Viability of Steem and DTube
(My thoughts)

Preface

If this seems negative, it’s not because I hate the Steem / DTube platform but just skeptical about its viability. I’d love for this platform to succeed and grow into something great to actually rival other sites but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my doubts. Also this is mostly based on my observations and opinions, I do not claim to be 100% correct here but if I do make a factual error please inform me in the comments. Also I started writing this at 1am because I’m bored no hate only likes xoxox.

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Context

(Mostly a rant on YouTube, feel free to skip)

Just so you understand the perspective I am looking at this discussion from, I’ll tell you why I joined the Steem platform. I’ve been a user of YouTube since pretty much since the site started. I didn’t make an account until 2008 but hey I was 11-12 then I didn’t feel compelled to comment on videos, especially the type of content that was prevalent then. Hell, I remember going on Dailymotion even before YouTube and before that there was FunnyJunk when that was actually relevant. But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is that I have seen the site evolve. What started out as just a comparatively small community of people wanting to share their videos with each other has turned people making their livelihood off either professional quality content or low budget formats of whatever they wanted to make. And whenever an older creator seemed to lose their groove, it was almost like a newer channel came in to replace their content with something else that is fresh, innovative and more entertaining than before.

That is until recently where I swear the company has tried their hardest to not only stifle any new unapproved creators to get a small following (which isn’t helped by the rate at which people make new channels burying them in a sea of shit to be fair) but is also burning out the full-time creators by constantly changing what their site determines gets advertised in sidebars, the frontpage and even the fucking subscription feed while also making them avoid the minefield of not losing their hard-earned income from either getting falsely claimed, taken down or just plain old demonetised. The established creators are less incentivised to make the content their viewers watch them for and while it has always been a thing where a lot of the newer creators that are being promoted are the ones merely following trends and trying to game the system, you at least got a decent stream of creators who would make something truly worth watching but now if you don’t absolutely whore yourself out or are not helped out by an already established creator it’s almost impossible for someone to get noticed without the dumb luck of internet virality.

So after seeing creators like @Rerez and @tjkirk join the Steem platform (both great creators by the by), I felt like this had the potential to attract some newer talent and help them grow and establish themselves. Also the rare few times I do actually make content it may get viewed more than 50 times these days, which while I will admit my content if far, far away from anything good I still think compared to 99% of shit on that site it deserves slightly more recognition even just for the effort I put into them and I know that’s a direct result of the changes YouTube has made to their backend because my older videos that I used to do got a lot more traction for substantially worse content. I make content for the fun of it, but you know a little bit of recognition feels good from time to time.

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Technical

With that said though, there are two sides to every story. While it’s entirely possible that these changes are just because the heads at Google decided to change their motto from

Do no evil.

to something more along the lines of

Actively aim to annoy your users lol.

I feel like these changes were done for a slightly less malicious (and infinitely more boring) reason of they’re a business and they want money. Not the most groundbreaking revolution, I know, but I do feel like a lot of people neglect that aspect when they complain about the site’s changes. They may say the understand that it’s a business and they are only just trying to make money, but then they immediately forget that in the next sentence when they want them to make every move possible that will almost certainly bankrupt the platform in a few years. You can scream “freedom of speech” and “constitutional rights” as much as you like (I legitimately saw someone say that the shit on YouTube and / or Twitter is protected under the constitution once, really fires those neurons), but even with the infrastructure available at Google the expense of running the largest video sharing platform by far would be pretty hefty even just to break even they have to listen to the wishes of the advertisers. Sure having such a large user-base would give Google some leverage but I’m pretty sure advertisers would still rather not have their brand appear alongside things such as people legitimately promoting for white ethno-states or top creators casually using racial slurs especially in this divisive climate. Not saying I’d prefer the site in this neutered state, my opinion on the matter is irreverent because I’m not the one bankrolling Google.

So I understand YouTube becoming a sterile shell of its former self was inevitable. Jimmy Kimmel is safe for them. Music videos are safe for them. Established corporate news shows are safe for them. Investing in their already massive and safe creators is safe for them. Why gamble on risky upstarts when there are safe bets that already pull in the big numbers and advertisers want to be shown against? Hey sounds kind of like current Hollywood.

Which is where Steem / DTube comes in.

It’s social media but it’s cryptocurrency.

