While we are still working on update 0.8 and fixing our issues with storage and buffering, we decided to release this short part of 0.8 update a bit earlier because we felt like it deserves it's own article and visibility.
https://i.imgur.com/TXK45SY.png
DTube Sponsorship Program
Starting from today, we are welcoming anyone to delegate Steem Power to DTube. While we would prefer that our users manually curate our content, we want to provide this option of passively investing while supporting DTube.
We will return your share of the curation rewards, and your share of the beneficiary rewards generated by the @dtube votes. Financially speaking, it will exactly the same as actively curating DTube content yourself with your own account. More about that a bit later in the article.
The delegation redistribution will happen weekly and will begin on the 18th of May 2018. You need to delegate before the 11th of May 2018 to be eligible for the first weekly payment.
On top of it, in order to increase DTube's voting diversity, we will invite our top three delegators into our curation team, if they refuse, we will propose to the next highest delegators. We will contact top delegators through our Discord server on the 11th of May 2018.
Improving our Curation
Opening our curation to new people requires us to improve our tools and organization.
We now run a discord bot that helps our curators work together and avoid mistakes we did in the past, such as re-voting on the same content, misclicking the voting percentage, voting for impostors, voting for old reposted videos, etc.
The decision to vote or downvote a content remains entirely human. The bot only provides arbitrage between curators to reach a common decision.
The bot has many features:
- Detects reposts and plagiarism and blocks votes for those
- Creates a 15 minutes decision window where all curators can contest an upvote
- The more curators agree that a video is good, the stronger the vote will be
- Lowers the vote strength depending on how many votes the author already received this week
- Waits to never vote earlier than 30 minutes
- Creates logs from the curation discord channel
We have tested this new system for a couple days now, and it seems pretty solid as nobody saw or talked about the change. This will allow us to improve our current ~5 people curation team to probably 10+ in the future, and miss less good videos.
Redistributing DTube Beneficiary Rewards
One of the most prominent concern of our users has been our '25% fees'. Technically speaking, at the current market value of SBD, our fees were about:
25 / (50+50*3.83) ~= 11%
These fees covered our costs for storage servers, encoding servers, paid a moderate income to our staff, paid for the AskSteem API, and we still have 80000 STEEM on our account to pay for bigger things in the future. Luckily, we will still earn curation rewards and will be able to keep afloat financially without having to compromise our future tokens fair distribution.
Instead of simply stopping to collect these beneficiary rewards like most other apps, we have decided to fully redistribute it to curators instead. This happens through the @dtube.rewards account that was created and started operating recently.
The way it works is simple, it looks at the beneficiary rewards collected by @dtube for a video, then distributes it back amongst all the voters, proportionally to the strength of their votes (rshares). The only exception to this rule, is when the voter is a public vote-selling bot, in which case the associated reward with the vote will be sent to the author instead of the bot.
We thought a lot about these changes, and we strongly believe that curators should be rewarded more than what they are currently rewarded. We are therefore using our beneficiary rewards to create this unique experiment on a large scale. This will give us precious insights for the future of DTube, where we want to create a balanced and self-sustaining economy.
Of course im generalizing. Thats the whole point of my comment. You yourself said the exact same thing in your last video: "People think that Steemit is generally low quality content"..
I cant pick and choose every single creator and point out why this is high quality or why this isnt.
And yes, you really seem to do high quality work for the niche you do.
I for example didnt even own a mic 3 months ago when i started out.
I didnt have a mic, i didnt have a pop filter, a stand, lights, a program for audio editing, didnt know how to stop clipping, how to sync audio, etc.
But im trying. Every thing i do is special to me and has a point. If i did a million and one song a day that would be prostituting my talent for money. You cant interact with your audience, that particular video simply doesnt stay in focus less then a few hours until the next one.
When you take that route youre just doing it for the upvotes.
If you made 3 videos per day on youtube you wouldnt get nearly the views 1 per day does. Viewers would get burned out and that kind of spam would hurt you. But here, its quite opposite, sure you get less interaction, but more upvotes are coming in so who cares.
Dtube is here, or rather should be here to push forward those that actively claw their way to a level of quality that can compete with other platforms.
My talent and skill didnt change one bit from day one. But everything else did, things i didnt need to focus on, that are insignificant in comparison.
What im seeing (and sure, i can say, "not all" to comply to the semantics rule) is the conveyor belt content spam on platforms with high SP...
Ive seen "creators", if they are vlogers talk the same topic from a different angle in 10-15 videos in a row, musicians doing karaoke spam without ever trying anything remotely different (improving lighting, editing, location, genre, nothing). And they just switch platforms never improving in any way.
There is just no incentive to improve for them because this works
And im not talking reaching a high video quality like yours that you cant go far up from that so you are content.
You need to motivate your creators to move forward. Rewarding them for conveyor belt content isnt healthy in my opinion.
Thats not how you grow a viewer base, thats just feeding hungry cats that meow loudly under your table.
I don’t think you were raping lol, but perhaps being paid more than a semi competitor. A competitor that has themselves updated often and well.
There are some good characters on dtube, but there’s not a ton, and as is the case all over steem, especially in cases with great delegations from Ned, there’s a lot of “playing”, and formulaic content, where thumbnails and intros mask some really shallow stuff that no ones ever gonna actually watch.
