DTube 0.9: Doubling up your rewards
The DTube team has always been focused on creating a real usable product before doing any fancy announcements.
After so many months of research, developement and testing, DTube 0.9 is upgrading the concept of decentralized social media.
In this article:
- Post from URL : you can now post videos and livestreams from a URL
- For curators: share a video from any platform on the web
- For creators: double your earnings with tokens and advertising
- New blockchain : Get a DTube account and try our brand new decentralized economy on the public testnet
- Vote on tags: tags now accounts in the tokenized monetization
- Promote: burn your DTC to rank up your posts
- Create your own DTube: in partnership with Steem Engine
- Search engine: Search, related videos and tags navigation is fully functional again
New Feature: Post a video from a URL
Starting today, DTube is making a drastic change by allowing any user to upload almost any existing video from the web.
Instead of forcing you to upload a video file, re-encoding it and sending it on DTube's IPFS nodes, we now allow you to simply paste in a link of a remote video to get it included in DTube's video catalogue.
The currently supported platforms are numerous: YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, LiveLeak, Vimeo, Dailymotion. This change can seem very counter-intuitive for a 'Decentralized Video Platform' at first glance, but it actually has too many pros to be ignored:
IPFS file upload remains the same
A big chunk of DTube's user-base cares about decentralized file storage. These users love us and support us, so we feel bad when we see complaints about queues for our IPFS uploader in our discord.
However, most of our users don't need anti-censorship features. These users are very often already using centralized video platforms. By allowing these users to offload some storage from us, we will actually have more space and less queues for whom it matters.
It becomes easier to publish on DTube now
Everyone reading this knows the pain of a new user on STEEM or DTube. A new user being able to try DTube without having to go through the pain of a full upload will increase users retention.
It works with livestreams
We disabled our own livestream feature a while back when we realized associated costs and maintenance required. If you put a YouTube live or Twitch stream link, you can now have it displayed and ranked in DTube.
Ads
Many centralized video platforms offer monetization via advertising services. As DTube is now compatible with these platforms, it indirectly enables our users to monetize their videos with ads if they want to.
Sharing also creates value
While STEEM has originally focused on original content, most likely thanks to the high percentage author rewards in the distribution mechanism. But we want DTube to be a place where anyone can feel welcome and participate, not only video creators.
@dtube will keep voting on original content
@dtube is a powerful account in the ecosystem, and it is our duty to use our stake to influence our users behaviors. We do not want DTube to become a site full of reposts, and we want to reward our real users. This is why our upvotes will keep going on original content, while we observe the changes in behavior associated with the new features.
Introducing a new economy focused on content curation
We are introducing the public testnet of a totally new blockchain codebase in this update. The DTube chain is strongly inspired from STEEM, but is actually a totally new codebase. It's open source and available on GitHub.
The Why
Our experience running a successful Decentralized Application (DApp) on the Steem blockchain and gathering feedbacks from our users gave us valuable insights on the limitations of this technology and on how to improve the current model.
Introducing DTube Coin
In our model, the token (DTC) that generates voting power is fully liquid and tradable, and the Voting Power never caps, even if you go inactive for five days or more!
DTube chain now powers DTube's content discovery
DTube 0.9 requires you to have a DTube account to have your videos listed in any content discovery mechanism (new/hot/trending/search/feed/notifications).
Long story short, we believe STEEM's rankings to be stale and easily manipulable (bidbots, curation guilds, etc).
The whole purpose of this new economy is to have better rankings and overall quality, so keeping the STEEM rankings would make little sense.
That means everyone is reset at 0 subs!
It's a harsh change, but it's easy enough to re-subscribe to your favorite content creators. It makes sense to have a separate subscribe system, you might like someone's blog or memes, but you might dislike his videos.
DTC monetization is instant and infinite
On STEEM, your videos can only generate rewards for 7 days. This discourages creators to go for the long term rewards. Not all video contents are made to become viral, think about documentaries or tutorials. These contents rely on long term monetization to be able to exist.
On DTube chain, monetization of contents is infinite through time, and the DTC rewards associated with a vote are distributed instantly.
100% curation !
The DTC is 100% distributed via "curation rewards". The way these rewards are calculated is slightly different from STEEM, taking into account the popularity of the content before the vote. For example, if @bob upvotes a content now, and @alice has already upvoted this content before. @alice will only earn curation rewards from @bob's vote if her vote was cast when the content was less popular than now.
