Curation on DECENT

So I talked to Milan Gajdos – COO, DECENT Foundation, on the phone today mainly regarding the curation awards we have on Steemit and wether something like that is on DECENT. Basically there are no curation awards available right now, but this functionality might be added later. Likes i.e. upvotes and downvotes are counted and there is a reputation mechanism, I think similar to Steemit but I didn't get to the specifics.

Milan mentioned that DECENT strives to be a complex platform in the digital content distribution space, but perhaps the many functionalities need to be explained in greater detail. For this purpose, they wish to increase communication towards the community on what’s coming and what functionalities will be introduced. More can be read at: https://decent.ch/en/biggr/

Use cases

I gave some use cases one was being Micheal Jackson which doesn't need curation since he is famous anyway. He said that there is a possibility to split payments with a mechanism similar to a smart contract, which can for example send 20% to a marketer marketing your work. I also made the case of being a starting musician who would live only from online distribution and Milan said it could be possible for him/her to rely purely on DECENT to distribute his/hers work. We also talked about theft and he assured me that DECENT is very active in looking for technological solutions to minimize the possibility of uploading content from someone else. Before something gets uploaded there is a verification process where the author has to identify himself/herself . They are also following the DMCA regulations and other copyrights related laws to minimize risks that IP is infringed.

About Steem

Half way trough I explained basically who I am and what my intentions are. I see Steemit as a great community and the curation and author awards work very well most of the time. And I see that as the right incentive for users to upvote quality content. We didn't however talk about power distribution. I did address plagiarism and that there are bots for that but basically if it is content other than text the bots like @Cheetah and @Steemcleaner can't do much right now.

Marketeers should not earn author awards but curation awards.

So there's an issue when people are basically marketing content by posting say a clip or track from an author. This author would not earn anything by this exposure which would be really nice if it did! Something like that could however be build on top of DECENT which is my primary concern and the initial purpose of pursuing alternatives beyond Steemit.

I have composed and produced music and I know how labour goes into it. Currently I'm giving my music away for free but enough (paid) upvotes could incentivize me to release more of my music. And this is exactly what I initially liked about Steemit.

DECENT core

One of the aims of DECENT is about making sure content is uploaded by the rightful owner who can then set a price. Another is to minimize the impact of middlemen and thus decrease the price for the consumer, potentially offering cheaper content compared to for example iTunes or Spotify. However, you could also build such a service on top of DECENT yourself, and then you'd also could re-implement the current author / curation awards split. DECENT specifically mentions their stance and the possibilities for 3rd parties in their latest blog post, mentioned above I had already read it so I was prepared but Milan did mention it as well and said:

DECENT strives to be a complex platform in the digital content distribution space, but perhaps the many functionalities need to be explained in greater detail, so that everyone knows exactly what it can and cannot do. In this respect, DECENT will be communicating its features frequently going onwards.

Multiple concurrent currencies

When I asked about having multiple tokes on the DECENT network he said it could be done, but the usability is dependent on each particular use case. He also asked me to email him what I would write about DECENT so that they could correct statements before they were published. This is the corrected version which you are reading now.

The DECENT Website

Looking at their website I noticed they were looking for a Machine Learning specialist and two C++ developers. So I'm curious what more functionality the DECENT team will produce.

Milan Gajdos was a really nice guy ever since our first email conversation and it was good to speak to him on the phone.