Mr. danger, I think you should take a little time each week and engage in real and meaningful conversations.
If you’ve Solved this curation issue, then there is now room to stand up when you have the time, and participate in what it’ll take to create some “STARS”.
Not just individuals, but “SHOWS”.
Production that takes MORE than even your big votes.
YouTube doesn’t have many like that, but there’s nothing that says you can’t.
People making VLogs everyday, are fine, and I have no problem with them making a little money.
I’ll send you another message on discord, and maybe even make a d.tube video for you.
I’ve been using dlive because it works great, takes no money besides the base curation, and has allowed me to earn some rewards, while PREPARING for something great.
This is a good step!
Alx - Alx#3690
Dudeeeees! Hahaha this is such a hot topic among DTuber talks at the moment! LOLOL
I've seen the post since yesterday and have discussions with people a bit about the thing that will be happening.. (already is, I suppose). Thank the team for such an update and do something about this whole thing.
Some may whine about it and some may even close their town to celebrate LOLOL but that how it goes. There are pros and cons at the same time.
I personally understand both sides as I am both..
- A creator that put in a lot of work on my vlog but sometime got overlooked
- A creator that get a giant upvote occasionally, sometimes, somehow.
So I think I'm in a good position to speak my mind out. THE NEW SYSTEM SOUNDS GOOD!
As a creator who's sometimes overlooked I always think I need them (the team) to see more and a little deeper into what they giving the votes for and the bots may do their jobs + the curators will manually look at it again to see if it's a really good one so the 'favor certain authors' won't apply again (At least not as often). I've watched some of people videos that have so many scenes in one video and they're not seen. Some people talk for 2 mins and get such a firework. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally not against anyone here. It's good to spread the love to more people. I know this is going to discourage some people who certainly get big upvotes but at the same time, it will totally encourage people who are trying to make their way up as well.
As a creator who get big upvotes (occasionally). For example, there're some period of time I get fireworks constantly and suddenly it stopped. That's *so f!!! depressing already and even came up with a video talking about it reasonably (This one hope it's still watchable). This is occasional upvotes here that I get.. so think about those who get it constantly and they're already used to it like, a $1xx (1-4 times a day). Totally understandable that they're coming out and whine about all these changing as they are losing so much.
Though, I totally support the new system as it's gonna be less amount of $ but more spread out which is much fairer. Those who're used to it already, probably have to adapt a bit (big time, actually). Though, you can do it!
Last but not least, hope it all works out!
Next update though, I wish to see something like 'Now your videos going to stay on the blockchain forever!' as it's pretty hurt that a few days later you come and try to watch your vid again, they're gone LOLOL
Thanks for the update people! Appreciated loadsss!!!
I've been using DTube for 3 months, and love it.
I always check DTube before YouTube, I hope one day too see more of those whom I view on YouTube move over to DTube.
I attempted to post this before and it appears I accidentally deleted it, so if I post twice "oops" but I think my original post is lost into oblivion.
I want to just take a moment to say somethings I would like to see from DTube in the future, just my personal wish list for things in the future.
I'd like to see a donate button, I like Steemit, but using that as the only form of monetization limits monetization to 7 days, so when DLive and one version of DPorn added donation buttons it seemed like a good idea for everyone else to try it.
I like how the DTube page looks, it is a lot like YouTube and great when focused on viewing videos, but sometimes I like to view posts as a Steemit article, the Steemit article can be great when you want to focus on the text description in the video post.
Both are great depending on what you want at the moment.
So I would love a button (or link) that would allow a person to directly switch back and forth from the DTube video and the Steemit article.
I know videos will expire based on age and data file size vs profit made, and considering the amount of data potentially uploaded and how expensive data storage can be I consider that logical.
I noticed the bot will be tuned to discourage reposts, I have to question if this will also discourage re-uploading older videos that no longer play?
Considering as someone's followers may grow with time, old videos might find new audiences, I would hope people could re-upload videos that don't currently play. This isn't a problem on YouTube (YouTube has many many problems, but that is one of their strengths because they keep old videos) I hope that re-uploading videos that no longer play will not be discouraged. (Assuming the person is also making new content and the original video upload was sufficiently long ago)
Also about videos that no longer play, I like that when you view old videos on someone's channel even the ones the that no longer play are still viewable as thumbnails.
I consider the thumbnail and text description, also any comments made on the video, all to be an important part of a person's video history.
But if a video no longer plays, it would be nice if instead of the video-length time in the lower right hand corner of the thumbnail, a symbol for expired was displayed, or perhaps the word expired.
Also maybe the ability to hide expired videos could be nice, like hiding nsfw content, or perhaps more importantly perhaps the ability to permanently turn on viewing of nsfw content, so that option doesn't have to be re-clicked over and over and over and over again.
Anyway, I love DTube and am looking forward to future updates, my biggest interest in in updates are ones that benefit long term storage of videos, and ways to support evergreen content that continues to get views even as the video becomes older.
I'd also love better support of more video formats other than just mp4.
Maybe a way to create play lists could be awesome?
Maybe a way to embed DTube videos in Steemit articles like you can with YouTube videos?
I really enjoy DTube and look forward to future updates.