Forced self-upvote
On DTube chain, you are forced to self-upvote your own content. It will not self-vote on STEEM of course.
You can do a very small vote if you wish, but then you would earn less curation rewards for your content.
You can now spend 100% of your VP in 1 vote
Be careful while using the VP of your DTube account. On your DTube account, you will spend your whole VP in one single vote if you at 100%. If you want a similar experience to steem, we recommend setting the default vote at 2% for your DTube account. If you want to visit DTube less regularly, 5-10% should be good.
New Feature! Voting on tags
Instead of creators having control over the tags of their videos, it's now curators who control them.
If you are logged in with a DTube account, you should discover a new button on the video page.
As this tagging feature is associated with your vote, you can only tag once per content.
The original uploader can also choose one tag, but more tags will have to come from different people.
This feature should create a lot of dynamism in the search engine and tags navigation, and create a new way to use voting power 'for good'.
Burn DTC to promote a video
Similarly to STEEM's promote feature, you will be able to burn your DTCs to promote your videos. The amount of burnt DTCs will increase the power of your self-vote, increase the position of your content in the rankings, as well as increase your future curation rewards for this content.
This feature has been tuned down a lot during the testnet, as the DTC is a testnet coin and virtually worthless.
Sending DTCs
You are able to transfer DTCs to any other account, either by going to the channel of the user, or by clicking the 'Gift' icon on any of his videos. Transactions are fully validated once included in a block, about 3 seconds.
Becoming a DTube leader
In the side-menu of DTube you will discover a new 'Leaders' page. This is the equivalent page of the witnesses for STEEM, except these leaders rule the DTube chain. To become a leader, you will need to run a node, and collect enough votes to reach the top X. X is currently set at 7 and will grow as time passes and real leaders show up. If you are interested, feel free to join our discord channel and send us message in the #chain-leaders room.
Get your own account from Steem
You should instantly spot the difference from before, but you can now login with a DTube account.
To get a DTube account, you need to:
- Login with steem
- A message will appear asking you to claim your dtube account
- Do the 3-step procedure
You will get 100 DTC
The DTC is the DTube Testnet Coin. Holding more of it increases your voting power and influence in the network. However there is no need to 'power it up'. We want everyone to be able to try our new economy during this public testnet, so everyone can get 100 DTC by doing the claim procedure and start generating voting power.
The search engine comes back
Since the shutdown of AskSteem.com, our search engine for DTube has basically been down. This meant that tag navigation, the related videos, and the search were all completly broken.
Starting from today, all contents posted on dtube chain will be included in our self-hosted elastic search engine. It should also work better and give out better results than before (especially for tag navigation).
What about STEEM then?
If you stopped reading the article here, you'd probably think DTube is doing a 'LINO'... We could have, but nope.
Interoperability
DTube 0.9 is compatible with both chains. As you publish a video, a vote, or comment, your action will be posted on both chains. The only removed part from steem is the content discovery.
You will earn both STEEM and DTC in parallel and your video will still show up on all other STEEM UIs as usual. You will also keep earning author rewards of course!
This is a unique feature for our DApp. Most other DApps seem to focus on using a single blockchain and a single model. The future is a multitude of blockchains (or other techs) with different features and properties, combined elegantly into powerful UIs.
STEEM brings in a lot of features (much more than dtube's new chain). And we need some of them, such as author rewards, a semi-stable coin, the staking mechanism, etc...
Empowering Steem-Engine tokens with ScotTube
A preview of what is to come very soon is available in the top-right menu. If you are a member of the PAL community, you can try using DTube with the PAL token. This will serve as a quick beta of this feature, the real pal-tube website will follow, as well as details on how to get a scot-tube with your own token for your own community. This mean you can not only earn STEEM and DTC with DTube 0.9, but also any steem-engine token with proof-of-brain distribution.
Steem Onboarding is limited up to 31st July 2019
The DTube chain is reserved and limited to Steemians until this fixed date. Until this date, only the @dtube account will be able to create accounts, in order to prevent malicious users from stealing popular steemian's names and impersonating them.
After the 31/07/2019, anyone will be able to create a DTube account for someone else by burning some DTCs, directly from the DTube UI.
This is why you absolutely need to claim your DTube username now, while no one else can, otherwise you risk losing your username and channel.
Deprecations
We are deprecating SteemConnect login, we recommend using private posting key or the keychain extension instead. We are also deprecating DTalk (the private message feature) and the live streaming feature. These experiments brought us valuable information on what needs to be done to make these features possible in the future. They are likely to come back in a different fashion sooner than later.
