I had some questions relating to journalism, how Filecoin might facilitate a new journalism content ecosystem that rewards journalists in ways they haven’t been rewarded before. Vettage is decentralized, collaborative multimedia journalism just about to enter a beta, and I’d like to invite people to test drive to improve collaboration towards a better journalism and better journalism business model.
For now there’s an early site at beta.vettage.com – built in PHP but looking to migrate into JavaScript with IPFS for content collaboration. As independent signup is currently disabled, feel free to message me to create a new login.
First question would be, if, in fact, it is possible for IPFS users to decline from hosting bad content, how could that be ensured in a collaborative content ecosystem like Vettage’s?
Second question would center upon financials – are Filecoin’s incentives to engage with content enough for journalists to want to be involved? How to get this message out to them?
On the IPFS level there will be “denylists” explicitly for this purpose, but AFAIK there are no specs for it yet.
I made a quick summary on this here.
My intuition is that each content ecosystem will apply multiple blacklists from various places, but ultimate control over what is blocked will be in user’s hand (she will have ability to disable blacklists, always).
This is a good question. So far I’ve been thinking about Filecoin in terms of paying for data storage, as stated in this interview:
Not sure if Filecoin alone is the right tool for incentivizing journalists, nor how such mechanics should work.
Perhaps there is an open niche for something like distributed version of Flattr?
Thanks indeed for the feedback. I actually looked at Flattr yesterday. And yes, there is definitely that open niche – while there are lots of concerns with privacy – how to feature content by the Mexican journalist exposing corruption, and still support the journalist financially without exposing identity so they aren’t killed, for example.
I’m still looking to wrap my head more around the implications for journalism that Flattr, Maidsafe, Filecoin, the Basic Attention Token and IPFS have for journalism, and the best recipe.
So far the mood seems pessimistic among some in the newsroom – there’s more to “saving” journalism than just a better business model. But it’s a good start.
Yeah, there are various micropayments solutions, interesting one is to integrate them directly into web browser.
A good proof-of-concept is Brave: browser is built on the Chromium web browser and its Blink engine, announced by the co-founder of the Mozilla Project, Brendan Eich.
It ships with micropayment solution built-in (see Brave Payments):
Could we rename this thread “IPFS and Filecoin for Journalism”? That will make it easier for people interested in this topic to find @lidel’s answers to your questions and to participate in the discussion.
Have you though about auctioning news article as NFTs?
I have a feeling that a subscription model for content will never work in cyberspace. In the video game industry that model has already mostly disappeared.
Wishing you the best. Journalism is very important.
