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I read the Civil white paper linked from the article hoping to see a description of a new business model for journalists and publishers but only found how they

I read the Civil white paper linked from the article hoping to see a description of a new business model for journalists and publishers but only found how they will use CVL tokens to vote on who is in the whitelist. Can someone please explain how/why readers would pay for the content? That's the important part, isn't it?

anongraddebt 8y ago
FWIW, I still have close to no idea what DLT/Crypto/Decentralization/etc. even is, or rather is for. Assuming the tech actually has wings we won't really understand the how and why until certain use cases come to dominate. Even then, it can be difficult. After Western Union was founded (19th century), people would walk into WU offices to send money over the telegraph line and say things like, "Where can I see the little man who runs along the wire carrying the money?" Having said that, here's my explanation: How? Readers can pay newsrooms for content using a debit/credit card or purchasing and sending CVL to the newsroom. Why? Because they like the pieces coming out of a set of newsrooms and want access to that type of content. Effectively, journalists end up running their own newspaper, but that newspaper is a subsidiary of a parent company that is hands-off for content but not for governance (which just means it's not totally hands-off for content). This newspaper would compete against other subsidiaries of the parent, and would have a certain percentage vote on what other subsidaries exist. Moreover, journalists would often be paid by selling their stock options in the parent. ---- Obviously, the hypothesis here is that such a direct connection between journalist and reader will lead to higher-quality content then can be found at the MSM rags. I'm agnostic about whether that is the case.
- riffraff 8y ago
  Couldn't journalists always run their own newspaper? In Italy we had cooperatives running newspapers and magazines as long as I can remember, doesn't this happen elsewhere? I _think_ the advantage of Civil might be that you get to pay directly a journalist rather than the group, but I'm not sure it's a big improvement.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    To pay journalists directly there are platforms where you can already pay directly for the article (Blendle), plenty of blogging platforms and new media startups than pay journalists at least in part by page impressions/revenues, and online tipjars. Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
    - anongraddebt 8y ago
      Blendle is in Beta, which means people are just now coming up with revenue models that only charge customers for the articles they want to read, and allow them to do this across different outlets. The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this). My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate. When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world. Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
      - sparkzilla 8y ago
- M2Ys4U 8y ago
  Why send them tokens and not real money? Especially if one has to spend real money to get the tokens in the first place...
  - notahacker 8y ago
    tbf, the whitepaper is unusually candid in suggesting that journalists on the platform in control of their revenue model will often charge in other currencies instead...
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    The tokens allow you to do more than simply pay journalists. Something to do with how the Civil constitution is applied and how new newsrooms are created. That's what I gleaned from the whitepaper. I could clearly be wrong about this. Crypto whitepapers, even read charitably, are difficult to interpret and not because what is being said is too complex or something.
decentralised 8y ago
I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong. It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls.. The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls) The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc. The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens. Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)
- spacecowboy17 8y ago
  Thanks! """with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall? Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well? They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    My pleasure! I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts. The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless. (caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)

anongraddebt 8y ago

FWIW, I still have close to no idea what DLT/Crypto/Decentralization/etc. even is, or rather is for. Assuming the tech actually has wings we won't really understand the how and why until certain use cases come to dominate. Even then, it can be difficult. After Western Union was founded (19th century), people would walk into WU offices to send money over the telegraph line and say things like, "Where can I see the little man who runs along the wire carrying the money?" Having said that, here's my explanation: How? Readers can pay newsrooms for content using a debit/credit card or purchasing and sending CVL to the newsroom. Why? Because they like the pieces coming out of a set of newsrooms and want access to that type of content. Effectively, journalists end up running their own newspaper, but that newspaper is a subsidiary of a parent company that is hands-off for content but not for governance (which just means it's not totally hands-off for content). This newspaper would compete against other subsidiaries of the parent, and would have a certain percentage vote on what other subsidaries exist. Moreover, journalists would often be paid by selling their stock options in the parent. ---- Obviously, the hypothesis here is that such a direct connection between journalist and reader will lead to higher-quality content then can be found at the MSM rags. I'm agnostic about whether that is the case.

riffraff 8y ago
Couldn't journalists always run their own newspaper? In Italy we had cooperatives running newspapers and magazines as long as I can remember, doesn't this happen elsewhere? I _think_ the advantage of Civil might be that you get to pay directly a journalist rather than the group, but I'm not sure it's a big improvement.
- notahacker 8y ago
  To pay journalists directly there are platforms where you can already pay directly for the article (Blendle), plenty of blogging platforms and new media startups than pay journalists at least in part by page impressions/revenues, and online tipjars. Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    Blendle is in Beta, which means people are just now coming up with revenue models that only charge customers for the articles they want to read, and allow them to do this across different outlets. The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this). My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate. When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world. Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
    - sparkzilla 8y ago
M2Ys4U 8y ago
Why send them tokens and not real money? Especially if one has to spend real money to get the tokens in the first place...
- notahacker 8y ago
  tbf, the whitepaper is unusually candid in suggesting that journalists on the platform in control of their revenue model will often charge in other currencies instead...
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  The tokens allow you to do more than simply pay journalists. Something to do with how the Civil constitution is applied and how new newsrooms are created. That's what I gleaned from the whitepaper. I could clearly be wrong about this. Crypto whitepapers, even read charitably, are difficult to interpret and not because what is being said is too complex or something.

decentralised 8y ago

I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong. It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls.. The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls) The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc. The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens. Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)

spacecowboy17 8y ago
Thanks! """with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall? Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well? They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.
- decentralised 8y ago
  My pleasure! I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts. The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless. (caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)