The road to mainnet (DTube 1.0)
Our team has redacted a complete whitepaper with every single detail you could ever need. If you think this article is a bit too light, feel free to read the full thing here
Another blog article will follow in the upcoming week. Explaining the complete details for the DTC token generation event.
We expect this update to come with it's share of bugs or annoyances. Please report any bug or suggestion, either in the comments or on our discord server.
As mentioned previously, 0.9 is a public testnet for DTube's chain. We estimate this period to last for about 1 to 2 months total, depending on how it goes. This is a unique chance for you to be able to try a new crypto game before the DTube Coin becomes tradable on markets, seize it!
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Glad to be involved in the upcoming changes. It was critical to me that you didn't leave steem so much as built additional functionality with your own curation mechanism that matched your business needs. I applaud this, and I'm looking forward to letting everyone get their own scottube still built on steem getting rewarded in DTC, Steem/SBD, and a variety of steem-engine tokens!
Yep, we are going to create a very strong ecosystem of tokens. LIBRA/Voice have strong marketing techniques but we have live code running and working doing what they promise to do in 2030!
I'm still working on reading through the full OP, but when I saw this, I had to comment.
This is brilliant. The adpocalypse has financially destroyed many good and substantive creators. By enabling them to link to their content on politically manipulative platforms, they can monetize that content on Dtube, and the sanctions on their content elsewhere are moot. As long as their content is not deleted on the original platform, it can be searched, commented, upvoted, and monetized on Dtube.
I feel that proper marketing of this feature, particularly to creators that are being suppressed, censored, and demonetized, can both make Dtube rapidly become a standard addition to other platforms attempting to control social narrative for all content creators concerned about those manipulative degradations, but also make Dtube a target for those tools Big Tech has to harm platforms. ISPs, Domain registrars, payment processors, and more have all been deployed against platforms themselves to enable censorship and economic suppression.
Please give this latter problem close attention, so that you can be prepared with means of resolving such assaults by the Big Tech alliance intent on total narrative control. I recommend studying The Pirate Bay, which has demonstrated decades long resilience to such incessant attack.
Now, I'll go back to reading the OP.
Thanks!
You're like the Keanu Reeves of Steem
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You're like the Kevinli of Dtube.
🤣🤣
nah keanu is cool.
I agree! lol!
LOL good one :)
Meme it! =)
Keanu is the best!!!
Wait a minute, dtube is leaving steem in a very fundamental way: going forward dtube users will not need a steem account and the token economics will not be mediated by the steem blockchain...I would say that counts as leaving. You can retain the functionality of posting links to steem (which is fine) but how is that going to contribute in creating demand for steem?
This is Dlive all over again (although a soft version of it). Think about it, they had a huge delegation of steem that was used to cover their costs and now they will operate with their own blockchain. I for one will not applaud this. In fact I am going to stop voting on any content that is posted to dtube so that no beneficiary rewards accrue in dtube's favor.
You can still use DTube in the same way you could in 0.8 and post only on Steem if you'd like... The only thing removed from Steem is the content discovery. You've seen how easy it is to get top trending (this article is an example of it). I want to create a fair and balanced economy where the token distribution isn't a complete joke and where people sell their votes to monetize their stake so easily, something that has been happening on STEEM for years now, and I've blogged many times about my stance on it, and tried convincing influent members of the community to do something about it, but alas here we are still.
Now you can call it a soft-lino if you want, but I feel offended. You see 1 similarity and you automatically think we are evil like them?
I believe you are not ill-intentioned right now, but what's stopping you from splitting apart in the future?
You just planted 0.10 tree(s)!
Thanks to @ucukertz
We have planted already
8192.51 trees
out of 1,000,000
Let's save and restore Abongphen Highland Forest
in Cameroonian village Kedjom-Keku!
Plant trees with @treeplanter and get paid for it!
My Steem Power = 21589.75
Thanks a lot!
@martin.mikes coordinator of @kedjom-keku
What's stopping you from cheating on your wife in the future?
Come on man this isn't minority report. You can't condemn me for something I haven't done.
I didn't condemn you at all. I'm sorry if my comment came across that way.
What I wanted to know is what dependencies remaining on Steem chain that would require additional development efforts if Dtube were to totally split apart from Steem.
