How the biggest social platforms steal prosperity from original content creators

With all this drama lately on fake news, censorships and manipulations of platforms, I wanted to weigh in some of my thoughts on the issues plaguing content creators created by the big social media platforms.

I had a nice chat with @infovore last night and as I was reading back on the older SteemMags I started thinking back of some issues that were big a few months/years ago. Facebook being one of the bigger problems, but after reading @ash's post about the reddit manipulation video and looking through the youtubers other videos I came to realize that reddit isn't that much different.

I remembered a really great video which explained in a nutshell the issues with facebook and what it does. It's a video created by Kurzgesagt - In a nutshell on youtube.

If you really like their videos, you can support the content creators through Patreon and hopefully on Steemit soon! :)

In case you weren't able to watch the video here is a short description of what facebook does.

1. Announces they have achieved 8 billion views on their videos per day, yet 75% of the videos are stolen.
2. People copy videos from other sites, upload them on facebooks player and fb gives no credit to real creator cause they want the users to stay on fb for maximized ad viewing.
3. Their algorithm counts a video view after 3 second of viewing, with facebooks autoplay they count views by people just scrolling down their page and viewing it for 3 seconds.
4. This causes bad engagement to the content, video has a short-lived viral time but facebook only cares about amount and numbers.

So even though this just brings false data to their own statistics on video views, it is nothing compared to the consequences these video thefts have on the real creators. How it must feel to be able to create a viral video and see it reach 100k views on your platform, but then the same day realize someone has uploaded it to facebook where it now has 10 million views and someone else is profiting from it... that must suck.

So now we know what facebook does to maximize the time people spend on their site and avoid any links that would bring users somewhere else, and conveniently most users don't give credit to the real creators.

Watching this other video of the youtuber Point titled "How to Get Karma on Reddit" where he was interviewing a mod called "GallowBoob" he points out that Reddit works a bit the same way as he is re-posting a video turned to a gif from Instagram onto Reddit. Here is the full video to it, below I am quoting 2 parts from it that are relevant to my post.

At 7:00 he mentions:

The good thing about Imgur is that you edit your post and be like "oh that's the source if you wanna follow it" but it get removed on Reddit cause they don't want you plugging any social ... facebook or instagram is a no-go.

Another part at 7:47

So I have 0 ways of crediting the guy now, I can just make him trend and if people wanna chase it... they can try and be like "oh I know that guy" or something... I can always mention his instagram but they actually ban you for plugging anything social...

This means that Reddit is a lot like Facebook in a way that it wants users to stay on the website so they can advertise to you as much as possible, in the same way as Facebook does and its after all their business model.

Obviously on Reddit re-posting content isn't as bad as doing it on Facebook where the uploaders who have stolen the content actually get paid for it, on Reddit they only get Karma Points and the company gets all the profits from the attention instead.

Now comparing those parts to how things work on Steemit, here we really care about the content creators, we take care of plagiarists stealing their work and make sure the right people are rewarded. We have @steemcleaners, @cheetah and many more helping out, there is incentive for everyone to make this a place that benefits us all.

To me this alone is a huge advantage to the other social media sites and I can't wait to see how it will disrupt it in the future.