Okay, cool. I’m not biggest fan of meme money currently since people think it’s currently the stock market 2.0 but whatever, interesting concept I’ll give it that. Maybe they are onto something.

It also has a YouTube counterpart that is curated mostly by users rather than any pressures from advertisers and there are no real explicit rules besides don’t post illegal content.

Wouldn’t be the first, but that sounds right up my alley. Sounds similar to the Newgrounds model.

We do not run ads, instead we pay our creators based off community upvotes with our crypto.

Okay payments based off community approval seems like a decent concept but hang on one second, you are not running ads? I don’t know if the creators of Steem are doing this for profit or for some kind of philanthropic e-commerce / social media reason, either way that does not negate the fact the running a social media site especially a video sharing platform designed for longer form content does have operating expenses. Now I (somewhat) understand that it utilises IPFS to store the data and I will admit I have not looked into it enough to properly understand how it fully operates but from what I have gathered it is the lovechild of torrents, the blockchain and hypermedia which is neat and all but how in the hell are you going to support a video sharing site on it?

Okay, in theory I know how it could support a video sharing site but how is it currently operating? I’ve currently uploaded a few videos of my own to the site (shameless DTube plug) and they aren’t the smallest of file sizes (although I did re-render some of them to reduce the size to reduce transfer time). After the upload of these files, I can guarantee you my network is not being used to seed these videos any further. My proof is this speedtest I just ran (and I assure you, besides Spotify there is nothing else using bandwidth on my network right now).

I know Australia’s internet infrastructure isn’t exactly what one would call “world class” (but hey, we are finally beating Kazakhstan) and even then my upload is questionable but that’s kind of my point. Trying to casually browse a website becomes a Herculean task even when I try to upload a simple .jpg on this network so I will definitely know when a video is being seeded off my computer. Maybe the IPFS system can detect my network is a beyond useless and general outlier to helping sustain it so it completely ignores me in the peer-to-peer distribution of the media. Okay, so is someone else is hosting my 800 megabytes of content. Along with a lot of other users content. And constantly seeding it. I feel like the storage capacity of my computer is much larger than most being around 6.2 terabytes (and roughly 700 gigabytes free after cleaning it out a few months ago) among four internal drives so while a couple hundreds of gigabytes of content to host as my delegated portion wouldn’t be too detrimental I feel most people don’t have the luxury of that much free space on their only 500 gigabyte drive to play around with being part of a blockchain for a video hosting site. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic either people’s willingness to participate in this system or the average user’s set up but I highly doubt it.

Again I will admit, I will have to look into this more thougherly than just reading the bluepapers and whitepapers to properly understand the mechanics of it all and if someone has information telling me how incorrect I am feel free to link it to me in the comments. Speaking of bluepapers and bandwidth, saw this in the Steem bluepaper and just like I needed to highlight how good of an idea this is for throttling content:

Bandwidth Rate Limiting for Fee-less Operations

Because the witnesses are paid entirely through the generation of new tokens, there is no need to charge users a fee for powering the blockchain. The only reason to charge a fee would be as a deterrent to prevent users from completing an unreasonable amount of transactions, which could potentially impact the performance of the blockchain. In order to place reasonable limits on the system use, each user is given a limited bandwidth. Whenever users perform blockchain operations such as token transfers, posting content, and voting, it uses up a portion of their bandwidth. If a user exceeds their bandwidth allowance, they must wait to perform additional actions until their bandwidth recharges. Bandwidth limits adjust based on network use, so users have a higher bandwidth allowance when the network usage is low. The amount of bandwidth that an account is allowed is directly proportional to the amount of Steem Power a user has, so users can always increase their bandwidth allowance by getting additional Steem Power.

I like this idea. Just saying. Moving on.

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Monetisation

If you have not gathered by now, unlike 99% of people on this platform who have this massive awestruck tone whenever they talk about cryptocurrencies (which, to be fair, this entire site is based on crypto so people being enthusiastic about it here should be expected), I am still skeptical about its application and especially its current main usage of being an investment to flip. Not saying the concept is bad or unviable at all, I’m just trying to be realistic about it which considering how much of a fad it is right now seems at least uncommon to me.

I’m also going to assume all the content posted on the platform is being posted by people who have the legal right to post it, only because that can of worms is a problem pretty much all websites with user-driven content have to deal with and mostly irrelevant to what I want to talk about.

