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Goodbye, Denver Post. Hello, Blockchain
- iagnionio 8y agoThis is the only application I've seen for a blockchain that isn't totally brain-dead. I'm certainly skeptical, but skepticism is better than certainty it will fail. I'll be watching it with interest.
- Wehrdo 8y agoCan you explain what you see as the benefit here? It looks like the tokens basically give some level of editorial control; therefore, wealthy individuals/organizations would be able to assert control over what gets published. And because of the anonymity, it wouldn't even be clear who is asserting this control.
- wepple 8y agoI do like the idea of a digest of the article being put into the blockchain: it makes it impossible for sneaky edits or removal/denial of content at a later date. When you hit publish, you better be prepared for that article to exist undeniably for eternity. I'd like to see a twitter with the same features. Of course, blockchain isn't absolutely necessary here. You could sign a post with PGP 20 years ago and achieve the same.
- prolikewhoa 8y agoEven after reading the previous comments in this thread? I'm really not seeing any benefit, just a shifting of company shares and maybe the benefit of all transactions publicly available on the blockchain, but some anonymity would make that seemingly useless.
- pishpash 8y agoUnrelated side benefits include content archival and anti-censorship. I don't think they had those in mind though.
- hk__2 8y ago> Unrelated side benefits include content archival and anti-censorship I fail to see how any of those is relevant to the use of a blockchain. Mirroring a newspaper’s website gives you content archival, which in turns gives you censorship protection (unless the censor can attack all mirrors). A blockchain gives you those advantages because it relies on mirroring (the transactions).
- fru2013 8y agoWhile not completely brain-dead, a blockchain still is not necessary to solve this use case.
- wycs 8y agoI think it is fair to say it is completely brain dead.
- avip 8y agoHow about people purchasing and breeding virtual kittens?
- Lazare 8y agoReally? Because offhand this looks like one of the most brain-dead potential applications of a blockchain. What problem do you think this is solving?
- znpy 8y agoNow I am no expert on blockchain and business administration but... Since these CVL tokens could be tradeable, and they grant "a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil"... Uhm... Doesn't this all look like, basically, company shares? Doesn't this mean that the problem has just been shifted but potentially not solved ?
- danso 8y agoStockholders, especially retail investors, don't typically have privileged access or ability to give input to a newsroom.
- aitrean 8y agoAnd they shouldn't. News should not be determined by its shareholders. The idea that such privileges should be able to be purchased is so incomprehensibly stupid, I'm at a loss for words.
- prolikewhoa 8y agoYou don't think it already isn't purchased and hasn't been for a very long time? There are only a handful of media companies, at least in the USA.
- iOShosts 8y agoLess than a handful now thanks to Trump’s FTC. Make America pay again. And again. And again...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- geofft 8y agoIt's obvious when the Washington Post writes articles about Amazon that there's a conflict of interest. They definitely write them, but I don't remember anyone sharing any stories from them about e.g. the HQ2 process. People know to look elsewhere. And conversely, the moment the Post publishes a news (not opinion) article about how every city should want to be HQ2, or worse, mentions it off-hand in an article about something else, everyone knows not to trust that and possibly to lose trust in the news source in general. So they don't. It's not obvious when ownership is a thousand pseudonymous private keys when there's a conflict of interest. If a random article about a random company looks a little more negative than it should be, who knows if the current pseudonymous owners are shorting that company? Publicly-disclosed ownership of the media by the rich has a ton of disadvantages, yes. But I don't the blockchain solving any of those disadvantages, and I see it introducing a new one that is specifically avoided by publicly-disclosed ownership by the rich.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards, which are outlined in the Civil Constitution This features the worst elements of public (e.g. the BBC), private (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) and patronage (e.g. the Washington Post) media. Letting token owners “vote on whether...websites violate the company’s journalism standards” explicitly removes editorial independence. Worse, it ties editorial control to tokens/votes which are bought with money. Worse still, since ownership is pseudonymous, there is no way to detect someone (e.g. a wealthy individual, company or foreign government) amassing control across disparate wallets. Pseudonymity also makes shaming owners for bad behaviour difficult or impossible.
- danso 8y agoIf the votes and results are made public, though, they at least reveal the instances in which stories/projects have been explicitly downvoted/killed. Even without knowing who voted for yes/no, that's still insight to what might be covered up.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drb91 8y agoWell, how would you incentivise journalism? I can’t tell where articles i might want to read come from; i know that any given newspaper will have plenty of content that i find head scratching—that’s your editorial independence for you. There’s no good model right now to patronize journalists or topics.
