LBRY: The YouTube Replacement You've Been Waiting For
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LBRY (pronounced "library") is a decentralized, peer-to-peer digtal media sharing platform/marketplace with a revenue model surrounding LBC, their own cryptocurrency, as opposed to traditional advertising. If you're already excited, you can feel free to stop reading right now and head on over to their site to start exploring it yourself. If you're not there quite yet, let me share why this is so exciting to me.
Decentralization, a word that should make you feel happy for a few reasons: On the LBRY network, there is no one party or corporation that owns the content. Your data is your own, only you can remove it and you get to decide how/if it is monetized. Many content creators on YouTube have professed the feeling that they are being held hostage by a monolithic and mysterious entity with ever-shifting goal posts regarding how to play by the rules–LBRY obliterates this concern with its decentralized protocol. It also allows content to be filtered by users instead of corporations, and keeps your data safe at the same time.
Tipping in the wake of ads has got to be one of the most attractive things about LBRY. This is immensely important for reforming the type of media that we see online. If you sign out of your YouTube account and clear your cache and cookies before navigating to the front page of YouTube, you will be confronted with a barrage of videos I have a hard time imagining anyone asked for. This is the case because those videos are A) something advertisers are willing to put their mouth behind and B) something tricky or mindless enough to get us to click on. Many of us have been browsing YouTube only to come to the sudden realization that nothing we've seen in the past 20 minutes has provided us with any kind of value. And remember, content creators are incentivised to make these kinds of videos otherwise they can't make a living. Here's where tipping comes in! If the consumers are the ones who decide whether some media is worthy of existing, then creators can foster a community around creating what they want to create in a no-strings-attached manner. The issue of having viewers pay for content is solved through LBRY's LBC, the formerly mentioned cryptocurrency. Upon creation of your LBRY account, you will gain access to your very own LBC wallet. LBRY will reward you with LBC for using the platform which you can then use to support the creators you feel deserve it. How great is that? There's no cost to you outside of your explicit decision to purchase LBC and directly support content you like. No bank, no middleman, just blockchain.
A true payment model: LBRY supports charging people for access to your content. For example, you might create an educational film series on photography and wish to release it, but you don't have access to traditional publishing methods. With LBRY, you can simply be your own publisher. Put it out there, market it as you please, and the LBRY protocol with handle the paywall as you set it.
Discoverability through support is a concept I haven't mentioned yet. Essentially, when a creator recieves a tip, it goes into the "support" pool for their channel. The value of the support pool positiviely effects how the associated channel gets factored into trending calculations and search results. If at any time the channel owner wants to redeem LBC from the support pool, they can do so and the redeemed LBC will show up in their wallet. This is a simple, yet elegant, way to shape how content is discovered on the platform.
As a new user of LBRY myself, I stumbled across a video by the LBRY creators mentioning that they are currently doing a neat promotional event they're calling Down to F*#$%^ February. The comically named Down to Follow February is basically an event centered around bolstering activity on and awareness of LBRY in which all participants get their hands on some extra LBC. Everyone who joins this month and follows 5 creators will be rewarded with 15LBC–about 0.3USD as of yet. Large rewards are offered for users who make videos about LBRY or invite the most new users. And lastly, if the goal of DTFF is met (50,000 new users register and 500,000 new follows occur on the LBRY network this February), then bonus LBC is handed out to every new user who follows 5 channels and every user that has invited a new user.
On top of time restricted promotional events, LBRY also gives out LBC to new users who were invited to join and to the user who invited them (speaking of which, I'll just leave my invite link here) To me these seem like great ways to get people to give LBRY a shot, after that the protocol can work its charm and before you know it LBRY may actually compete with the monolithic YouTube.
If you're interested in all the exciting developments in the LBRY platform and protocol, you can check out their 2020 roadmap video.
I reserve the right to preach here on my own blog so I'll take that liberty now: please check out LBRY and other people-centric/content-freeing platforms such as the Brave web browser. It just makes sense to cut out the middleman if technology allows it, and now it does! This is especially true for meddling middlemen who thrive on appealing to the lowest common denominator… I'm looking at you, television broadcasting and most of the modern internet.