I am looking for feedback on a Safenet Site I have been calling Safe Haven.
The idea is to have anyone from a journalist to a film producer, a musician to a programmer, and anything in between, have a “crowdfunding” type platform for releasing content. The only difference from other platforms like this will be that the content will have already have been completed and is just waiting to be released.
For example, a journalist has written an article about Maidsafe and wants to be compensated for it. An overview is given of what information is included in the article and a price is set for the entire article to be revealed.
Say the journalist would like $20 for writing the article. An address is created and a time frame is set to reach the goal. Anyone can send any amount they wish to contribute to the $20 and once the goal is reached the article is now available for anyone to read. Also contributions to the journalist can still be made after the goal is reached.
For each successfully funded venture a poster has, they are awarded a +1 to their reputation. This will help people have a better idea of the quality of the creators work.
A voting system is also a way for a creator to reach their goal.
A vote will cost the voter ~$0.20. So if the journalist above receives 100 +1 votes the $20 goal is reached and the article is fully available.
If a goal is not reached in the time frame set then the money is sent back to the original senders.
Comments votes will work the same way with a ~ $0.10. This will help to detour arbitrary votes and also credit the comments posters account that they can spend how they like.
A down vote does not make sense in this environment because money should not be sent to an account for bad content.
Please note that all the numbers here are for example purposes.
Please let me know if this is a platform you would like to use or at least something that would be useful to others.
Also please let me know if this is a project you may be interested in getting involved in. I do not have much experience with programming.
Thanks for any feedback!
This has been proposed before as @Blindsite2k has said, and is implemented in a few blockchains. Mostly it gets used to pay leakers for private documents. Would love to see one tailored to a more positive group of people like you are proposing.
That’s because there’s no reason to pay a journalist for the poor-quality stuff that they typically produce. Any information is likely to be found elsewhere for free, and it is rare for journalists to produce articles that contain more than press releases, opinions, or something off the newswire.
Even an online scientific research publishing organization such as PLOS is non-profit, with their contributors, the researchers, being paid (if they are professionals) by their universities and such. I don’t believe that the paywall type of online scientific publication is going to last much longer.
If that’s the case for original research making the world a better place, what chance for mediocre hacks who have never done anything except to maintain the power structure, provide low-grade entertainment called “news” or give vent to their own psychopathic tendencies?
I’m not sorry to say that the future for most journalists, after their employers go bust (as many have in the last 15 years) is probably to get a job at a call centre, or as short-order cooks, or perhaps go on welfare.
But anyway, you’re in the wrong place for another reason: What do you suppose there is about SAFE that particularly suits your idea? Why wouldn’t it work on the clearnet?
What’s that I can hear you say? Whistleblowers could publish on SAFE? Whistleblowers aren’t journalists. We saw that in spades with the incredibly coy attitude of the Guardian towards the Snowden leaks.
And wikileaks (even if one accepts it at face value) is not a money-making operation; they are volunteers.
And last but not least: Suppose for the sake of argument that I’m wrong in my analysis and there is some grains of gold waiting to be published on SAFE and only on SAFE by neglected unicorns ahem I mean competent and honest journalists. You know what: some people will take it and publish it for free ON THE SAFE NETWORK. GUARANTEED.
I’m not arguing with anything you’ve said so far in this post. However, once its out so it can be “reposted for free” the “journalist” has already been paid so he doesn’t care. Just saying.
Does it matter? If they really are the only ones with the content, who cares where the money comes from. Who cares if it gets reposted? They got paid. That’s all they wanted for their exclusive content.
If it’s not exclusive content, then they shouldn’t be there anyway because they’ll get labeled a scammer soon enough. No one will buy from them.
Why suppose that those things are suited to being on SAFE and only on SAFE?
Don’t people publish novels anywhere else?
With Lulu.com, anyone on a low budget can publish a book. If no-one is reading it now, why the obsession with putting it on SAFE where FINALLY the producer can get paid for his precious work? It’s looking at SAFE as a magical pair of slippers that somehow transform a hideous wretch into a raving beauty.
The point is that an app or enterprise will fail on SAFE if it has no compelling reason to be there; i.e. unless it is doing something that cannot be done elsewhere.
Now if you want ideas (i suppose I must spoonfeed people sometimes) then consider what Aaron Swartz did that ended with his suicide. You can look it up. I’ll just note that it will be goodbye to JSTOR and their overpriced ilk once SAFE is up.
And there’s so much more to be said, but alas, I would risk violating the forum guidelines to describe them.
Consider for a moment that no where else offers anonymity of funds and communication and decentralization. True you can publish a book on LuLu but you need to do so with your real life identity and thus are likely to be censored and persecuted if you publish anything too far outside the norm. On SAFE this is not the case. Also on Lulu one would be subject to taxation, again on SAFE this is not the case. True such apps could probably be mimicked on the clearnet but the clearnet is inherently insecure and that alone makes any app or project made for the SAFEnet inherently superior.
Consider the following scenarios:
A Chinese antivaccination activist writing articles or even a book on the negative health affects of vaccines on the Chinese people. China is currently JAILING such activists so such a text would be very dangerous to publish openly if it could get to print at all.
A Christian woman in the Middle East doing a documentury on religious persecution and sexual discrimination. Or any woman in the Middle East campaigning for women’s rights.
A lesbian pedophile living in the U.S. wants to publish her memoirs and campaign for the rights of children. Yeah THAT would go over well.
A black transgender male living in Russia wants to write some journalism against the religious biases and homophobic attitudes of the state.
