Why Everipedia Will Fail

Video Transcript:

So there’s probably going to be some people watching this video, and wondering what Everipedia actually is, and I wouldn’t blame you since if you’re not someone actively involved in cryptocurrencies you’ve probably never heard the website mentioned, since it isn’t really talked about outside of crypto communities.

Everipedia is basically a website that is looking to become the new wikipedia, like an alternative wiki site where editors can actually get rewarded for their work via a cryptocurrency token known as IQ, built using the EOS smart contracts platform. Now explaining what EOS is could take all day so for now we’ll just stick to talking about IQ specifically. IQ is used to both pay editors and the token economics also pay the website owners themselves, so that they don’t have to beg for donations like Wikipedia will do occasionally. The way this works is that whenever someone proposes a new article or an edit to an existing article, they offer up some of their IQ tokens as collateral. If the edit is approved, their IQ is returned to them and they also gain IQ as a reward for their contribution. But their IQ is not returned to them by the system if their edit is rejected by the Everipedia community. So essentially the idea is to incentivise quality submissions and to disincentivize those posting low quality content, and those who are intentionally trying to troll. Having IQ will also give you the ability to vote on changes to the website depending on how much IQ you have, so in a sense the site ultimately belongs to the community.

Now the reason I’m saying that Everipedia is looking to become the new Wikipedia rather than an alternative or a competitor largely has to do with the fact that almost all of Everipedia’s articles have been copied word for word, picture for picture, and source for source onto Everipedia. So the only original content that you can find on Everipedia is the kind of stuff that got rejected from Wikipedia for not being relevant or of a high enough quality. Now in some cases this is good because it means useful information that was censored on Wikipedia, by say, a government, can show up on Everipedia. For the most part however all it means is that the articles that are unique to Everipedia are about stuff that nobody wants to read. So it begs the question why the IQ token wasn’t simply built on top of Wikipedia, although it might have something to do with the fact that Co-founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger has now actually left Wikipedia as of 2017 and now serves as Everipedia’s chief information officer. This is speculation to me but it suggests that there might be some large disagreements and potentially some bad blood between the Wikipedia and Everipedia developers, but don’t quote me on that.

One of the team’s stated goals is that they want to make sure that governments have a harder time censoring their content, though personally I fail to understand how their blockchain model would achieve this. Normally a blockchain is censorship resistant because the contents of its ledger cannot be altered by any one party or entity, however articles on Everipedia should be very easy to edit so long as you have IQ tokens, which any government serious about censoring content could easily purchase to gain influence on the platform, and approve their own edits irrespective of the communities wishes. Now I think what they actually mean is that due to the decentralised nature of Everipedia’s servers, those servers can’t be attacked directly and the IP address of the website is harder to block, and while the first point is probably true I would imagine that most people living in countries with a heavily censored internet would have learned how to set up a VPN by now. Feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood any aspect of Everipedia’s governance and token economies and I will happily correct myself.

Personally however I don’t see why the government would even need to go that far when most people likely haven’t even heard of Everipedia, and the website doesn’t show up on google search results unless you literally type in the words Everipedia, because google’s algorithm doesn’t really favour pages with plagiarized content, which is what Everipedia is mostly comprised of. So overall the entire construction of the website is very confusing to me because all it really offers is a different funding model.

On a minor and extremely petty note, I also really don’t like the I in the name. You may notice that this entire time I’ve been pronouncing it Ever-Pedia, because for the love of god I just find it so awkward to have to say ‘Everiiiiipedia’.

So, moving on from that. Maybe you’re thinking that this funding model just needs work, that even if these websites fail, that with a few years of iterations and new ideas being tested, that eventually a token economy system for rewarding creators fairly could work. And, sure, maybe if we’re lucky Everipedia or any of these other crypto-based clones or alternatives to popular website could find their own niche. But the reason I feel projects like Everipedia will never replace what we currently have is that new funding models are already being built on top of what already exists. Obviously Patreon has proven successful for many creators, especially those who were unable to survive when Youtube’s ads became much less lucrative for smaller content creators. But I think the big new innovation is going to be Coil, which is being built using the XRP token.

Now I’m not looking to shill and I’m not being paid here. I wish I was, but I’m a nobody so there’d be no value in doing something like that. You can think what you want but I honestly really do have much more confidence in XRP and Coil’s web monitisation solutions than I do in anything coming out of the EOS or Ethereum platforms right now, or really any other cryptocurrency to be honest.

