The Joystream Manifesto
Our Manifesto units out each the problems we imagine are related to digital media platforms in their present kind as well as our proposed solution to these issues.
Problem
We believe that art, be it as literature, music, film, video games or performance, is a important software through which societies set up a shared understanding of what’s widespread data among all members. These expressions define values and narratives that find yourself shaping tradition, religion and even public coverage. It due to this fact matters deeply how it is financed, distributed and paid for.
Digital media has turn into the primary medium via which such expression is distributed, and digital media platforms have turn into the important thing institutions organizing this exercise.
Unfortunately, because of network https://www.joystream.org/ effects, economies of scale, laws and political interests, we’re right now left with handful of large institutions which set the phrases for a way this occurs. They are virtually entirely unaccountable to normal market and political mechanisms.
As a result, our tales, expressions and interactions are managed and filtered on their terms. This continues to generate an ever altering set of problems, be it rigid monetization, censorship of controversial speech, inequitable sharing of gains with creators and audience, low platform innovation or lack of credibility with third get together builders.
Goal
We call for an arrangement where media platforms are accountable to the individuals they impact, that are primarily their users, be it as customers, creatives, third celebration developer or workers.
It is the absence of such accountability which is the basic source of any particular problem at any specific time.
Thesis
Our core thesis is that there are two basic challenges which have to be addressed to achieve this goal, and that an acceptable utility of up to date distributed systems expertise, including blockchains, sensible contracts and tokens, is the right means to take action.
The Wedge
First is the question of how to create an alternate from scratch within the face of platform externalities which make any new platform practically ineffective, no matter any of its inherent characteristics. The strategy of doing this kind of bootstrapping has historically been mostly an art, where success has hardly ever been reproducible.
We consider that blockchain tokens, earned by and issued to early individuals, have been shown to be extremely efficient at mobilizing, integrating and motivating a world and dynamic group.
This has now repeatedly allowed nascent communities, just like the Bitcoin community, to overcome the initial network effect hurdle. There is no certainty that this might be enough, however we imagine this mechanism is as promising as anything which is more likely to have a chance in a very long time.
Accountability at scale
Second is the question of the way to create and maintain accountability in such a platform when it truly reaches scale.
We perceive there to be two fundamental ways that individuals can maintain institutions of any kind accountable: Voice and exit, in the custom of Hirschman A. O.
Voice
Voice is the strategy of attempting to improve or reform the functioning of an institution from within. The effectiveness of this is dependent upon some capacity to each share dependable information with other members, and have some influence on inner governance processes. Current media platforms provide customers no efficient way of doing either.
We consider that blockchains present an organizational and financial infrastructure which may handle each issues. The public, verifiable and immutable historical past of economic and administrative records, supplies an excellent basis for users to grasp the current and previous state of the platform. This allows anybody to make incontestable claims about related facts and circumstances.
Further, blockchain tokens enable us to make use and control of a platform inseparable, giving users an automatic seat on the table in deliberating over platform degree choices.
All that is required to ascertain, exercise or switch the capacity to take part in such exercise, is the flexibility to sign messages with identifiable cryptographic keys. Perfectly dependable contracting gives a large, dynamic and unrestricted set of users the technique of governing the platform. This can serve a variety of functions, corresponding to endeavor tasks, regulating participation in several formally specified roles, or even updating the institutional rules themselves. This integration of reliable contracting into the economic rails provides an organizational infrastructure rather more according to our aims of inclusive management than the traditional jurisdictional trust primarily based infrastructure.
Exit
Exit is the approach of entirely ending participation in an establishment in favor of both joining or creating another. The effectiveness of this is determined by prices of leaving, and both joining or creating an alternate, all being low in comparison with the deprivation in the existing establishment. This is currently not the case.
By building platforms primarily based on free open source software program, open protocols and open information — as is the case with Blockchain techniques, one dramatically lowers these prices. Since users control their own information, identity and assets, they’ve a much easier time becoming a member of new platforms, and even taking their friends with them.
Open protocols and knowledge will make multi homing interfaces abundant, where customers may not even need to change, but as an alternative use a number of platforms concurrently, which inspires platform stage competitors.
Even extra dramatically, reliance on open supply signifies that all of the software program capital of a platform can simply be reused, and since the whole organizational state can also be public, whole ecosystems could be forked to create new various platforms with modified insurance policies and objectives.