This is a post about something I've been noticing more and more now and seemingly social media platforms have stopped caring about because in the end it's naturally all about money, stock prices, shareholder profits, etc and so forth.
It is however ironic because a platform I used to use a lot before this chain was very much against this at one point, I guess back when the majority of its users had an actual say in it.
Let me first talk a little bit about what I'm referring to as attention parasites in the title.
Let's say you make an amazing video, it's covering something unique and fresh, whatever it is, it's driving a lot of people to your video/content to consume it. Let's say it drove 1 million views to your content, the platform you uploaded it to rewards you fairly for your contribution. (Fair being vague as it's mostly just an ad revenue share the platform profited off of from advertisers)
Your content is still quite fresh, so after your excitement drops a little and you get curious to see where your traffic is coming from, you notice all kinds of places it's been shared in. External traffic tells you a large % is coming from different platforms to your (let's say in this case youtube account), some from google and a lot from Youtube's recommended page since your video is "trending".
You think to yourself, oh that's great, let me check what some of the other social platforms think about my video since everyone here on this platform seems to love it. You go to Reddit's biggest relevant subreddit r/videos and you instantly see your face on their trending page.
(I'm including an example here, video/youtuber may not be relevant to the discussion but is definitely affected)
At first glance you're happy someone shared your video on Reddit to drive more traffic towards your work, but on second glance you notice they did no such thing. They simply clipped part of the vide, re-uploaded it to reddit's own storage and media player and haven't even shared your original video anywhere in the post.
This is attention parasiting. You may wonder why did the uploader, who's only gaining worthless karma points download his original video, cut it shorter often times unnecessarily, then upload it to Reddit and not even bother to share the original video?
It's because there's an unspoken agreement that Reddit does not care if the original source is mentioned, in fact they prefer you don't. Naturally they wouldn't admit to it, but remember Reddit is now a company seeking to launch its own IPO and any links on their platform sending people off said platform is a risk to the platform. If I constantly told you to go to Steemit on Hive, even without the drama, theft and censorship that occurred/occurrs, it'd still be weird, right? This is how they see it as well, without considering the costs to the original creator.
The costs are not nothing. People who see this edited version of this video from this creator on Reddit don't have a reason to re-watch it on youtube. If say youtube was their next platform they'd visit after scrolling Reddit for a while and get this video recommended they'd just say "I already watchedit". This costs the uploader monetization since that primarily stems from ad revenue/views and potential follows/future recommendations of new/other videos of the same channel by the algo.
Reddit profits off of this person's content 100%, gives the person 0% revenue and generally many subreddits don't allow you/it's frowned upon to drop links to the source. (In this video they actually did at some point down the comment tree)
It's ironic because not too many years ago Reddit users were shaming Facebook for pretty much doing the same thing, albeit there it was way more malicious where content creators would copy shorts completely and just add a 2 sec clip of their face saying "what would you do if this happened to you" insert full 30sec clip someone else has created and monetize it for your own gain.
This has become more of a touchy subject lately due to Streamers streaming hours upon hours and viewers watching content through their stream. Also known as "react streamers" although often times they barely react much to it. Even so they're going through many of the same social media platforms watching trending content which ultimately works as a barrier of ad revenue to the original creators because all these thousands of viewers are now watching content through the streamer rather than giving any views, follows, clicks, etc, to the original creator.
The original creator are simply being robbed of a lot of monetization this way and the platforms have of course little care for "outside creators".
It's especially funny considering Streaming platforms like Twitch were quick to DMCA and mute vods from streamers playing music in the background because record lables wouldn't want their songs being played "for free" to thousands of viewers/listeners, but when it comes to original creators without legal backing, they aren't being cared for.
This is something I think Hive does well, even if we some times give hivewatchers a lot of flak for the way they handle some things, but I like that we have a strong sense of not taking value/attention away from others and using it as the majority of the content being monetized here, where no laws or DMCA's are attempting to enforce their rules. We just do it because it's the right thing to do and always encourage people to share links to sources and the "full video" or the creator's channel when we pick pieces of content from others to post about or share.
