YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals
You know what's interesting? A Decentralised media platform used to be huge and actually is still huge: Torrents.<p>There's a huge community that consumes media that's not hosted anywhere particular and there are apps like Popcorn Time that offer viewing experience almost as good as Netflix.<p>The problem, of course, is that up until now there was no way to reward the creators and almost all the media consumed on Torrents is illicit copies of copyrighted material that don't bring direct benefits to its creators.<p>It is a huge topic in the blockchain community to find a way to reward content creators and we see early attempts that may or may not succeed at this.<p>Another issue is the "Averagisation" of the content. The moment that you make a content that advertisers might find controversial you risk losing your reward for that content so advertising financed media fails to capture anything beyond the mainstream entertainment. This has another unfortunate outcome, which is that people who don't want to get a direct reward for their content but hoping to be rewarded with political influence can afford to continue producing content that tends to be extremist(veganism, left and right politics, racism, conspiracy theories - you name it). So we end up with extremely light content that's something between product unboxing and funny videos not touching any sensitive topic and extremely edgy content that depicts the world as black and white and if you are not one of us you are one of them. Your average monetised content on Youtube is extremely light and your average popular non-monetised conted is extremeley heavy.<p>At this time you'll find that these new decentralised platforms are full of the extremist's stuff, as it is just another platform to spread their influence but in the long run, I believe that they will be diluted and will offer a platform where non-extremist but alternative cultures can flourish.