not getting paid for projects I worked hard on myself. 25% might be a little high. But quite frankly, DTUbe and DLive are both paying me more than Youtube or Facebook does.
If you don't like the fact DTube gets 25%, what is your suggestion for them to be able to develop this further and be able to make a living doing so?
And for me, that 25% is just part of the cost of doing business here. What I get in exchange for that is excellent compared to what I'm getting from Youtube.
Please see my latest comment reply to @bethwheatcraft. I presume we’re in agreement after you read my comment?
I definitely agree that developers should be paid well and have some vesting to motivate them to do their best work.
hey. Thanks for your mention.
Just one point, I'm not working with dtube. At the beginning, I wanted to simplify the ipfs pinning process.
Another point, mu bpt os fpr french community (via #tag fr) but :
Last point, I cannot guarantee persistence for "life" because :
Oh no! Sorry about that. I just assumed you were a dev from the way @heimindanger talked about you!
No worries 😉
I think the percentage they take is enough. We just have to be patient for the useablity to come around, or it won't and something else will take its place. I personally wouldn't give them more than what they take up front. To each his/her own, but in the meantime I won't complain about the hosting. Google drive is free, just back stuff up and reupload if it disappears off Dtube. If the service doesn't improve overtime I'm not taking that responsibility on. That's on Dtube. Our job is to create and promote, but the tech should be something that promotes itself, otherwise what's the point. We need a good product, but that takes some time. We'll see if the time pays off and the platform gets significantly better down the road. I'm a bit frustrated that my videos are lagging and freezing significantly. I haven't had too many issues with my Dlive stuff. I'm definitely not Dtube or die. I'm more like. Dtube 'it exists'. I hope that changes.
I didn't come here necessarily for the decentralization (though that is a plus), but more so because I just wanted to diversify things a bit, and get paid for some of my content so I can hopefully do computer build videos and product reviews.
But yes, there is definitely personal responsibility for one's own work and promotion. And I don't mind paying 25% of what I get. I just wish they had been a bit more upfront about that detail previously. But I knew about it from another video I had seen before I even signed up.
You should mind. It is the antithesis of decentralization. See my other comment on this page for details.
I didn't say anything about "minding". I just said that wasn't the primary reason I came here for, but to diversify the distribution of my content a bit more.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree with that motivation. And I think Dtube is progress. I just want to see more decentralized competition on the hosting to bring fees down.
Also in general I see some serious problems (actually centralized corruption also) with the design of Steem overall that need to be fixed, but I think to fix them will require a complete change in the design of the ledger and the reward system.
Oh, I missed that you were talking about the 25%. My bad. Will check out your comment.
agreed! o100%
I don't have a teenager yet but I hope my son grows up and doesn't disrespect his mom like that. hahahaha
.......thinking of getting free tea in Freetown.
Individual responsibility first. Even when the platform is free, one Steemian has a lot of work to do.
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