Le Fly posted about YouTube blocking certain content creators. Reminds me of Twitter and Facebook “curating” their users’ newsfeeds.
Should we be surprised? No. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This type of subjective censorship won’t last on the Internet. There are now decentralized competitors popping up in many areas: Arcade City vs Uber, Steemit vs Reddit, YouTube vs ????.
An example of a shift against monopolistic control driven by ad revenue is a new browser on the market called Brave. Their Mission:
….to save the web by increasing browsing speed and safety for users, while growing ad revenue share for content creators.
The Brave Browser team are removing the middle man and enabling payments to content creators directly in the browser. Sounds like YouTube/Facebook’s worst nightmare.
Introducing Brave Payments
As part of our 0.11.6 release of Brave for desktop today, we are pleased to announce the beta version of Brave Payments, our Bitcoin-based micropayments system that can automatically and privately pay your favorite websites.
For the first time in the history of web browsers, people can now seamlessly reward the sites whose content they value and wish to support, while remaining untracked by anyone, including us at Brave Software, Inc. This removes the need for intermediaries who may overwhelm web pages with invasive trackers and ads (and sometimes even malware). It also avoids centrally managed “feed” algorithms that may or may not value your idea of content quality.
Decentralized mircopayments to content creators cut out the middle man. Add in privacy and an open system…what’s not to like?
This concept is in pre early adopter phase but it’s happening in many industries. Most projects will fail, but new projects will take their place.
So while YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pick and choose what is good for their users the Internet is striving to be free (from censorship) again.
The question is, does Joe Public care about monopolistic entities censoring the Internet for them or have we given up those rights for the easiest possible access to cat videos?