[HN Gopher] Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media
___________________________________________________________________
Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media
Author : thunderbong
Score : 225 points
Date : 2024-04-25 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| synctext wrote:
| Tribler founding professor here, AMA.
|
| 2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of
| coding.
| troyvit wrote:
| How well would tribbler work for disseminating content, such as
| a documentary, that might get a person jailed if they put it
| out on more mainstream social media?
| synctext wrote:
| Whistleblowing documentary spreading in Europe or upper
| Americas might go OK with solid operational measures such as
| open wifi war driving, etc. China, Russia, etc: nope.
| CapitalTntcls wrote:
| Hi, I'm curious about your alternative model for capitalism.
| How does it aim to change the logic of capital accumulation?
| Since companies are driven by profit, the entire system
| revolves around capital growth and competition, which
| ultimately leads to the emergence of monopolies and
| billionaires. How does your model address these issues?
| synctext wrote:
| We simply iterate on Linux and Wikipedia work.
|
| The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive
| platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future
| profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that
| profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.
|
| Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise
| alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you
| still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic
| governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European
| Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the
| tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions.
| Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have
| self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not
| markets.
|
| By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We
| have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one
| extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].
|
| [0] https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-
| display.html?cftId=... [1]
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3565383.3566112 [2] https:
| //repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:f45f85a0...
| azinman2 wrote:
| If advertising model is doomed (so far all the signs
| suggest otherwise), wouldn't "big tech" just adjust models?
| What makes you think they just go away?
|
| I'm not sure why technology is the "solution" to an
| alternative... people seem to just want good content
| delivered well. Content creators want to make as much money
| as possible. And that's for "honest" content... the
| internet is filled with disinformation and people trying to
| spread conspiracies, recruit for X, or otherwise mass
| influence the entire population.
|
| How a decentralized Bitcoin based model magically get us
| amazing content, something people want to use, and
| minimization of negative forces? Why is technology the key
| issue?
| synctext wrote:
| Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business
| model is key.
|
| It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry
| without the current monopolists. Linux showed how
| disruptive an open model can be.
|
| See here a description + full implementation of a music
| industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists
| release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations
| from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0%
| credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired
| music discovery.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/11814767/Fir
| st.Depl...
| stcredzero wrote:
| _Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business
| model is key._
|
| _It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry
| without the current monopolists. Linux showed how
| disruptive an open model can be._
|
| There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and
| content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in
| dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part
| the perception of customers.
|
| This is going to be very difficult in the particular use
| case of news media, which is arguably the most critical
| area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is
| in the form of the strengthening of biases and
| misinformation.
|
| The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to
| find a niche where superior value generation becomes
| undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps
| music can serve this function.)
| apantel wrote:
| I think the advertising model is bound to collapse once
| GPT agents / assistants progress to the point where
| anyone can set one up to do a lot of their internet
| searching for them. The GPT will take your query and
| provide you an answer, bypassing both search engines and
| websites. If you control the GPT, then of course you can
| simply use one that distills whatever it finds into
| useful information free of ads. If it is designed to be
| able to evaluate product listings, it can simply find you
| the product you are actually looking for, bypassing
| sponsored results. Once the technology reaches this level
| of capability, any trend toward wide adoption will pull
| the rug out from under most forms of web advertising.
| foobarian wrote:
| I have zero faith in this direction. How will you pay for
| the GPT agent operations? These things are expensive to
| run, which means there are going to crop up cheaper ad-
| supported alternatives and we're back to square 1.
| apantel wrote:
| They're expensive to train, not to run. A technical
| person could produce and run the kind of agent I'm
| talking about today on pro-sumer hardware. It would take
| a lot more effort to make something that non-technical
| people can use.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Okay, so how do creators get paid on your platform?
| tribler wrote:
| Direct Bitcoin donations by fans. 100% to artist. Think
| Taylor Swift of tomorrow.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I want to see your project succeed, and I'm probably not alone.
| What kind of help do you need?
| synctext wrote:
| We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.