#sbi-skip
Nothing. Just like nothing is stopping you from powering down and leaving. Bloke wants to keep his business afloat so he's making sure it delivers his vision of what users need.
Speaking of complete jokes, I have a question for you. I too yelled at the clouds for quite some time about this vote selling nonsense and by now I think most can see the damage it has done, especially since so many new developments seemingly want to distance themselves as far away as possible from the madness happening here.
I'm also the jackass who sat here holding SP and curating manually for nearly three years, while so many others got paid to look away.
I don't create video content, but I still want to to be able to support some of these Dtubers from time to time in the form of votes. I have 26000SP. Will I need $10000 worth of these Dtube tokens now to be able to offer any meaningful support to these creators if I see something I like? I'm sorry if it says something about it up there in the post but goddamn that was a long read and the stupid cat was sitting here meowing the whole time.
What's in it for me? As a curator.
From the whitepaper. Note that staking tokens is not needed, VP never stops growing and the 100% curation rewards.
Also, almost all dtube posts will still be posted on steem, so you can still reward them with SP.
This testnet is a 'marxist' version of our blockchain where everyone gets 100 free DTC. Obviously gives an advantage to multi-accounters but as it's a testnet we do not really care.
1.0 will start with a massive airdrop to our community (creators and CURATORS), so if you curated some DTube stuff in the past you will be rewarded for it with some decent starting stake.
Excellent. As you'd know, I certainly can't get around to all of those videos, plus there's some music and reading to do here as well. It's a nice gesture to include the sporadic curator in the mix.
That's far better than attempting to create a complete community from scratch. Kudos man.
How are we flagged as a creator for airdrop? By using it now or just a sign up later? If I do post content here on testnet will I still receive steem now? I'm a bit confused when I look at the site/read this post.
Why are you using all these bid-bots to promote your post then if you are so against them?
I understand where you are coming from. In my opinion the content discovery is more a UI issue, for example on steeve.app both the search and the content ranking is different to what you get on steemit.
The fact is that you are going to use another blockchain and therfore the economics of Dtube will be disconnected from steem. Technically dtube will have the same connection to this blockchain as other video delivery platforms... just another link. Users will need an account on your native blockchain and steem will not even be used for bandwith.
steeve is centralized.
That is not the point. The point is that the ranking of content is entirely up to the user interface and there is no need for another blockchain to acomplish this. Besides, the content displayed on steeve is the same as the one shown on other steem interfaces so your comment doesn't make sense.
No, steem's rankings are built into the blockchain. Any rankings not built into the blockchain are not using the decentralized consensus and deviating hiding part of the blockchain from the user.
The payout is descentralized. You can rank the content based on that or any other metric. In the end all user interfaces are just fancy block explorers. So what if steeve uses a custom algorithm to display recommended content? You can still search for everything else. Again, that is not the point. My point of contention was that Dtube will use another blockchain to rank content and I was using an example to show that the same effect can be acomplished by other means.
I am sorry that you feel offended, your motivations might be different from the lino guys but the end result is the same: your project will run on it's own blockchain. I was hoping for dtube to be a big part of this ecosystem but now I feel disapointed.
It runs on both blockchains in parallel, one can backup the other at any time. Using Steem's trending / hot again would be really easy, I just don't expect to want to use it again. But otherwise there's not one blockchain coded to be 'superior' to the other in the UI, it's just the vote a tag thingy I cant do on STEEM atm, and it would just require adding a 'memo' into the vote operation basically.
Forgive me for being aprehensive but you can understand that after the Dlive fiasco I am not inclined to trust blindly anything that resembles that move. I hope things work out, have a good day man.
Glad I not the only one who was thinking this. It a great idea but I confused on how other than the token support its good for steem. The token and accounts are in its own chain not even a sidechain.
And while it allows for Steem and other token to be monetized using scotube, dtube itseld doesn't need steem?
I love to see another prospective of this.
It is easier to onboard people onto the Dtube chain. Those users can then eventually make steem accounts with the steem earned.
It's also just better for users, which is never a bad thing.
How does a sidechain help steem anyway, other than make steem power needed for bandwidth.
Steem is required for enabling 'author rewards', its pretty fucking obvious any creator doing OC will want a steem account ;)
While I don't doubt what you're saying is true, it's not obvious to me that creating OC will drive Steem involvement. I am still digesting the massive update, so expect I am simply not grasping this. Please forgive my slowness, but also note that I am probably not alone, so be patient with we tards.
