Blockchain-based Publishing

[jkosem]

I’m Getting a Daily Allocation of Cryptocurrency to Participate in HyperSpace

explores a UBI-based incentive model for publishing. So everybody gets a daily allowance that they can use to amplify good content, and it expires if it’s not used.

[jkosem]

Cent and Musing.io. They’ve introduced tipping incentives. Musing is similar to Quora and the other is like a mix of Pinterest/reddit/quora. Cent used state channels and provides incentives via tipping, seeding and for sorting responses. You can also post a bounty with a question. Some interesting experiments inside.

[jkosem]

Cyrcus
Ether Cyrcus is an open-source app for reading, creating and supporting publications stored on decentralized, uncensorable infrastructure

[jkosem]

Pheme
decentralised publishing platform called Pheme, experimenting with new ways of publishing and ownership.

[jkosem]

Civil
Civil is home to a growing number of independent newsrooms from around the world. Our cooperative model allows journalists to capture more of the value they create, in a community that prioritizes ethical journalism above all.

[jkosem]

Po.et
The decentralized protocol for content ownership, discovery
and monetization in media

Po.et is building an open, universal ledger that records immutable and timestamped information about your creative content and uses our open protocols designed for interoperability with current industry standards in media and publishing.

[GBKS]

I really like this area of blockchain-based publishing. The hard part might actually not be the technology, but getting the economic incentives right and the ability to foster flourishing communities.

I started experimenting with Hyperspace and Steemit, and will try out the other ones. As I'm creating new content for The Crypto UX Handbook, I'll post things on those other sites as well to start conversations around UX and get feedback. So far, looks like the basic publishing and browsing features are there, but there's a lot still missing. For example, Hyperspace (which is in alpha) does not provide URLs to profile pages, you don't get notifications on comments, etc. One of the main things I'm concerned about though is that people will just post what gets them the most coins, and that that will result in lots of uninteresting clickbait. But we'll see.

Have you tried any of those? How has been your experience?

[jkosem]

I can't agree more with the economic incentives. Right now Publica are doing an okay job with this but there's way too many hoops to jump through. Also spot on about the community. If you look at Reddit or Kindle/GoodReads you see how they're intertwined and work incredibly well with extremely low barriers to entry. Steemit is interesting and seems to work decently but I think a lot of people don't have the patience to learn how a token curated registry actually works or how it benefits them.

Personally I see the issue largely with one of onboarding and content. Steemit seems to be largely for people already into blockchain/crypto which doesn't help, and seems to be the same with Public although that looks to be slowly and slightly changing. You would need a critical mass of readers and key authors to sway people onto new platforms.

@GBKS Do you see the issue with blog vs book? Or social media content incentives?

[GBKS]

What do you mean by blog vs book? Overall, my concern is that the financial model is so prominent (like $ earned under each Steemit post), that that's the sole thing being optimized for. Content farms that did the same on the Internet to milk ads could just come in and fill these networks as well. Might almost be better to keep earnings private so only the content authors could see them.

[jkosem]

By blog vs book its just looking at two different types of publishing. Book meaning its long form and could have a paper form and a very old way of distribution. Blog is just any sort of post, meaning generally ephemeral and purely internet.

I agree with money for posting can trigger lots of behavioural issues, and can just get things back into pushing panic for dollars.

Another thing to potentially look at would be something along the lines of Quadratic Voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting which might overcomplicate things hugely, but perhaps not anymore than a token curated registry does.

The main problem after collecting money for content is how to price it?

[GBKS]

Gotcha. There's a super interesting blog post about how content is sliced and sold in China. Instead of the all-or-nothing model we see in the West, it's apparently a lot more fluid over there. If we enter a new world of micropayments, maybe that approach would work better?

[markoprljic]

@jkosem I'm looking for a self-hosted content publishing (blogging) engine on blockchain. Anything you came across recently?

[markoprljic]

Found some over here, will look into it https://github.com/gdamdam/awesome-decentralized-web#microblogging-and-social-network

[markoprljic]

No use from these. If someone knows any better let me know please.

[jkosem]

Can't say I've come across anything really although apparently WordPress have somehow teamed up with Consensys on something

ConsenSys Joins News Industry Leaders to Invest in New WordPress Publishing...

[jkosem]

Actually technically Beaker is sort of self hosted, but more distributed p2p.