|
| So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in
| desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with
| reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO
| standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to
| capture.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/pull/7926
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The reason I don't run TOR exit nodes is that I neither
| wish to support criminal activity (of at least certain
| types) nor do I want to get entangled with law enforcement
| for doing so. Since this is TOR-like, what are my legal
| liabilities if I am running this software?
| synctext wrote:
| Tribler does not include a Tor exit node!
| wongarsu wrote:
| But can you download data from regular bittorrent peers
| using Tribler? And if yes, how does my traffic reach
| them?
|
| Suppose I want to download a torrent that's only seeded
| by one person running Deluge. My understanding was that
| this would involve making a connection to another Tribler
| user, and that user making the connection to that seeder.
| That would make every client a sort of exit node for
| bittorrent traffic, even for torrents they don't
| download. Is that not how it works?
| wongarsu wrote:
| From my outsider's view, the part where you need the most
| help is actually your website.
|
| From the https://tribler.org homepage it's very hard to
| figure out what tribler actually is, and the only
| screenshots are hidden away in the support and developer
| categories, and all feature vastly different menu items
| (without clear indication how to get those features, if
| they even still exist). The API documentation isn't linked
| anywhere.
|
| And while installing the client and downloading your first
| torrent is easy enough, there isn't a lot of info on how to
| do anything else. And the help that does exist is outdated
| or wrong. The https://www.tribler.org/howto.html seems to
| be for a completely different version than what I get when
| I download and install the Windows version, and 3 out of 4
| steps don't work as described (The text in 2 is completely
| wrong/outdated, I don't even have the menu item for 3, nor
| the icon for 4)
| Animats wrote:
| > it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is
|
| From the buzzwords, some kind of crypto scheme:
|
| "Micro-economy", "self-sovereign", "reward content
| creators directly", "micro-economy without banks", "fully
| distributed ledgers".
|
| It reads like crypto bolted onto torrents.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| "Trust Chain" has this as one of its design decision:
|
| - No global consensus
|
| which I think sets it quite apart from anything on a
| blockchain.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I noticed that too:
|
| https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/%22TrustChain%22-
| arc...
|
| But not much else about it. Would be interested to read
| more. Using torrent seeding as a form of Proof-of-Work
| that rewards tokens is actually an interesting use case
| for cryptocurrency, and not as energy-hungry. But no
| global consensus is different from any crypto I've ever
| heard of. How does it keep a consistent ledger or who
| owns what tokens?
|
| Edit: full explanation here -
| https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/The-design-of-a-
| trus...
| thejohnconway wrote:
| I'm curious about the rewards/tokens aspect. Is this done using
| cryptocurrency (you mentioned bitcoin, urg, upthread), or
| something else?
| hanniabu wrote:
| They smartly aren't answering b/c of how hostile HN is to
| crypto.
|
| Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a
| clear sign of HN's bias.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| It's a subject that I am interested in and involved in yet
| I will never discuss it on Hacker News again. The attempts
| I made to genuinely interact related to crypto have been
| terrible on this website. It's unfortunate because I feel
| there is a very good discussion there regardless on whether
| you are for or against it but we don't get to see that
| discussion.
| synctext wrote:
| There is no crypto in Tribler.
|
| We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple
| ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of
| earning points by helping others.
|
| Economically, its complex. Coin creation is
| decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The
| value of that help-currency is based on how connected you
| are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we
| maintain fairness in this micro-economy against
| freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and
| 95k users [1].
|
| [1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S13
| 8912862...
| hanniabu wrote:
| > We have something much older then Bitcoin
|
| Then it's flawed. There's a reason why all earlier
| implementations failed. They were incomplete.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes, Tribler has completely failed as a cryptocurrency.
| 0x457 wrote:
| To be fair, Bitcoin also failed as a cryptocurrency.
| kmacdough wrote:
| Interesting I'll have to study this. I'm curious how this
| fares in the face of well- resourced adversaries. Also
| funny that the guy complaining about crypto convos went
| straight into hate mode for "not quite crypto" without
| any research or support. Presumably y'all have thought
| through this.