- wycs 8y agoLike Steemit, this cannot incentivize production long term unless it has more efficient means of monetization, which it doesn’t. Steem subsidizes content through inflation of a token during a speculative mania. To put it mildly, this is not sustainable. Though the founders did astonishingly well on their exit. Putting a newspaper on a blockchain, to the extent the idea is even coherent, does not exempt it from the economics that makes journalism unremunerative. This is not to say that we cannot use crypto currencies to perform activities that were traditionally performed by journalists. However, this will look more like anonymous information bounty markets or prediction markets. But even prediction markets need someone to subsidize them, willfully taking a loss to provide liquidity. I think there is a good case to be made for using demurrage to do this. But for this to work there has to be actual long term economic value on the blockchain, which most lack.
- okay_nick 8y agoHello! I'm an engineer at Civil. While our TCR will not solve the economics of journalism on its own, we believe it will help provide transparency into the inner workings of newsrooms and increase media literacy in ways that could encourage more people to fund journalism organizations. Furthermore, we think it can vastly improve discoverability especially for smaller (but still ethical and reliable) news organizations. From there, it's about giving newsrooms tools to run and monetize their business how they want. For some this might look like traditional newspaper subscriptions, for others we might see more experimental monetization schemes that are only feasible on the blockchain (such as bounties). -- Nick Reynolds p.s. - Have you looked into TCRs generally? There's a fair amount of overlap with prediction markets, you might be interested in learning more about the incentive system.
- paulie_a 8y agoHahaha, oh wait you are serious, let me laugh harder.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.
- mistrial9 8y agoThere are many good studies from more than ten years ago, about participatory voting systems. I think many of the knee-jerk cynical posts here are premature.
- paulgb 8y agoI'm curious about these studies, do you have a link?
- diievevsvck 8y agoSteemit has been running for some time to demonstrate that a blockchain based publishing platform is possible. I suspect many more papers will launch private blockchain based storage, it provides transparent voting and censorship resistance, both valuable to a publisher.
- bwb 8y agoI am not sure what newspapers should look like now... it doesn't seem like they can be local and profitable any longer. Hm....
- jordache 8y agoanother blockchain hype?
- iOShosts 8y agoThe “Civil Council” is, arguably, a lot like saying the “Ministry of Truth”. Once seen through Orwellian lenses, euphemistic organizational titles-as-masks tend to reveal themselves. Sort of like those sunglasses in “They Live”.
- Moodles 8y agoI propose a new rule of the internet, much like the rule of "if you can think of it, there's porn for it." If you can think of it, there's a alt coin for it. It's genuinely difficult. One friend suggested "a coin for space travel". Nope. Mars coin is a thing. What about a coin for students? Nope. A coin for Kanye West. Nope. A coin for porn? Nope, of course that already exists. There's even a coin for keeping track of blockchains.
- a1369209993 8y agoA coin for Cymothoa exigua. COBOLCoin. A coin based on MD2 hashing for proof-of-work.
- bastawhiz 8y agoAre you accepting investments?
- a1369209993 8y ago... Not yet, I guess?
- casefields 8y agoHow about a coin for pedophiles? I know it’s extreme but it’s the only group in society that’s vilified even by health professionals so they’re really hidden.
- cagenut 8y agothat would be bitcoin
- mirimir 8y agoMaybe. But also a honeypot for clueless pedophiles. Seriously, though, pedophiles make great canaries. Everyone hates them, even those who create and manage systems for security and privacy. And police love to brag about busting them. For example, we learned about Freenet vulnerabilities and CMU's Tor exploit through pedophile busts.
- nrclark 8y agoWhat makes this different than a co-op, aside from the "definitely not a scam guys, honest!" overtones of selling unregulated stock disguised as tokens? That and hosting everything "on the blockchain" for some inscrutable reason? And what does hosting news "on the blockchain" even mean in any practical sense? That I'll have to install a crypto-mining client just to read their articles? Or that they won't use normal webservers to host their content?
- apo 8y agoRidiculous story. When was the last time you heard of a newspaper going under because its stories weren't "written permanently into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain"? Newspapers are dying because other kinds of companies ate their advertising revenue. We can add the Denver Post to a list of old-guard companies desperately grabbing for blockchain straws on their slide to oblivion (Long Island Iced Tea, Kodak). I'm all for innovation in applied cryptography. But these desperate stories of blockchain cargo-cultism need to stop.
