PtP and PtD cannot work without curation

Continuing the discussion from Legal ramifications for PtD (Pay the Developer) feature in the SAFE protocol:

In order to make PtP or PtD work, you need a way to curate.

If there is a developer then you need to take into account the quality of the app developed and not just how popular it is. If you’re talking about content then it’s all about subjective preferences which means you require curation.

Curation is necessary to make PtP or PtD work. The network must make decisions based on the aggregate preferences to determine what to fund and what not to fund. Content particularly is not all equal because value is subjective, preferences are subjective, and the best we can do is aggregate the preferences to come up with a list of apps which meet the minimum threshold to be funded or content which meets the minimum quality threshold.

If you pay a developer without any curation then you could be paying for apps no one would want. If you pay for content without curation then you could be paying for content no one would want. Instead you want to pay for apps or content most people want or at least most voters, token holders, reviewers, or participants like or want.

Otherwise the owners of SAFE Network will not be able to control the evolutionary trajectory of SAFE Network.

Amazon works because there is a rating system, with a recommendation system. It does not work by subsidizing all possible books which could be created and charging one fee. It’s a curated model to the point where it has a recommender based on learning conditional preference networks.

Reddit works because it has a up voting system for collaborative filtering. This is the only way Reddit can be useful. The best posts are constantly being curated. So if micropayments subsidized Reddit people would at least know over time Reddit is going to optimize to become more what the Internet likes and more of what they like as an individual.

PtP on the other hand is on the wrong layer. If it’s going to be on the app layer then the first app should be the app to rate app stores, and then curation apps, and then PtP or PtD based on some fitness criteria.

I disagree with this entirely. If you’re to have curation it should be by competing apps because there are competing subjective opinions on what is “Good” or “Bad”. The cultural values of the West are not going to be the same as those in China or the Middle East for example. Different populations and different cultural groups will want to curate their content differently.

This is an assumption. A man designing a boat in the desert doesn’t mean he’s designing a poor quality boat, it just means he’s marketing to the wrong audience and in the wrong location. Value is subjective.

There are no owners of the SAFE network. Nor should there be. Nor should they be able to control it. This statement is like saying you control the elements of air or fire. It’s ridiculous.

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I disagree with the pretext. It can work without.

You do not pay the dev by PtD, PtD is a gift/reward by the system, there is no coin taken from your wallet to pay the dev. So the conditions for your pretext is invalid

PtD ONLY pays a particular APP if people use the APP.

SO

Is what PTD/PTP does. Only APPs /content that people want will get the gifts/rewards using the proposed algorithms. So that is a form of voting to only pay the ones people want.

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There are no owners

Only people uploading content, people downloading content/using APPS and teh farmers who supply resources. None of which owns the SAFE network

Who owns the internet?

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So have multiple different curation apps which all get rated. Now the apps which you don’t think do a good job will be rated down by your demographic of reviewers.

What is the problem?

There are owners. The farmers and the token holders own SAFE Network because SAFE Network does not run autonomously. It requires token holders who own equity in the computation resources and it requires farmers to act as decentralized service providers.

These farmers are like Tor exit nodes or VPN services in that they can’t see what anyone is doing but it doesn’t actually matter whether or not they can see. The fact is that once you’ve got money flowing around then the developer who came up with the algorithm is going to be the one that gets blamed if the algorithm is hard coded.

On the other hand if the algorithm can be flexible enough to be continuously modified then no one is to blame and the network is a democracy, a potentially sovereign like entity owned by people who operate it.

To say there are no owners is propaganda and misinfo. The Internet has owners too, and this includes ICANN, this includes the backbones, this includes all sorts of different critical parts of the Internet including phone and cable companies, including server hosts etc. To say no one owns the Internet is ridiculously.

Everyone owns a bit of the Internet and some own more than others but the difference is the Internet isn’t paying for clicks. That is a key difference. You can get paid for content sure, you can get paid to develop sure, but it’s not indiscriminate nor should it be. Not all ideas are good ideas which should be rewarded or reproduced.

If we can’t change the algorithm or choose our own algorithm individually then it’s not flexible enough to scale to a mass adoption level. It’s not granular enough, it’s too hard coded. A smart contract which can allow for all kinds of criteria to be rated is far superior.

Think of it as a database and think about how you can quantify many different aspects of a content. Not only does this make content searchable but it also curates and favors certain content above others. This can allow the network to learn what people like over time and reward based on machine intelligence rather than some blind hard coded hack like PtP.

I think the idea of paying for development is fine but in all the other DACs, DAOs, smart contracts, there is usually some consensus mechanism built in so people can decide how to spend the scarce resources and where to direct the flow. If you replace all of that with an algorithm then it’s never going to be very good and it’s going to upset a lot of people who eventually will not like how resources are being directed.

