The Joystream Manifesto

Our Manifesto units out both the issues we believe are associated with digital media platforms in their current type as well as our proposed answer to those considerations.

Problem

We consider that art, be it as literature, music, movie, video games or efficiency, is a critical tool via which societies establish a shared understanding of what’s frequent information amongst all members. These expressions define values and narratives that end up shaping tradition, religion and even public coverage. It due to this fact matters deeply how it’s financed, distributed and paid for.

Digital media has become the first medium through which such expression is distributed, and digital media platforms have turn into the important thing establishments organizing this activity.

Unfortunately, due to community https://www.joystream.org/ effects, economies of scale, rules and political interests, we’re at present left with handful of massive establishments which set the terms for the way this happens. They are nearly totally unaccountable to regular market and political mechanisms.

As a end result, our stories, expressions and interactions are managed and filtered on their terms. This continues to generate an ever changing set of problems, be it inflexible monetization, censorship of controversial speech, inequitable sharing of features with creators and viewers, low platform innovation or lack of credibility with third get together developers.

Goal

We call for an arrangement the place media platforms are accountable to the people they impact, that are primarily their customers, be it as consumers, creatives, third get together developer or employees.

It is the absence of such accountability which is the fundamental source of any explicit drawback at any particular time.

Thesis

Our core thesis is that there are two basic challenges which should be addressed to achieve this goal, and that an appropriate utility of latest distributed techniques know-how, including blockchains, good contracts and tokens, is the right means to take action.

The Wedge

First is the query of how to create another from scratch in the face of platform externalities which make any new platform almost ineffective, regardless of any of its inherent traits. The means of doing this type of bootstrapping has historically been mostly an art, the place success has hardly ever been reproducible.

We imagine that blockchain tokens, earned by and issued to early members, have been proven to be extremely efficient at mobilizing, integrating and motivating a global and dynamic community.

This has now repeatedly allowed nascent communities, just like the Bitcoin community, to beat the preliminary network impact hurdle. There is no certainty that this might be adequate, however we believe this mechanism is as promising as anything which is prone to have an opportunity in a long time.

Accountability at scale

Second is the question of the way to create and maintain accountability in such a platform when it really reaches scale.

We perceive there to be two basic ways that participants can hold establishments of any sort 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 inside. The effectiveness of this is dependent upon some capability to both share reliable information with other members, and have some impact on internal governance processes. Current media platforms present customers no effective way of doing both.

We believe that blockchains provide an organizational and economic infrastructure which may address both issues. The public, verifiable and immutable history of financial and administrative records, provides an excellent basis for users to know the present and previous state of the platform. This allows anybody to make incontestable claims about relevant details and circumstances.

Further, blockchain tokens permit us to make use and control of a platform inseparable, giving users an automatic seat on the table in deliberating over platform degree selections.

All that’s required to ascertain, train or transfer the capacity to take part in such exercise, is the ability to sign messages with identifiable cryptographic keys. Perfectly dependable contracting gives a large, dynamic and unrestricted set of users the means of governing the platform. This can serve a variety of purposes, similar to enterprise projects, regulating participation in different formally specified roles, and even updating the institutional guidelines themselves. This integration of dependable contracting into the economic rails offers an organizational infrastructure rather more according to our objectives of inclusive management than the conventional jurisdictional belief based mostly infrastructure.

Exit

Exit is the approach of completely ending participation in an establishment in favor of both becoming a member of or creating an alternate. The effectiveness of this is determined by prices of leaving, and either joining or creating an alternative, all being low in comparison with the deprivation within the present institution. This is presently not the case.

By building platforms primarily based on free open source software, open protocols and open knowledge — as is the case with Blockchain techniques, one dramatically lowers these prices. Since users management their very own data, id and belongings, they’ve a a lot easier time joining new platforms, and even taking their peers with them.

Open protocols and data will make multi homing interfaces ample, where customers may not even need to change, but as an alternative use a number of platforms concurrently, which inspires platform level competition.

Even extra dramatically, reliance on open supply signifies that all of the software program capital of a platform can simply be reused, and for the reason that entire organizational state can be public, whole ecosystems may be forked to create new various platforms with modified policies and objectives.