| hanniabu wrote:
| If it were able to withstand adversaries it would have
| been bitcoin before bitcoin
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| I seem to remember a time when HN was much friendlier
| towards crypto.
|
| But, you have to admit the crypto community hasn't done
| itself any favors: Hype and endless promises that never
| came to fruition, astronomical transaction fees,
| frictionful technologies, exhausting volume of promising
| ("world-changing!") projects that under delivered
| (putting it mildly), rug pulls, thefts, and other
| outright scams, massive use cases for money laundering
| and criminal activity.
|
| Kind of hard to stay positive through all of that.
| spencerflem wrote:
| yeah- from the github repo linked
|
| "Numerous other projects try to create a generic approach
| using an ICO for funding and promising the early adopters
| a dazzling return-on-investment. Tribler is different.
| rant warning. We are non-profit academics. We do not want
| to replace the old elite with a new crypto-currency
| elite. What is changed if we replace backroom deals,
| lobbyists, middleman, and legal monopolies with the tools
| of the new elite: algorithms, early investor rewards,
| proof-of-dominating-stake, and smart contracts? Replacing
| the analog world and breading digital-native inequality
| does not make the world a better place."
|
| totally agreed, that's my problem with all of the bitcoin
| hype - it's mostly there to make the early investments
| more profitable which doesn't excite me much
| hanniabu wrote:
| > it's mostly there to make the early investments more
| profitable
|
| So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now?
| Crypto democratizes
| spencerflem wrote:
| yeah, a lot like that actually
|
| I like cryptography, the blockchain, decentralization
| etc. but the pitch of almost every ICO is- get in now and
| become massively rich (at the expense of people joining
| later), almost the exact same dynamic as investing in a
| company like Visa.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| To be clear, I was referring to my parent comment about
| crypto discussion in general and was not making a
| judgement about this particular project.
|
| But, yeah I relate to the comment in your last paragraph.
| There was a lot of of early talk about democratization,
| etc. but at the end of the day it seemed to be more about
| replacing the old centralized incumbents with new ones.
| Or, in some cases, just giving the old incumbents a new
| way to extend their incumbencies. There was really
| nothing to insulate the space from the latter. This all
| became really apparent during the "DeFi" craze.
|
| I do think a lot of earnest folks got caught up in the
| hype and were sincerely invested in the idea of
| democratization. The scammers and grifters just seemed to
| overwhelm the idealism. The Web3 hype was probably the
| apotheosis, before it popped. What's interesting is how
| much VCs seemed to rush into that space, yet there was
| barely a whisper when it all came crashing down.
|
| Kind of makes you wonder what it was really all about.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I get there is a lot of trash in the crypto _finance_
| space, but I just wanted to see and have conversations
| about the very fascinating technologies, ZK proofs, etc.
| Every time it comes up we just get drowned in a thought-
| terminating-cliche style discussion rehashing other
| (often entirely unrelated) events that happened in the
| past that were egregious or comical.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| I'll be less hostile to crypto when the benefits of
| cryptocurrency outweigh the environmental destruction
| caused by its mining.
| hanniabu wrote:
| https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Ethereum is useless as a payment mechanism unless you
| like paying wildly varying fees, and therefore its
| benefits do not offset it (relatively less) energy use.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Look how receptive these comments have been so far,
| that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
|
| Does "people don't like my idea, they must be biased" apply
| to murders, urethral sounding, and kicking puppies? Have
| you considered the possibility that some concepts _earn_
| hostility?
| DRosario wrote:
| Have you checked out Farcaster? https://docs.farcaster.xyz/
|
| FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to
| align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with
| twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A
| video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Any service built on cryptocurrency is a terrible idea for
| the future; there exists no such thing as scarcity in
| cyberspace.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Scarcity is just a natural consequence of trust
| jolmg wrote:
| What do you mean?