- perl4ever 8y agoI believe I've seen claims that classified ads used to support newspapers, and the internet took that away.
- cabaalis 8y agoI often click a bunch of links on here and receive a "Sorry, you've exceeded the free limit" message. Why can't I dump $5 into an account on NYT and then be able to click "I want to read this, use my tab." I'm not talking about a subscription. I'm talking about a "buy 10 reads" which I would absolutely use. I will not subscribe.
- jacobn 8y agoHaving run a business (in an unrelated field) that offered both a subscription and a paygo model, the reason was pretty clear: you lose more from people who would have subscribed opting for paygo than you gain from people who would never subscribe but would choose paygo. The subscriptions are surprisingly valuable. Paygo not so much. Usual caveats apply: on average, in my experience, YMMV, etc etc.
- lazerpants 8y agoYou could use Blendle. blendle.com
- whatsstolat 8y agoCure middle age balding .... with Blockchain.
- root_axis 8y agoLike in most cases a blockchain is useless here. Why not just used a centralized system? Nothing is gained from decentralization since the organization has to be trusted to recognize the voting power of the tokens either way. Totally pointless.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tCfD 8y ago'investment' from a company (consensys) with an enormous stake in promoting blockchainism to a mainstream audience is a pretty tangible gain.
- okay_nick 8y agoHello! I'm an engineer at Civil. I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Once the Registry contract is deployed on the blockchain, it will continue to function and provide utility no matter what happens to the "Civil Media Company". No involvement on our part is needed to "recognize the voting power" as any individual, entity, or website can use the information contained in the registry however they want. A social media site, for example, could query the registry and decide to render a "credibility badge" when displaying links from a news organization that is whitelisted. Happy to help clarify if you still have questions. -- Nick Reynolds
- root_axis 8y ago> A social media site, for example, could query the registry and decide to render a "credibility badge" when displaying links from a news organization that is whitelisted. Yes, the key word is "decide". To use your "credibility badge" example, an organization could ostensibly behave like they accurately respect the registry while also surreptitiously ignoring the registry in situations that suit them. You might say, "well those organizations will develop a reputation for dishonesty", which might be true if they get caught, but also isn't at all different from the status quo today where selective reporting and partisan bias are bemoaned loudly and often by every side regarding every issue.
- Lazare 8y ago> They will be partnering with the Civil Media Company, an ambitious New York start-up that aims to use griddles and pancake recipes to start 1,000 publications nationwide by the end of the year. ...actually I think the original quote said something about crypto, not pancakes, but I don't think it changes the underlying meaning. Why do you need a distributed, trustless database to run a local paper? > The new publication will have a conventional website whose data will be written permanently into a MySQL database. Whups, sorry, that actually was meant to say "...into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain." Which...okay. 1) I think they mean "a blockchain", and 2) why do we...care? Is this so people will notice if the article is edited? Why not just push the content to a public git repo when it's published? Maybe sign the commits? > People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards So in other words, it's a lot like...a public company, that owns a newspaper, that then strips out every hint of editorial control, and then lets its shareholders directly have a say in every detail of what gets printed? So it's like...literally an attempt to create a newspaper even worse than the one they're quitting in order to form this one? > Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said that by selling ownership stakes to the public, the company seeks to eliminate the possibility of one company or a small group of investors exerting power and influence over a journalistic organization and compromising its mission — exactly what many employees of the Denver Post accused Alden of doing. By selling ownership, they think they're stopping one rich person from amassing a major ownership stake, as happened when their last newspaper sold ownership and allowed one rich person to amass a major ownership stake? What must it feel like to live with this level of blinding naivety? The good news, such as it is, is that ownership of the tokens doesn't actually give anyone control over the newspaper, meaning that this is actually just meaningless hype. But, by the same logic, there's also no reason to actually buy the tokens. They have value only to the extent they allow editorial independence to be violated. So either they'll be valuable (but will undermine the journalistic ethics of the organisation), or they'll be worthless. There's no upside here. It's early Monday morning in this part of the world, and I literally cannot figure out if this is an overly subtle troll or merely the dumbest idea I've heard in quite some time. This basically seems to be an attempt to use inappropriate technologies in order to carefully craft a "solution" that will make the problem worse. If you're worried about local newspapers being financially unviable and subject to intrusive editorial control...how does this do anything but make it worse?
- igorlucifer 8y agoGoodbye CEO Goodbye Mr. Manager Kill the CEO His wife should go naked through line of men Then go work piece of shit. Kill the CEO Hang the CEO Kill the CEO Hang the CEO