There are two chains, three tokens (four if you count SBD) and a raft of great advances involved in this update. For those of us that have to take off our shoes to count past ten, time and gentle explication will likely be necessary to get us up to speed.
How is Steem required to deliver author rewards in DTC and PAL?
DTube chain is 100% curation rewards. Basically the author of the content isn't a variable into the monetary distribution. Only the list of votes is. The author basically gets a slight advantage for being the first vote in the list. But if he is a minnow, and his content becomes very popular (whale votes), he will make a very small % of the total rewards, while on steem or pal he would always make 75%
That was unclear to me from the post.
This was obviously not a random decision, and it seems counterintuitive to provide 0 author rewards with DTC. What is the advantage to DTC, Dtube, or creators to this rewards structure?
Thanks!
They don't earn steem? They earn dtube coins....
You mean sell dtube for steem-hopefully... If anything they'll sell for Usd,btc or eth....
It great for users(hopefully) but it that all it good for steem?
The sidechain helps bridge steem accounts keeping one account. Allows for it to scale vs mainchian. It helps give steem more use and in the ecosystem more. And the RC thing is a big if steem is going to do the backend as a steem app platform...
Dtube has large stake (delegation), so they can convert RC into free accounts and sell for DTC (which they have said they might do).
So they become an steem account seller?
I guess that cool but that a pretty limited thing.
Delegation that were given to encourage steem users to use a decetralized video network are now used to create a steem accounts. Well I guess I can't ask for more. I assume this was a better than dlive move as it was more open?
You wrote this post didn't you? Nice write up. Best of luck to DTube.
thanks for your special comment
Is incredible!!. I have all afternoon trying to upload a video in dtube and I could not do it. I'll upload it to youtube and then I'll post the link. I have tried to support dtube as a video platform but undoubtedly something is not going well when the technology is above the product itself. Technology is a service and the more imperceptible the better. Regards
just made new dtube video and logged in to both
Glad to see these updates of Dtube and the fact that the team is hard at work to innovate and improve the app to better serve your users.
We'll be claiming our Dtube accounts and see for ourselves the improvements that comes with running on your own chain.
A working decentralized video sharing platform sounds mighty interesting to us at @coingecko. We'll be looking forward to Dtube 1.0 launch.
Amazing new development which fixes all the problems of the old DTube. Well done!
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Publishing videos hosted elsewhere is a great feature.
I was able to get cross-publication on d.tube and STEEM working after some doing. So that's good.
I don't understand the need to create a completely separate blockchain. It seems like this could have been done on STEEM with just your SCOT.
I started working on this before I even knew about SCOT or Steem-Engine, but it's true a lot of features are similar (the focus on content discovery). SCOT is centralized though, while this is powered by blockchain, like STEEM.
But no it was not possible. This article doesn't include every detail about the differences with STEEM, but you can already see that DTC is liquid and tradable at any time (no need to 'power it up'), and the VP doesn't cap. The onboarding mechanism that we are going to release after the 31st of July is also different and should help getting people into crypto more easily than having a STEEM account.
Edit: Also the 'vote on a tag' is impossible on STEEM / SCOT because it's impossible to write a text alongside a vote on the chain (would be an easy change tbh)
look at the white paper if you wanna know more: https://token.d.tube/whitepaper.pdf
Publishing videos hosted elsewhere might be useful sometimes, but it mostly defeats the purpose of DTube, which is to be an independent video site. Another copy, in case YouTube goes down, or censors your video. This is just hotlinking (embedding), encourages plagiarism and copyright infringement, and brings no discernible upgrade to the users.
What about people who have been deplatformed on YouTube, and need somewhere to upload a video? This feature does nothing for them. It's just a YouTube support function. It's something which was available even on MySpace, 20 years ago.
This isn't all things to all people. The IPFS uploads are worth doing if you are deplatformed.
For the vast majority, using YouTube as a host and potential lead in to d.tube and steem is fine.
wow, lot to take in. really excited for this news. i hope you become the #1 best IPFS and video host on the steem blockchain beating all others because you have first mover advantage. i'll be doubling down on my dtube efforts!
Hot damn that is ALOT of legitimately useful functionality. Glad to be a molecule sized part of this awesome community. Love the effort to make "ranking" and curation more DTube centric, as Steemit's is irreparably broken. All in.
This seems good. Had alot of trouble in my early days on dtube. Upgrade good
Another Coin. Now I got to learn how to be a video maker!
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or a curator mate !
That's excellent!
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