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| There is some relationship but some scarcity is natural-
| where is trust in that?
| DRosario wrote:
| thanks for the gut reaction but FC has nothing to do with
| scarcity. It has to do with ownership, control over your
| digital footprint, and censorship resistance.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's a weird take. After all, 'cyberspace' is not some
| abstract realm divorced from the universe at large. It's
| still subject to scarcity of time, energy, and information.
| zadler wrote:
| Hi I'd like to try plugging into Tribbler as a content backend
| for beastie.fi, which seems to have similar goals.
| ajb wrote:
| Do content creators currently make any income from your
| platform? If so, what are the statistics of this (best,
| typical, etc)
| jszymborski wrote:
| While I can't say I've really used Tribler a lot, I've been
| following the project for most of those years.
|
| Thanks for working so hard on a such an admirable project.
| Qem wrote:
| Time to test tribler again. Great project. I installed it 3-4
| years ago. Looked great, but I couldn't get it working properly,
| because IIRC it required two open ports, one for regular torrent
| protocol, another for their content discovery protocol, and my
| VPN provider allowed only one port available to forwarding, per
| user per IP.
| synctext wrote:
| thnx Qem for you enduring patience!
|
| We're now multiplexing everything on 1 port. If you use our
| Tor-like decentralised onion routing feature that works. Sadly,
| in normal mode we need two forwarded ports. Both Libtorrent
| download lib and our decentralised gossip requires their own
| port. We gossip about trust, content discovery, and torrent
| health.
| Qem wrote:
| Thank you all Tribler developers. Your project is awesome.
| With today Internet siloed in, projects to re-decentralize
| are a critical need.
| inSenCite wrote:
| This is a super cool project (first time I'm hearing about it),
| great work to everyone involved!
|
| Is the intent to have multiple tribler-like instances serving
| different (content) domains or more of a one-spot search that
| content providers can serve their content through? I ask as I'm
| wondering about how you foresee this "degrading" as it scales as
| that is where most current content platforms fail apart as they
| try to grow/maximize audience.
| synctext wrote:
| Glad to hear it! Indeed, most platforms have a central point of
| failure somewhere. Note that Bittorrent swarms never get
| overloaded, we use that same technique: extreme
| decentralisation.
|
| With increased load that website, discovery server, or load
| balancer gets overloaded. With Tribler we decentralised
| everything to the extreme of Bitcoin and Bittorrent. So there
| is no "degrading", as long as the freeriders are somehow
| detected. See our 2007 architectural documents [1]
|
| [1]
| https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/Concurren...
| runeks wrote:
| > Earn _seeding_ tokens
|
| How can this be possible in a non-centralized manner?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be possible? My friends know what when I show
| up to a party, I usually bring a drink or a dish or something.
| There's no centralized database for this, they know because
| they've eaten and drank those things. We don't use tokens to
| keep track of this, but we could. The situation seems similar
| with seeding.
|
| It's just not commonly done because you have to build and
| maintain a web of trust for it to to work, and that's often a
| level of user responsibility that's hard to cultivate. But if
| you need that web of trust anyway (e.g. for filtering out ads
| ad other disinformation) then you might as well use it for
| consensus about who is a good citizen and who is not.
|
| (I have no idea if this is Tribler's approach, it's just on my
| mind because I've been designing something quite like Tribler,
| and it's my approach.)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It's pretty easy to build an emission or reward schedule into
| the rules of a decentralized network
|
| when the software that nodes are running see another compliant
| node, they expect for it to be rewarded so they all conform to
| the additional issuance of tokens
|
| you just need to make sure that sybil attack attempts improve
| the network, as the attacker adds more nodes to earn more
| hanniabu wrote:
| With blockchain, but HN would hate to hear there's a usecase
| fwip wrote:
| It uses Bitcoin
| hanniabu wrote:
| They said it's not
|
| > We have something much older then Bitcoin
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40159144
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| it's their artisanal trust me token. at least it's not
| monetary (yet). the technical description is a pull based
| delayed ledger.
|
| the paper they link just show that by harming newcomers to
| the network you reduce free loaders, but they interpret
| that it solves fraud.
| _nalply wrote:
| Corporate has learnt to misuse honorary or voluntary non-paid
| work in the software ecoystem and grabbing power.
