Wow, that’s a first (if I ignore @janitor’s gut responses, obviously.) Anyway, I’ll choose to listen to the wise advice: “Don’t accept criticism from anybody you wouldn’t hire.”
Suit yourself. I’m not 100% against the idea, but it is unlikely to work for anything that is not thought of as “content” (pages, videos, etc.) Most useful content, however, will be metadata (e.g. search responses) that people don’t usually think of as something to “like.” Even if they did, having to do it manually would be about as welcome as the stupid EU enforced cookie consent crap.
In short, paid likes would make pirating profitable, but they wouldn’t help honest, community serving services (again: search.) More of a problem is how you would implement it at all, because:
From a technological point of view, there are a lot of problems with likes. How does one “like” a chunk of data? How can we make sure likes won’t get hijacked? Which of the 2000 chunks that make up a video file should be liked? How should a like on a content aggregator’s (e.g. SafeTube’s) site propagate to the content it links to, so that the original poster (the artist) would also get some of the love? I’m not sure an explicit like feature can solve these problems, but they are trivial with PtP.
Yes, we may reward some stuff that was accessed by accident, even against the desires of the user, and it sucks. I still can’t see anything better that can make the network work (again, I’m referring to those services that can’t function without a return of investment.)
The proof is in the fact that people don’t pirate everything. And on top of that they go out of their way to support artists. By examining how pirating works you can find out how to identify the best source for material. And if the orginal source is the best source for material, which any decent artist should be unless they’re DEAD or completely incompetent, then people will use these methods to find them. Ergo studying pirating shows you how people can find and filter out artists from those who are just copying material. Because it’s the artists that will be regularly producing new original works. Have you ever followed a web manga? New content every day sometimes, or at least every week. Sure you could copy the material but only one person could PRODUCE the original cannon.
Content rewards can be handled apart from the network level (probably need to). Also, as far as I know MaidSafe distinguished app rewards and reward of content, so I guess rewarding search enquiries would be in the former category, but I may be wrong about that.
The argument “likes” could be hijacked, well, I think that argument can be (and was) directed towards “Pay the Uploader” as well. When I referred to likes I actually thought about paid likes and transmission of love via watermarking. I don´t see how that is would make pirating necessarily profitable (unless users are willing to pay, of course), but admittedly there are other ideas about the liking part, so you may be right depending on implementation.
Anyway, I have spent too much time on this thread and rereading it remembered me of the fact that originally I only wanted to point out that I find it misleading to name the feature “Pay the Producer” and not more accurately “Pay the Promoter” or rather (as @joshuef has correctly said) “Pay the Uploader”. To me that´s marketing a feature which cannot be delivered for the network is agnostic to social semantics, but yeah, I am repeating myself, therefore I follow the friendly advise of @happybeing and leave it here.
I saw that before, not recently though. I just never understood how that would be possible on a network where apps and “regular” data are both just opaque blocks of ones and zeroes, indistinguishable until a client decrypts them, so paying or not paying is at the discretion of the user and their willingness to follow the “rules” (demoted to guidelines at this point.)
My single strongest argument for rewarding uploaders is that many of the most important community serving services are impossible without it: a statement nobody challenged in any substantial way yet. I understand PtP can be played, and there may or may not be good ways to thwart some or many or most of those attempts. None of these arguments are stronger than the requirement to make the above mentioned services possible (profitable enough to maintain.)
EDIT: sry for editing after your like by accident; i hope i didn’t mess it up too much with it haha
I think it will be pretty easy to break, tbh. You just need to get a sufficient number of people making requests to your data. You could do this by embedding requests in legitimate software or via some sort of XSS to embed the requests in someone else’s software.
In short, requests just need to come from a far and wide user base, in sufficient volume to generate income. This must be possible (acknowledging caching, etc), as otherwise legitimate producers would be unable to generate usual income.
As soon as you have a few devs/hackers exploiting the network, either:
The PUT costs are either going to have to increase to cover them (making the network uncompetitive due to high cost)
The payout per request will tend to zero (as the PUT fee is shared out), rendering the process a) pointless and b) a drag on the efficiency of the network
We can test this though. It seems to be the only way this will be resolved either way, as this debate has ranged for a long time with no sign of agreement.
youtube, without curation wouldn’t exist. it was constantly in the process of being sued into oblivion in the early days. my objection to ptp is that it fosters, rather than hinders, the kind of behavior that threatens safe network. and i would like safe network to succeed.
There are pros and cons with regard to the success of the network. Attracting content uploading, and users wanting to access that content could make the network very much more likely to succeed for example.
But again, which way you each of us sees that question is a matter of opinion. I think we don’t get anywhere with simply stating opinions I’ve easy or the other.
I think the question of whether or not to incorporate PtP as a function of the core system has been most valuable and at this late stage I’d like to add a few of my thoughts:
• most forum contributors seem to thinking of “producers” as writers of news, music, books, software and so on whereas to me such works are all goods and/services and are part of the great world of commerce consisting of commodities, goods, services and currency. So in voting I considered PtP to apply to all such commercial transactions;
• “all commercial transactions” to my mind includes everything that can be bought and sold;
• every time someone, a corporation, a bank, a central bank or government meddles in the market for commodities, goods, services and/or currencies the effect is destruction of the essential part of commerce namely “free market price discovery” and that is the prime cause for the monetary mess that has engulfed the world today;
• it seems to me that where and whenever man creates rules for the medium of exchange, unit of value or what constitutes a unit of account, whether by limiting the issued currency or debasing it by increasing its issue or by way of creating inflation by running a deficit current account, the result is the inevitable booms, busts and depression which is usually followed by war;
• therefore I think the prudent course for development of the SAFE network and Safe Coin is to avoid the issue of PtP and encourage this essential facility to be provided by app developers.
