RE: We NEED To Talk About The PURGE Of ALEX JONES!
I do agree with you, very good question, let me respond with a rather long answer:
Someone (who I right now forgot the annonymous username of) on Steemit, made the arguement to me in a comment, that D-tube was just as controlled as youtube. I have tested that in praxis by different means, mostly just using it a lot.
First of all, when I began to talk about this in a video, after that I lost the (before that) almost continuous votes from the d.tube account, that has a huge deligation from Steemit inc. I also asked Adrian (@heimindanger) what the guidelines was for getting votes from the d.tube account and he responded something similar to youtubes guidelines (I dont remember the exact formulation, it is in some old post of mine), what I remember is that he used the word "hate speech" and went on to that "hate speech" would not be upvoted, would be downvoted or something like that.
When I asked him more specific questions, to his one comment, he never responded to me again.
"hate speech" is a very subjective term, that many conspiracy literate people do think is a huge part of the "powers there should not be"'s way of silencing the population. So this term should not be used as a guideline in a censorship free media as d.tube, if you ask me.
In general it seems like d.tube has a lot of centralized power and in effect, even that some of the content is different then on youtube, then I do think d.tube has a centralization problem too. But then again, this is only my opinion, I could be wrong?..
Other critics of d.tube:
- It is to me unclear how long a video is stored and which mechanism that decides this.
- I have had problems with the upload interface several times, mostly in the past. Now for the most part it is working, even the speed of uploading is variating a lot.
So over all d.tube is more like a proof of concept, not really fair or that decentral, that we would like it to be.
As for Alex Jones.. I dont really like his work, other then some of the first work he did.. but I guess d-tube would upvote him, just because of the attention he would bring by being there.
It seems to me that the d.tube's voting is very random, but I could be wrong.. I don't know the inside, but I imagine a very small group that have to handle all this power of the d.tube wallet.
OK, that pretty much confirms my own suspicions. I suspect IPFS is immutable. We are running some large scale IPFS servers in our data centers to help contribute back to the free and open Internet in some way. We have a lot of unused bandwidth and I'm very happy to donate as much of this unused resource to IPFS simply because it isn't helping anyone to have it go unused. I know that if I put up some content (video, audio, whatever) on IPFS, it is permanent. What is not permanent is the indexing to it. I guess this is similar to the old BitTorrent thing, where the torrent files that point to the content could be taken down, but the content itself is out in "the cloud" and you can't roll it back. So if d.tube got co-opted, taken down, etc. I suspect that if it was open source and could be forked, someone would simply fork the database and create a new d.tube.
These are all assumptions, of course. I'm probably wrong on some/all of them. But it would seem that the database and source code that powers d.tube should be put somewhere in the public domain so that all the work that hosts are doing and uploading, can be brought back to life in the case where d.tube is attacked by an adversary.
I also am not an expert on this IPFS technology... I think unfortunately the whole d.tube thing is a little shady compared to text on the Steem blockchain, that is perfect!
I still use and promote D.tube, as I think it is (together with dlive) the best alternative we have, also because of the Steem payment model.
I was making videos for a long time thinking that they would be stored permanently, but that is fare from the case, it is more like only 1 weeks storage or so, I have heard, but not checked it!!.. The length of the storage time should also depends on the numbers of views, again this is only someone told me in a comment, I dont know if it is true or not!
I have asked Adrian (@heimindanger) a lot of questions related to this, but he only responded ones and not with full details.
So in effect d.tube is a mystery to me, but I still use it.