|
| For example one big media outlet could adopt Tribler. At first
| everyone rejoices because it is recognition but what if it turns
| out to be an attack? How is Tribler resilient against taking over
| from Corporate?
|
| Of course, it's Open Source and everybody can fork. But still,
| could an attack be possible?
| ccvannorman wrote:
| reminds me of "EEE" for incumbents to destroy new platforms;
| "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
| hkt wrote:
| Always lovely to see projects like this. I used it years ago
| after thinking "surely there must be some kind of tor-like thing
| for bittorrent" and lo and behold, there was tribler.
|
| At that point hidden seeding and downloading were both done via
| tor-like outproxies, eg, out to the regular internet. I recall
| talk from the issues page about intra-tribler media, eg,
| anonymised from end to end - does anyone know if this has been
| achieved?
| synctext wrote:
| Yes, you can do end-to-end encrypted hidden seeding. See
| technical docs (slightly outdated) [1]. Everything in Python
| was too slow. With Rust implementation we get 10x the speed,
| 160 Mbit/s anon tunneling.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Hidden-Services-
| Spec...
| ementally wrote:
| Great project, but can the devs comment on
| https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December...
|
| >[tor-dev] N reasons why the spooks love Tribler (Number N' will
| surprise you)
| amenhotep wrote:
| ECB and random.randint, wow. I'm not sure any dev comment could
| redeem crypto sins like that in such a project.
| tribler wrote:
| Deadly mistakes from 2014. Full redesign and new Rust code.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Looks like there was a discussion back then on the github
| issues, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1066
|
| EDIT: Had a chance to look through it now, looks like they
| addressed all the concerns back by 2015
|
| i.e.
|
| 1. Replacing the custom crypto code with more standard
| libraries (looks like they settled on NACL/libsodium's
| implementations).
|
| 2. Switched to AES-GCM and then later ChaChaPoly
|
| 3. Fixed up the tor protocol issues too.
|
| Probably more but there's a lot going on.
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| Last I looked at tribler it was an attack resilient torrent/tor-
| like network client. Now it's a micro-economy for media. That's a
| pivot!
| aldeluis wrote:
| The use of Tribler was problematic in my case because it uses a
| random torrent cache that was instrumentalized for lawfare after
| a political problem with my public employer in Spain. I was
| accused of having pedophile content on my computer after the
| prosecution's expert selected the corresponding torrents and
| downloaded them. It seems there are always pedophile torrents in
| a random sample of torrents.
|
| The political problem was that I refused to alter statistical
| data for a "scientist" that wanted to publish that women after
| abortion develop mental health issues. They search my job
| computer for something to kill me and found tribler cache.
|
| https://www.publico.es/actualidad/rioja-paga-estudios-salud-...
|
| It was hard. Lost job, six years under juditial prosecution... at
| the end, the case was dismissed, I could show that the torrent
| cache was not personal, but the damage was great.
|
| Be careful if you are an activist or have political involvement.
| I'm unaware of the workings of the current version, hope it
| encrypts the torrent cache somehow.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Why does tribler automatically download random torrents without
| user intervention? Is it just to perform distributed search?
|
| In this case, it downloads random torrent _metadata_ right? How
| could the case be brought with just metadata? Regardless of
| whether the torrent cache was personal or not, if it was just
| metadata it still didn't contain anything illegal
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| linking to illegal data may be prosecuted as distribution,
| even if you're not the host
|
| if you're contributing to a distributed index where people
| are searching and retrieving material thanks to the meta data
| on your drive, IMHO that's pretty close to distribution
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| here's the thing with law, it's not code.
|
| if they argue nonsense and the judge buys, it's that.
|
| law enforcement uses hashes of bad content. torrent
| conveniently uses hashes. the expert can argue if you have
| the hash you have the content because how torrent works.
|
| the judge that accepted the argument about how torrent works
| but refused the argument about how tribler or freenet etc
| works should be disbarred imho.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| "Problematic" is perhaps the biggest understatement I've ever
| read. Sorry that this happened to you.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| There's a lot of focus here on the alternative economy part, but
| I think that's way less interesting than the rest of what this
| tech offers.