Are we getting the picture here yet? Just because you want to publish something or even make a bit of coin does not mean you want your name attatched to it. Do you want to talk about the subject matter or be pummeled by a barrage of prejudices? And if you are to be pummeled by said prejudices do you want your “real life” connected to your “professional” life? This is what SAFE offers but the clearnet doesn’t.
Of course they will only get paid if someone is willing to pay them. PtP will only reward them if some actually gets their content. So I am unsure of your point. If the APP fails because no one uses it then so be it.
@Blindsite2k The scenarios that you list are not journalism. For example, someone’s memoirs would either be written by themselves or by a ghostwriter (a profession that already exists and has no pretensions to journalism).
The items in the list are good use cases for SAFE, actually, activism and autobiography, but with little overlap to journalists, whose pretensions are supposedly to be able to write about anything. Discerning readers of non-fiction turn to original sources rather than to professional, all-purpose writers.
The model of crowdsales for single news articles won’t work. We are already inundated with low quality “news.”
However, here’s something that would be ideal for SAFE:
News curatage along the lines of the Drudge Report. A site that people turn to precisely because they are inundated and they are aware that most of it is disinformation or mindless repetition (which tends to converge on the same thing: someone has an agenda to lie, and then many someones repeat it to get readership). Someone that you have grown to trust for filtering for quality and who also adds helpful commentary. I would pay for that. At present such sites are restrained by copyright, simply to linking, and even that is under threat. The site I envisage would have no such restraints.
My point is that if 1000 mindless reports are put onto the site then there will 1000 mindless reports that never get funded.
If they do then someone thought they were worth funding.
If they put the content on SAFE with PtP then they will only get rewarded if someone actually reads the articles. If no one reads them then they are rewarded nothing from the PtP
I am unsure if this idea can work, BUT my thought is that when the mindless content doesn’t get funded then the writers will wake up and try harder or never get funded/paid. They have to reach a certain level of funding before the system will fund them, otherwise what ever was put up is returned to people who put up the money.
Journalists can’t write about anything, they should be able but can’t. It’s well known that news is censored. And I’d put forward that anything that has decent citations and information could be considered news. If your goal is to write a blog about religious prosecution so long as you’re writing about facts and including citations then it’s news not an opinion collumn.
The job of a ghost writer is to write something well and let someone else take the credit NOT to shield someone from identification in any way, quite the opposite. It’s the ghost writer that stays in the shadows. I’m unsure how this applies to writing something that would warrent anononymity.
Writing a decent essay requires one cite their sources. Writing anything that is of merit and not simply opinion requires one cite their sources. So I fail to see how you’d assume that my above examples do not apply as journalism because you seem to assume that activists, documentury producers, journalists and someone relating their personal experiences (they personally would be the source in question) would be assumed to be “general” and not non fiction. Citations are still required for any of those writers to gain credibility. Even if you’re writing about your own experience your recollections must coincide with reality. You can’t claim that flew to the moon in a rocketship made of cheese for instance. It just won’t fly ever. (And if you make any kind of functional orbital spacecraft made of any kind of dairy product and can prove it then you deserve a nobel prize. Until then you’ll be sent to the loony bin.) If you claim you shook hands with the President of the United States please provide a citation and documented evidence. See where I’m going with this?
I could see something like this working out. I hope you continue your efforts. It could well morph into something you never imagined. Dont get discouraged by anyone or when the headwinds blow. There are supporters and possible collaborators here. Good luck!
@blindsite2k You’re talking about something else than journalism. I’m not talking about writers of scholarly articles, or about any subject in which they have a stake, such as a scientist writing for a lay readership. I was not intending the use of the term “ghost writer” to mean a shield from scrutiny but simply an amanuensis, like a secretary. The rest of your comment is too unfocused to respond to.
As for @BIGbtc , sure, be a cheersquad devoid of substantial analysis. If the model sucks then all the pats on the back make no difference.
But isn’t that the point? This app SAFE Haven could be used by any creative person not just journalists, not just writers even but anyone releasing a creative work. In fact I would seriously think that it should be integrated with projects like n99 because artists might want to release on SAFE Haven and the have their work posted to n99 somehow or somehow have both functionalities preserved.
I appreciate your permission. I wish I had spent more time justifying my support but I actually like the cheersquad moniker and will see if the mods can get me a badge. I like the Safe Haven idea and would support it. Anything else my friend?
Thanks for all the input! To clear somethings up, I used journalism as an example of one of the many things that can be offered on this platform.
If it helps think of Reddit with all of the subs and it’s voting system.
Journalism or News would just be one sub, or even many subs for different types of news and views .
Or maybe a person who provides content on youtube is better example. Someone who produces video’s would set the price for it’s release. If they successfully fund each videos they build a reputation that becomes credible and is known for the quality of their work. Also the backlog of all their past work is available to be viewed to have a better feel of what it is they do.
A comic book can be released issue by issue like this. Or a Tv series.
Even a video game mod community can work like this as well. I think much better than the mismanaged attempt that Steam recently made. They had a very good idea, just did not handle it properly.
As for users who may not be producing any type of content, they still have an incentive to voice their opinions outside of just one liner jokes or straight trolling. Each upvote will cost the voter some amount of money that gets passed to the commenter who now can do what they want with it. They can use it to vote for things they wish to help fund, pass it along to another commenter, or even cash it out of the site completely.
This will create a type of information sharing ecosystem that could even become self sustaining. Imagine the Reddit bitcoin tip that had more of a purpose than just sending someone money.
I hope this helps anyone to better understand the idea here.