With that said being paid for creating content that users actually enjoy seems like such a brilliant concept compared to the current state of sites like YouTube (zing), being paid in virtual Disney Dollars does reduce my excitement. Now considering the entire platform is designed around not having advertisers to provide actual fiat it is understandable, having to get paid in STEEM tokens to then having to transfer that into SBD then into a more popular crypto like BTC or ETH and then into my local currency seems like a volatile tightrope to walk across. So not only do I have to rely on the value of SBD which does not have many applications outside of Steem itself but then I have to rely on the value of the middleman crypto of my choosing which is such a volatile market and more than likely the performance on my local currency compared to USD since (I assume) the value of crypto is more closely tied to USD than AUD. This is all assuming that there is enough interest in purchasing SBD to buy STEEM POWER (which I think is currently the only use for SBD outside of private transactions) which unless this site really takes off strong I do have my doubts on this becoming a seller’s market.

But that’s only just a nit-pick really. It’s convoluted, but I would be able to buy myself dinner doing that. What I’m confused about it how this revenue is actually generated. With the more conventional crypto, I understand miners are paid in the respective currency for processing the transactions. You get paid for maintaining the system. With Steem and DTube, what exactly am I getting paid for? Uploading content? Besides showing my lovely mug, I’m not exactly what service I am providing the system aside from adding to the workload to be processed and stored. That would be like going to an accountant and them paying me for getting them to do my tax return. Sure, it is a fantastic deal for me but that accountant has a family to feed. Now if the people who maintain the IPFS system got a cut for the work processing the system that would make more sense but as far as I understand there is currently no way to mine STEEM tokens.

Admittedly, I didn’t read the SMT whitepaper in full but the thing is also 61 pages long. I didn’t see anything in there that would answer my questions, but I may have skimmed over it.

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Curation

One of the massive advantages that DTube has over YouTube for a user who is more of a consumer like myself is that the content that is promoted is not based on trying to get me to stay on the site watching content that is deemed advertiser friendly but rather content that has been decided by the community as being good content as well as more interactive usage of tags does allow for smaller communities based on interests to properly communicate with each other. Sure, people will like-whore or find other ways to try to cheat the system but that is unavoidable.

My one concern is STEEM POWER. If this was only tied to what a creator’s payout for that vote was, I’d have less of an issue. However it also influences in what is determined in what trends on the site. I’m not sure what the scaling on STEEM POWER to voting influence is (going to guess like around $0.005 per 100% vote per 15 STEEM POWER) but anyone who has either invested into STEEM POWER or is even a mildly known creator on the site has a disproportionately large influence on what becomes popular on the site. While this may help give some authenticity to who is actually curating the content instead of view / like botting, this will be exploited. While it seems like the community here is extremely friendly for the majority, when this platform grows people will become gatekeepers. This is made worse by the fact that (at least on DTube, Steemit does not have this option) people can downvote with their STEEM POWER a video which reduces the revenue that the video earns.

It will also give people the power to easily silence any opposition singlehandedly. Since politics is always fun and divisive I’ll use that as an example. Let’s say I become a popular left-wing pinko on DTube and with the revenue I have earned on the site I have invested decently into my STEEM POWER. Then comes along a centre-right creator who made a video fact checking my content and gets decent support for it by a bunch of non-creators who have only the complimentary STEEM POWER. I see this video and I immediately dislike it because I am always right and am never wrong. I could bury that video on any form of trending from my vote alone. As much as this platform does not censor speech directly, they provide tools for elite users to either signal boost their interests or hide the opposition.

It also creates a conflict of interest for the users with more STEEM POWER. Do they use that influence to help promote people who could use that promotion, or do they use it only within their circles or even use it to ensure they stay the most relevant?

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Conclusion

Do not take this the wrong way, I want this platform to succeed. I want SBD to be a viable currency. I’m just not entirely sure on how viable of a business model (for lack of a better term) this system is nor do I completely understand the mechanics of how it operates. There were some other things I want to touch on but this is already nearly 3000 words long and I’m really tired right now. Maybe another massive wall of text with those concerns, but I don’t want to be too much of a Debbie Downer. While this service exists as is, I want to have fun with it.

Speaking of which, going to start properly working on my first DTube exclusive video after I go to sleep. It will be NSFW, but don’t worry it won’t be me who gets naked. Stay tuned.

Follow my Twitter for other instances of my being a glass half empty guy.

Have a lovely night, have a lovely life and find a lovely wife :)