Curation is how you fix that. It is how governments have fixed it through tax systems. It is how corporations fixed the problem with shareholders. Any time there is a shared national or collective resource you end up having to determine how to spend it. I would say you can either let the system learn to curate through human beings training it to know what human beings like, or you can manually curate yourself.

I prefer the machine learning curation approach because SAFE Network will eventually have compute. But what good is all that if SAFE Network never makes it out of the crib because of PtP??? PtP done as a hack is WORSE than not doing it at all.

Without the ability to collect statistics, to review, to rate, to score, you cannot engineer anything. You can’t even design an algorithm without rating and comparing scores. How are you supposed to choose to reward the best software or the best content if you have no scoring system, no ratings, no machine learning algorithm to predict or recommend based on preferences?

PtP is likely going to be a PR disaster. If you do it right, with curation or even better with intelligent curation, then you can avoid all of that mess or at least have it set up where most of the participants get most of what they want from SAFE Network most of the time. It’s about appealing to and accommodating the most people for the least cost to freedom, privacy and security.

What is the privacy or security or freedom argument which says PtP has to be in the network layer? I can’t find any. I am not saying producers shouldn’t get paid at the app later but that the curation layer should be what determines and evolves the payment algorithm rather than hard coding something in as a hack.

Pay-Per-Like was a better idea than Pay-The-Producer because at least it was on the path toward curation. It wasn’t sophisticated but it’s a start. Indiscriminately paying out resources is a blind subsidy. The better the curation, the more intelligent the payment algorithm should become, meaning evolutionary adapting algorithms as the main approach. Learning conditional preference networks for example are something to look into, or even taking a collaborative filtering mechanism and using machine learning on that data.

And every algorithm has to be constantly rated. We should only want the fittest highest scoring algorithms to be the ones to make it to the top of the list. So the idea is we don’t know a good algorithm for curation but through trial and error eventually we can find one if we work together to train SAFE Network. Otherwise I don’t see how the mainstream will be bothered with something which will always have a hard coded unpopular payout mechanism.

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Tell that to the first person that wants royalties from the first person that forks the SAFE network. Farmers don’t own SAFE anymore than my having a copy of Linux means I own Linux everywhere. All the users own is their DATA, that’s it. They own their safecoin but they don’t own the SAFE network. Building a fire does not mean you control fire everywhere on the planet. Flipping your bic does not make you Pyro.

Lovely information and what do you think the FBI will do with that? So you don’t know how many people use SAFE but you know how many people use whatever app and what kinds of apps are popular.

And how is one to tell who wrote what app? More to the point if it’s open source what does it matter? It’s out there so the code is forkable. If you’re talking about the maidsafe team the SAFE network has plenty of contingencies in place to make sure the SAFE network survives even if Maidsafe the company does not. If you’re talking about an individual app developer the same applies. First you need to find out who wrote what app. Then you need to sue them or arrest them but even if you do that doesn’t stop the software from being available on the network, forked by someone else and continued from being developed by someone else! Just look at what happened with popcorntime. The gov’t tried shutting it down a couple times and it just keeps popping back up because the code is open source and keeps getting forked and reforked by different operators.

The point of safe is to decentralize the internet. You exchange hardware and computer resources in exchange for safecoin. If you owned more resources like cables and your own private computer network you’d stand to earn more safecoin if you devoted those to the safe network so it doesn’t reason to say you own the network because you’ve already been compensated for your contribution to it. You give me a widget and I give you currency in return, fair trade. You don’t own me, or have leverage over me by trading with me in fair trade. So same with the network. You don’t own the network or have leverage over the nework by trading with the network. The network pays you safecoin and you give it resources. Fair trade. You aren’t buying shares, you aren’t buying ownership or equity. You are buying currency to in turn trade for space on the network.

Why is all this needed?

You can’t please everyone. That’s the thing. You seem more concerned with pleasing people than with the concept of freedom. It’s not the network’s business to be concerned with subjective moral opinion.

Because if it’s at the app layer it won’t apply to everyone. And there’s a big cuffle about PtP being at the network layer because PtD is at the network layer. And since many, myself included, consider PtP equivilant to PtD, that is developers are just another form of content producers, it seems unfair to have one at the network layer and one at the app layer, that is one applying to everyone and one being an elective.

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You are redefining means to come up with that one

Just because you supply resources and get paid for it does not make you owners. People supplying labour on a job site do not own the construction company. But by your definition they do, because they bring their shovels and do work, if no one did then the construction company would cease to exist.