So if you’ve heard of XRP you probably know that it’s a cryptocurrency made by a company named Ripple which is going to be primarily used for fast and cheap international bank transfers using a product called X-Rapid. But there’s other people in the XRP community who see greater potential for the token, and as a result projects such as a smart contracts platform called Codius is being developed, and it’ll be exciting to see where that eventually goes and if it becomes useful. But Coil is the project I’m excited about. So what is Coil? Well, basically it’s a startup company in San Francisco who has built this google chrome browser extension that you can see up here, and what you do is you pay $5 a month to the company as a subscription service, and what they’ll do is they’ll stream the equivalent of 1 30 millionth of a dollars worth of XRP for every second you’re viewing a web page which has been set up to receive Coil payments. So content creators can earn money for every second of viewing, and Coil can be set up for basically any webpage in existence quite easily, In fact even though it’s still in beta right now and not open to public subscriptions yet I actually have monetization enabled on my youtube channel in anticipation for when this thing goes public, you can see for yourself which websites are ready for monetization or not if you get the extension. It’s so easy to set up the service that Coil was able to set up Wikipedia for web monetization, but had to remove the monetization because Wikipedia being Coil enabled gave the community the false impression that Coil and Wikipedia were officially partnering with each other. That’s just so crazy to me. So right now if you sign up you’ll be on a waiting list, but when it’s ready you won’t have to deal with all the complicated crypto stuff yourself, you literally use systems you already understand like your paypal or your credit card or bank account to directly pay $5 a month and they’ll pay crypto to these webpages for you, and they’ll keep whatever isn’t spent of that subscription as profit. I mentioned earlier that Wikipedia had been enabled for a short time, but Twitch has also already been enabled, in fact Coil directly pays in twitch bits. This basically opens up the door for a single subscription to pay a small amount to pretty much everything you view on the internet, so you’re not just paying a few dollars to a single creator or anything like that. When I learned about this, I realised that it was going to be huge, because it seems infinitely more convenient than all of these other crypto based solutions and it could make paying people much easier and could save people a ton of money. If they don’t have to pay so many different separate subscriptions or seperate patreons for different services like we do now. Now Coil obviously seems like something that will only really work if a significant percentage of the internet adopts the service. But setting everything up is so convenient, even in beta, and it doesn’t really ask you to deal with anything you don’t understand. I can only imagine that once people know about it it will real take off and I really encourage you to look into it further because I seriously feel like this could solve a lot of problems content creators are having in regards to getting paid right now, and it could very well kill off these alternate sites that do nothing but offer ill-fated monetization solutions.

Now creators unfamiliar with crypto will have to learn how to deal with XRP, which might prove to be a hurdle for them, but actually receiving the money is super easy, and if it ends up being profitable for them then they’ll be incentivised to learn how to access that money. And the best part for me, I feel, is that the XRP token is also going to have utility outside of Coil itself as there’s also these other companies, such as, well, Ripple, looking to use it for other reasons.

In conclusion that’s why I feel like Everipedia and many of these other crypto-based web monetization solutions will mostly fail in the long run. Crypto communities are quite isolated from one another and only really focus on the news coming out of the select few coins that they’re invested in and excited about. But as someone who is interested in both XRP and EOS I can’t help but feel that a number of the projects being built on EOS are going to fail, and that the future of EOS applications will be found more in gaming than in web monetisation and social media platforms. Technological advancements and new ideas don’t exist in a vaccume, so it’s always best to absorb as much news as you can both within and outside of the blockchain space. So feel free to let me know if you feel like there’s some other solution I don’t know about that could make Coil or whatever irrelevant. I’m sure that if anyone sees this video at all that I’ll get a number of people preaching to me the virtues of the BAT token.

So I hope you liked the video, feel free to correct me on any factual errors or put your own opinions in the comments. If you liked what I had to say, well, maybe don’t subscribe because I don’t know how much crypto based content I’m going to put out in the future. I have other ideas for things to talk about and new information and topics could always pop up, but I don’t want to be a crypto youtuber per say I’m not really interested in discussing the majority of what goes on in crypto, as I feel others are already doing that job better than I can. However if anime and gaming discussion sounds like it would be up your alley I want to return to that, and do it much more effectively than I have done with past videos on this channel. But more importantly than all that I’m actually very close to releasing the first chapter of a short story I’m writing, which I’ll be presenting in an audiobook format on this channel. They’ll be a series of short mystery stories all set in the same universe, with the first story being extra long to serve as an introduction to the series. The first part of that will hopefully be out by the end of this week so if that sounds interesting to you, then feel free to stick around. And if you like what you see there then that’s when you can consider maybe subscribing and supporting my patreon. That is, if you want me to be able to eat in the future while I produce content on this channel. And of course, when Coil finally does open up to the public I’ll be recommending that you all sign up to that so that you can not only support me, but everyone on the internet. So with all that out of the way, have a good day and thanks for listening.