DTube made it on to Hacker News' frontpage as the top post
Right now there is a post about DTube on the frontpage of Hacker News, it's the top post at the moment. If you've never heard about Hacker News, it's basically Reddit for programmers and other people in the tech industry. It's very popular, the whole tech scene uses the site, so when a site gets on Hacker News' frontpage it often gets so many visits that the server crashes.
The Hacker News community is highly critical and has been very negative about crypto currencies in the past, so this is going to be an interesting comment section to follow over the next few hours.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about Steem and Dtube already but also some valid critique. And I'd say the misconceptions are a good critique in and of themselves, it means DTube and Steem need to do a better job of explaining what they are and how they work. If even tech experts don't understand it in a reasonable amount of time, there is a problem.
One critique mentioned in the Hacker News thread is that a lot of the videos on DTube are... Lets say unsavory, people who were pushed off other platforms like YouTube through demonetization and now use DTube instead. I don't see that as a negative. Of course those people are the first to adopt alternative platforms and if what they are saying isn't popular, it will sooner or later be driven out by more popular content.
Another critique is that DTube isn't really decentralized and I'd say that is the most valid critique so far. But it's complex. I could write a whole book trying to explain decentralization. There are different degrees of decentralization and different problems, some still have to be solved like incentive for hosting content (Steem does a really good job there, IPFS which DTube uses doesn't yet). And there are so many different types of decentralization now that the word really doesn't have as much meaning anymore as it used to, it's turning into a kind of buzzword. I think I'll actually make a video about that, show the different modern decentralization technologies, the problems they face, how they try to solve them and how that has worked out so far.
Thank you for the post and observation on hacker news. I agree that the news and data about steem and d.tube is pretty fragmented which makes me wonder how many of the big users and advocates really undersand it as well.
I think very few people understand how DTube works behind the scenes, even when it comes to tech minded people, it's just really complex. It started out using just IPFS and Steem, now it also uses WebTorrent. And all of these are fairly new and not mainstream.
Understanding how Steem works on it's own is quite tough, took me weeks to fully understand why it uses three different crypto currencies (Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars) and what the difference is. And then half a year later when I started writing apps for Steem I found out that Steem Power doesn't actually exist, it's just an abstraction on top of something valled "vesting shares", to make the concept easier to understand. It's quite remarkable that it has gotten so popular despite how difficult it is to understand it. But I guess that's due to the huge potential to make money on Steem, there is a big incentive to spend a lot of time figuring out what it is, so people do, and probably get help from friends who told them about Steem in the first place.
I would love your video on decentralization, but I'd love a text even more. ;)
I'd prefer text as well since my spoken English is a horrible thing to unleash on innocent people, but it's probably just too big a topic for an article that gives you a good overview of the current state of decentralization :)
Next to artificial intelligence, decentralization is probably the hottest topic right now in tech because more and more people have noticed that the centralization of the internet has lead to huge issues, including the creator of the world wide web itself, so there are dozens of decentralization projects now and quite a few that are very promising and usable like ZeroNet, Secure Scuttlebutt, the Beaker Browser and many more.
And these projects all vary widely in their main purpose. Some try to tackle censorship, others try to make the web permanent so nothing is ever lost, some try to make hosting cheaper or even free, some try to build true anonymity into the system, and some try to do a combination of all those things. Especially interesting IMHO are those that also add monetization into the mix but without having to rely on advertising, like Steem does, because at the end of the day people who create good content should be rewarded for it.
I decided to do it in text form (optionally available as an audio recording) and split it up into multiple parts, to make it more manageable :)
The first part is out: The decentralization of the internet - Part 1 - What is decentralization and why does the internet need it?
The first part explains some of the problems with centralization and what decentralization at it's core means. The second part will have the more interesting overview of all the current decentralized networks and specifics on how they solve the problems or plan to solve them in the future. I'll add video clips to that one to show off the different networks.
Part 3 or 4 will go into the negatives that a decentralized network brings with it, especially when data becomes uncensorable and permanent. While I think the positives far outweigh the negatives, it would be dishonest not to mention them. Things like revenge porn for example would become impossible to delete, although it's already not possibly to fully get rid of something on the "normal" internet.