I feel like platforms like youtube and others should do way more for regular creators, most who already have accounts on most big platforms either way, so the solutions wouldn't be too difficult to throw some "beneficiaries" or revenue their way if they're generating a lot of traffic and advertisement on other platforms with their content. Yet they don't, and you don't see many talking about it because you know they're not going to listen nor care nor are the giants in competition with each other going to shake hands about something that only concerns their users rather than their own bottom line.
Video of the screenshot taken from trending on Reddit. Not that this post will get it many views, but it might still grant it more than Reddit does.
Funnily enough I was listening to a podcast on this topic today. They highlighted that it's not just making money off others work, but sometimes they clip things in such a way as to twist what originally transpired. This is purely for the controversy because, of course, that gets more views than the reality. This can be detrimental to the reputation of the original creator as well. Naturally no-one can be bothered with going to the original long form which they've now (in their minds) already seen in short form (because who's got the attention span for long form anyway?) and so the false narrative continues with the controversial stolen content as it continues to bring eyes and make money. They also went into AI generated fakes of high profile people/influencers.
In December Australia will be requiring ID for us to use most social media platforms as part of new regulations to stop under 16s using them. They've recently, quietly, added search engines to that if you're logged into Google or Microsoft. In all honesty I've reached the point where I'm not sure I even want to bother with these platforms any more anyway. Far too much time disappears when I go on them and you can't believe most of what you're seeing and reading anyway.
That happened to us a few times in the past when we had our viral videos on Facebook and Instagram. There are videos that had tens of millions of views and we weren't even given proper credit for the content. Of course that also didn't give us any monetization income either, but at the time we still had a noticeable impact on all of our online data and streaming figures, so it had "life changing" knock-on effects. In the end, it was the platform that profited from our content, which is one of the reasons why we fell in love with HIVE conceptually back in 2017 (That was the year we went "mega-viral")
"Reaction" videos where someone is just pointing at the real content, spoofed accounts copy/pasting another creator's content, and of course the new trend of A.I. slop infuriate me. And then there's the ads every 4th link/scroll, ads before videos, ads popping into videos, etc.
Web2 needs to die. It had its time. That time is hopefully fading. We'll be here with the alternative if and when the masses are ready.
I have tried to grow on Reddit and my posts always get flagged if I share my cooking videos. Even if it directly answers someone's question perfectly. That also happened on Quora. They banned my account that I had worked for a couple of years. It wasn't unrelated stuff it was legit helpful videos that directly applied to what the person was asking haha.
Greetings @acidyo ,
It did take loads of words to explain the matter....thank you.
Such an unfair practice to be sure.
Appreciate the reminder of remaining conscious of original ownership. ^__^
Kind Regards, Bleujay
How about those curation round ups, then hey? :P Should they set the beneficiary to the posts they're bringing attention to? Not singling out any single curation project, but isn't it the same?
Would make sense for those rewards to go back to the creators, or for rewards to be declined, particularly on those posts that are "if account x, vote on y, automate post"
For more automated ones, or those who highlight but barely have any voting power to actually curate the users, I agree it's most likely just a low effort farm.
There's a lot of work involved there that most stakeholders would never bother with, so it's not just about highlighting authors for a small kickback to the curators while rewarding them with the majority of the rewards through curation, but also to go way and beyond to look out for those authors.
It's also no secret that manual curation, moderation and looking out for abuse doesn't really get any additional rewards here compared to just autovoting and forgetting about it, hoping someone else puts in the work.
I know :)
It was a dig toward those low effort curators who automate voting based on tags and then automate voting based on the "app" they use to publish to the chain. :)
The manual curation reward is actually reading and interacting with the content, in my mind. If people are just going to stake, autovote, and do little else, they're not really adding any value to the platform.
That's true, but there's very little ways to differentiate between the two, at least on the blockchain/protocol level. That's why different initiatives, if done well and fair, are powerful in my opinion for retention and general health of the chain.
We all know if there's rewards to be had for just being passive and doing nothing most people would get on that and there'd be very little incentive to actually look for overlooked authors and spread inflation around to more hopefully unique users.