|
| What we really need is alternative _moderation_. The most fragile
| /vulnerable part of traditional torrent trackers is centralized
| forums. It's also the most problematic aspect of social media. A
| successful decentralized alternative to content moderation would
| drastically change the world.
| wizardwes wrote:
| Interesting, but I wonder how feasible this actually is. The
| closest thing I can think of is the ability to selective
| defederate in things like Mastodon or Lemmy, where the host of
| your instance can do broad sweeps of moderation by essentially
| blocking instances that don't fit your instance's stance. The
| issue is that any moderation past personal blocks amd filters
| requires leaning against an authority, whether that be
| algorithmic, democratic, or our traditional style of
| moderation. And really, that's, in a way, what people want,
| someone who can handle removing unfavorable content before it
| gets to you most of the time. I'd love to hear ideas counter to
| this though.
| James314 wrote:
| Does the Tribler Client automatically turn my computer into an
| exit node?
| spxneo wrote:
| What is the onramp/offramp process for the tokens used in this
| micro-economy?
|
| If somebody seeds Independence Day 2 and by some miracle becomes
| the most seeded movie, how does that somebody cash out his
| tokens?
|
| If somebody wants to download Independence Day 2 what and how is
| it being converted into tokens?
| yobbo wrote:
| The goal here seems to be to incentivise bandwidth-sharing, but
| this is not the main problem.
|
| For a "decentralized youtube" to ever make sense, the problems
| that need solving are how to compensate content-creators/owners,
| and how to prevent piracy.
| heycosmo wrote:
| I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation
| problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an
| easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a
| consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.
|
| The idea that $10 for a digital copy of an album that is already
| on youtube (or a friend's harddrive) should be a viable business
| model is weird to me in this day and age.
|
| I have recently been wondering about a threshold-based "media
| economy" where creators don't actually show us anything (except
| for clips or samples or low-res versions, etc) until they are
| guaranteed a certain amount of income. It's basically
| kickstarter. A musician makes an album, goes on kickstarter and
| asks for $10,000 to release it. Once $10k is reached, the songs
| go up on a server, or are released on bandcamp, spotify, or any
| of the usual channels. Additional money beyond the threshold can
| be made, but it will be as difficult as it is now. But they have
| already reached $10k (set by them) so everyone can feel good that
| the musician has earned what they feel they deserve.
|
| I'm sure there are many problems with this. For one, many artists
| aren't creating just for money. They want to show us their
| creations, and with a threshold, they would have to hold back
| until it is reached (in the case of musicians, they might not
| even be able to play a new song at a show until the threshold is
| reached, b/c smartphones).
|
| There may be a critical mass problem, too. If two artists are
| similar and one releases immediately while the other waits for
| the threshold payment, the latter may drift into obscurity. There
| must be some allure to the withholding, though?
|
| What other problems kill this approach?
|
| Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing,
| don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it
| on github.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing,
| don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put
| it on github.
|
| I think it would be far more reasonable to put the source into
| escrow, to be released when a threshold is met. I've seen
| closed source vendors do that when they're smaller to ensure a
| large customer is not left high and dry should they go bankrupt
| or be acquired by someone who kills the product.
|
| I don't foresee anyone being willing to see a demo of a piece
| of software, then writing a check for it before using it. In
| the closed source world you pretty much ALWAYS have to do some
| sort of POV/POC before anyone will buy your stuff.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Plenty of creators make a decent living selling their content
| digitally. Once you democratize the tools and distribution, you
| remove the media companies that traditionally take the lions
| share of all the money. In the traditional setup a few business
| people and a few artists get rich and everyone else is broke.
| In an economy where the creator distributes directly via
| digital then a bunch of people get decent incomes. The second
| option is the better one, IMO. Once we do away with the notion
| that creating art could make you rich, then it become less
| necessary to make sure that we have some centralized way to
| collect money for art.
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