This is just made up. There is no reason why it cannot. Can you or 1 billion other internet users change the TCP/IP protocol? Only a few devs can, like SAFE devs can. But do you dare claim tcp/ip has not reached mass adoption.

Your claims are easily defeated and your whole concept/topic relies on these incorrect claims and concepts.

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  • PtP can’t deal with request stuffing, so the claim from this topic is a rehash from what was already discussed in detail
  • PpL invites Like buying

Replacing PtP with PpL just because the latter is marginally harder to do is pointless. Neither of the approaches is close to being fraud-resistant.

If you can use “machine learning on that (PpL) data”, why can’t you use machine learning on any data, including PtP?
Who would store that data, who should pay for this machine learning to run and why would they do that (since it does’t provide any benefit to the user)?

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You’re proposing a better way of implementing PtP and PtD via curation is necessary. I agree something is necessary but I argue that PtP and PtD and any “better way” of implementing them still flies in the face of the basic laws of supply and demand and equilibrium of price. And it’s this equilibrium price (however temporary because price can change frequently depending on the product or service and their supply and demand) that sets the value, not a fixed formula. It incentivizes only one type of behavior as determined by a Get formula. If economic value can be predicted by a formula, all we have to do is follow it and everyone would be rich. A nobel prize in economics would have been already awarded to someone who has formulized price.

So your reasoning for the need to find a better means of implementing PtP and PtD is correct. But will this “better way” be truly better? I’m sure all economists would agree that PtP and PtD is a poor way of paying for value.

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True, no coin is taken from a single user’s wallet but it’s ultimately paid for by everyone participating on the network as a collective whole. PtD as a gift or reward is a still a payment. So @luckybit 's pretext is valid. Because payment must originate from a human or in the case of PtD and PtP, a group of humans.

To clarify the human connection further. To keep it simpler, let’s say the only way an app dev can be paid is via PtD via the SAFE network. Then there’s only two sources from which payment can occur. The first is from users of SAFE when they purchase storage. Some of the payment goes to farmers and some to the app dev. The second source is from the creation of safecoin which increases/inflates the money supply. Remember, inflation by strict definition is simply the increase of a currencies money supply. So the owners of safecoin still pays for the app dev via the devaluation of the currency due to increase of the money supply or inflation. Paying via inflation of safecoin will continue until the max supply of safecoin is reached.

So the argument I hear that the human holders of safecoin do not pay app devs and content creators because safecoin is cycled back into the system is completely wrong.

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Not responding when you have refused to listen in the past. You seem to think I debate rather than working with facts and RFCs etc. So fine, go debate, but don’t involve me with your point scoring concepts that contradict many who have tried in the past to correct the erros.

It’s 100% your choice if you want to respond to my posts or not. I am simply stating fact and informing readers that may think that it’s not the users who pay, but the system. I’ve seen folks use this as a supporting argument for PtD and/or PtP and it’s simply wrong. It’s everyone as a collective whole who will pay for PtD and PtP.

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Of course, any amount of coins generated by the network to reward for visits (what PtP is) incrementally decreases Safecoin value.
It wouldn’t if that visit added value to the network, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter to the sustainability or strength of the network if some cat photo is downloaded or not.

But this is a matter of PtP, not whether curation is required. PtP and PtD should be discussed elsewhere, here only curation should be discussed assuming PtP/PtD becomes part of SAFE.

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But also after a period this is steady state with coins from PtP/PtD being spent to put more content back into SAFE. Those coins could be spent by the ones who received them or others whom the coins were given to.

Also I have yet to see someone prove that if more coins are given out that there will not be an increase in spending them back into SAFE afterwards.

With things like bitcoin where any amount spent on transaction fees rewards the miner for his providing security to the transaction (and the Bitcoin network), to the SAFE network these visits aren’t meaningful.

To pay the farmer every time he gets a request does make sense. To pay the poster, it doesn’t.

The poster (or producer) should take care of his own income. Some people here argue that users are by their very nature generous as long as the evil content companies are out of the way, but then they also argue it should be the network (e.g. others) to subsidize their content production, like governments subsidize public TV.

I have my objections around that, but this is about curation and curation is just more taxation. Anyone who wants to curate can curate by himself (solo or in partnership with others).

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Curation is just an app, it shouldn’t be the network layer but on the app layer. Curation should be the first app and the first genre of app we need to curate are app stores. Basically you need to give the human beings interacting with SAFE Network a mechanism to prioritize according to their preferences both apps and content.

Curation is a way to have something like PtP or PtD subsidized at the network layer but curated at the app layer so that we can be certain it’s producing value to the human beings of the SAFE Network.