This is part of the shift from the current economy where creators are centralised in a small percentage of society, to one where anyone can be a creator no matter how small a concern they are.
It is well known that many smaller artists never make a profit from the media companies that sell their product. Free market in the creative industry barely exists and you sound like you wish the status quo to continue.
PtP caters more for the smaller creator and the large creators will have their works mostly cached and receive little in the way of PtP
And they dominate the creative market today. And your post sounds like you want the status quo of a claimed “free market” to continue. A market dominated by the few controlling the creative energies.
Wow never new PtP was going to create war. I’ve heard it will destroy the network, but war?
PtP is not setting up rules or any such thing. The creator is still free to offer their works for sale. Actually the N99 project is the first of probably many APPs that will facilitate that.
PtP is purely an incentive to attract (quality) content. The network does not control how, when, where, how much, the creator can upload, or create, or even demand how good the works are. The “free marker” we have today, which you support it seems, does control the creator, even to the point of manipulating the actual creation. Writers have to satisfy a book editor before their works are accepted for printing.
And why not have the incentive to attract creators and then offer the benefits of APPs that can facilitate the sale of their works.
At least the incentive will assist in reducing the need for advertising on their safe pages that we see today in the so called free market, for any creator who wishes to offer their works for free.
The simple fact that taxes exist proves that there is no such thing as a “free market” in any nation-state on this planet.
So no, he is claiming the exact opposite of your interpretation - namely that the status quo of corporatism and federal intervention in private affairs should cease.
And yes, the status quo is “dominated by the few controlling the creative energies” - those with a government grant for one.
“Free market” - you keep using that phrase. I don’t think it means what you think it does.
Who put in the laws to prop up those media companies and create their oligarchies? Who mandated that you had to go through the government to get permission to run a radio station? The government!!!
Who, pray tell, is forcing them to satisfy a book editor? The publishing company that they are going through? At gunpoint? Or as a stipulation of the contract that they are able to break at any time. No, you are mistaken. No one has to do anything in a free market. The side effect is that if you don’t, you’ll most likely die. Whoops. Too bad.
So, what happens when you don’t like the terms? Head on over to the competition. That’s what competition and free markets are for. Here’s the crux of it. If PtP is enabled, thereisno competition, there is only “Big Brother Network” for all of your income needs. Please, spare me.
If there is no competition, there is no price discovery. If there is no price discovery - everything is theoretically equal - although you’d be hard pressed to argue that logic. If you can find the answer to the rhetorical question that has been asked soooo many times around PtP discussions regarding “is his video worth more than my book”, you can go ahead and let me know, m’kay? Thanks.
Oh, BTW, as a mod, I was pointed to a quite unsavory site in the process of doing an investigation on an account that we as a group were looking into.
This site had me morally outraged and went against all of my beliefs - yet in a Network with PtP, because I chose to visit that site, there was also the possibility that I would attributing value to that site, because the Network just knew that I visited it.
Now this site wasn’t clickbait and it wasn’t a malicious redirect, although those are two other ways that I could be directed towards a site that I would otherwise never have intended to visit. No. I meant to go to that site in order to see for myself the truth about the account.
I attribute NO value to that site, and it is my own belief that the site is of no value. However, in a Network with PtP - my view of that site could have attributed value to that site in the eyes of the Network because it is content agnostic. It cannot judge a person’s intent - hence the previous conversations about “likes”, and then about “alt-tokens” which kinda brought it all together.
By reverting to a PtP Model, we throw out the advances that have been made since this conversation started, and go backwards into an easily-gameable, troll-filled cesspool that is rife with clickbait all because of the misdirected ambitions of those who want to help content creators.
Let me give you a hint - let them help themselves. Using the Put Incentive Model with a splash of @Seneca’s Alt-tokens there is a completely viable ecosystem to be fostered for the content creators, the app devs, and the farmers alike.
And you’re going to torture us by not revealing the link.
Seriously though, the existence of sites that you abhor on the future SAFE network is not an argument against PtP or any other feature of SAFE. It is simply an argument against the existence of SAFE.
If PtP proves to be necessary in order for SAFE to grow beyond a small (and Tor-sized would be small) group of activists and hobbyists, then so be it.
If SAFE exists then by its nature it will have every kind of content that is reviled by someone, and if it doesn’t then it isn’t working correctly.
David even suggested that if PtP proved to be not sustainable for the very long term then it could be phased out after the network has been widely adopted. Of course he hopes that it will prove to be a change to the status quo.
It will either be a fizzle or world-changing, I don’t see much middle ground.
Whether that change will resemble a quasi-religious rapture, or perhaps a classic scifi story such as Arthur Clarke’s Dial F for Frankenstein or Fredric Brown’s Answer I have no idea. It’ll be a ride though.
By itself, it will not be “world changing”, but a vital aspect of the network that will be world changing. It will be the aspect that encourages (quality) content to be stored on the network thus growing it much faster. Providing content for the farmers to farm because people want good content to view and encouraging coins to be returned to the network, through the millions of small creators putting up their works for all to see.
We’ve been over that ground already. Unless these millions of small creators have something that by its nature cannot already be hosted on the clearnet, then no.
EDIT: Then again, maybe we’re both right, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, because the idea and the context is simply too big to grasp.
Maybe we could “test” PtP on a separate network (example: Community Test Network) before committing to the SAFE Network.
I understand this is not the same as a live network. But we can learn a lot by “simulating” PtP in a test economy and who knows… it may help us improve the current implementation or conclude it doesn’t work.
nvm