I think that being flexible with the author reward pool can make hive stand out even more, for instance what @redditposh is doing to generate traffic towards our front-ends. Or projects like @lovesniper that look for first posts of users to see if they seem genuine to welcome and guide them and give them future curation as well as rewarding people for direct onboarding through the @ocdb posts, etc, etc.
As you say though, there are some that just throw the word "curation" around willy-nilly, maybe give the posts less than $0.01 in rewards and use their content to create compilation posts, etc, which they then attract autovoters, purchased votes through delegations/hsbi/quid-pro-quo, etc. Often very little effort if any while they monetize from others content under the guise of doing things for the platform. Those are something we should be combating imo, like that freecompliments community leader that I downvoted for a while because of direct vote buying.
There may be ways to programmatically identify auto votes - they typically always come in by the same user x minutes after post publish - whereas, I know with the people who manually vote my content - they come in outside of a precise pattern.
I think we all know (for our own stuff) who auto-votes us and who is a genuine "oh, I liked that content a lot".
I am also getting autovotes from people who haven't been on the platform for years. They're "dust".
On the topic of things like HSBI, I have quite a large number of HSBI shares. From a personal perspective, it does make me want to continue contributing to the chain (sunk cost I guess - from around the time of the steem/hive fork) - but the meagre rewards it provides to me (compared to my personal, perceived quality!) would definitely not make it worth while as a commercial or abuse vector.
But honestly, what keeps me here is the deep engagement and discussion I get to have with people who actually respond, without the fractured nature of multiple "networks" for multiple things.
The other important thing, of course, for people to get HIVE is the concept of the immutability, the fact you can see everything on chain (even if someone downvotes it!) and the positive impact it can have on people's wellbeing as social creatures who might otherwise not get any engagement at all.
They'd just get smarter if such ways were to be attempted to be identified I feel like.
It's rather unfortunate, I do see some creators do all the hard work just to have someone else cut, repost and reap the attention. It's definitely a level of theft if you ask me. Platforms definitely look the other way.
Surely the original content creator can just issue a copyright cease and desist order? Or do no such things exist?
You can DMCA this sort of thing I'm sure, it's just most people don't know how and the other issue is doing so DOXes you completely to the person you are DMCA'n iirc.
There are probably companies that you can employ too that can do this stuff on your behalf but that's an expense most can't afford to make.
YouTube and other major platforms are super competitive these days so being a new creator there has a very limited upside...
Most of content creators are struggling about that theft. They would think of the concept, perform it, and carefully market it to the people by editing and hooking narrations. But then someone would download it, cut it , and upload the video as if it is the original. It is good that you are discussing this kind of topic here.
Hive is outstanding when it comes to sharing other people's contents because it ensures you attach the source so that due credits are given to the original owner, which I think should be implemented in all social platforms.
Content theft disguised as “sharing” is a growing problem, and Hive’s culture of attribution and rewarding originality is a rare and refreshing contrast.
Very good point and informative. :)
Yeah reddit doesn't like that users are brought outside it, they want users to stick in, it doesn't matter if that means doing this, they can always blame the mods of the subreddit if some troubles happens
This is nothing more than stealing someone's content. Please, you are one of key players here, let's ensure that we minimize this stealing on hive blockchain
I often don't mind other people making money off the work I do but getting zero credit can greatly piss me off.
Tom Lehrer who died the other day would be a great of example of this. What a decent and obviously clever guy.
1st rule of cybersecurity.... if a vulnerability exists it will be exploded... that's a rule among the social media, I'm glad that in hive the reasoning is higher than in other communities.
This reminds me of Ethan Klein's lawsuit against DMCA
Yeah, it's kinda crazy he had to go through the whole trouble of trademarking/protecting his content before posting it in order to be able to sue those people. That they aren't protected from the beginning, especially from malicious theft of content that others than the creators profit from, with reddit not even the users sharing, unless you count selling your account for karma on the black markets.
This is a very important issue. Respecting original creators should be a rule on all platforms.
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Great analysis! "Attention parasiting" is really a big problem right now. Those who create content don't get the right value—it's very unfair. Platforms like Hive, where the original creator is respected, should be encouraged more.