If nobody else is going to say it, I will 🎥🗣🎙
Today's video may be controversial, but I felt it essential to bring this topic up. Before we get into all of this, please know that I have the utmost respect for the 3Speak team and I will continue to support the app regardless of what the beneficiary % is. However, over the years I have learned that voicing your opinion is vital for optimum functionality. This can often mean giving/receiving some harsh criticism, but the truths must be told. Let's have a closer look at how 3Speak currently operates.
As of right now, Hive rewards are set to a 50/50 split between authors and curators. You may not know this, but that used to be a 75/25 split tilted towards the creator.
As you can see here:
I believe that the 50/50 split is a better option for Hive at large and curators surely are loving those extra rewards.
The same 50/50 split still applies when posting on 3Speak instead of something like PeakD or Hive.blog (which both take 0%). There is one major difference with 3Speak, they also carry an additional 11% cut from your half of the rewards. This means you are dropped down below 40% in total. That is a drastic dip from the former 75%.
You can see the current 3Speak beneficiary settings here:
So not only do the 3Speak accounts get a cut from the curation rewards, but they are also getting a cut of the author rewards. 3Speak is not the only app to do this. You can find the same over on Vigilante.tv and other apps like D.tube. It seems pretty normal to everyone and most just accept it, but is it a trend that we really want to continue as we further explore what Web3 is going to be?
Then when you look at another Hive app Liketu, you will notice that they only take 1% beneficiary.
See here:
This is much more respectable and I think this app is setting a better precedent for beneficiary rewards.
What gives❓
The question I ask today is...
What justifies this 11% beneficiary?
I'm not jumping to conclusions and thinking that it is entirely unneeded. I am definitely curious to know what exactly all of those extra rewards go to. Is it development? Advertisement? Paying employees? Or something else entirely?
It feels pretty harsh giving away 11% of our rewards for every single video that we post to 3Speak. Especially when the app's userbase isn't huge yet, it has many bugs and often goes down for a few hours, and they still don't offer a 4K upload option.
I could easily upload my videos to YouTube and then embed them in my post so that I don't lose that 11% and have the 4K option. I of course have chosen not to do that, but not everyone is making that same choice. I know of at least a few people who never post on 3Speak and some of them have specifically mentioned the overbearing beneficiary number as the underlying reason.
I think it's more important to see the number of actual users on 3Speak increase. Lowering the beneficiary to something closer to 5% could maybe be a wise decision for long-term growth and encouraging more people on Hive to switch from YouTube to 3Speak.
Who knows, maybe I'm totally wrong about all of this and every bit of that 11% goes to something that is vital for 3Speak. I would love to know the answer to this and that is why I made this video today.
I don't usually tag people, but to make sure the team sees this, I'm mentioning some of the 3Speak team members who I have interacted with in the past.
@eddiespino @starkerz @theycallmedan
What is your opinon❓
I'm dying to know what everyone else is thinking about this. I know some will agree with me, but I figure some will disagree with me and I'm willing to hear everyone out. Leave a comment and let's discuss. Please try to keep things civil and look at things from multiple perspectives without assuming any certain thing. Hopefully, we get some comments from the team to tell us exactly why this 11% is the current setting.
I will continue to use 3Speak either way, but I think it would be pretty awesome if their team at least addresses this sometime soon. I am not demanding a change, more so recommending it to see if more people start posting and interacting on the platform.
Thanks for your time today. Feel free to reblog this for further reach and be sure to follow me if you aren't already.
My NFTs: https://inji.com/@daltono/nfts
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▶️ 3Speak
I can say that 11% is ok atm. I've seen the bills that 3Speak has to pay each month, and it is not in the hundreds but rather the thousands of dollars. CDNs, encoding servers, and video hosting are expensive, and the 11% also pays the developers and the rest of the team. Dan and Matt have invested a lot from their pocket and have not yet made that back.
Also, 3Speak videos have more support (upvotes) from the Hive community. OCD and TCMD vote a bunch of 3Speak videos. Even with the 11% cut, I think most people make more with 3Speak videos than what they would make with YouTube.
When SPK Network is fully launched, you will have the option to pay the IPFS node operators for the hosting of your video or pay some sort of beneficiary to the platform that will host it, there will be more platforms and the percentage will be different in all. That is what I understand, at least.
This is the kind of answer that I was looking for. I knew that somebody from the team would be able to put my mind at ease. As long as the beneficiary rewards are being used for something beneficial to the future of 3Speak, then I'm all cool with it. I just couldn't help but let my mind wander and start thinking about why it is set to 11%.
You are certainly right. It is amazing that we have so many people posting videos and getting rewarded. Many of which have no following elsewhere and would have little to no chance of ever being rewarded. I'm very thankful for what we have here.
Looking forward to the SPK Network launch!
you have to consider what are the services provided. i am not sure does liketu is using their own storage for photos. Video hosting is not not that cheap, someone has to pay it. Not sure if it is still the case but for a long time youtube was not profitable if you look at all the storage space they need for videos and playback. But it is fucking google so they can cover that.
so i don't mind 11% as long everything works fine. and when they get to the full decentralization i assume it will be lower or maybe not even a thing. but storage nodes will be payed in some way.
Everyone would be more happy with less % and would be nice if it is possible. have no idea how the finances looks like.
I should have mentioned how much cheaper it is to hose images than it is to host video. I thought of that before, but forgot to bring that up in the video. You make an excellent point, this is why I enjoy these types of discussions.
Really tough to compare YouTube to 3Speak since there is such a major difference in how luck capital they have backing them. Sure, they are both video hosting platforms, but YT is a whole other kind of beast with Google behind it and all.
I think I agree with you in saying that I can continue to accept the 11% cut. I hope that it doesn't stay that way forever, but for now maybe that's what is needed to keep 3Speak chugging along. I mostly just hope to find out what exactly the 11% from all videos is put towards usually.
Thanks for a great comment bro!
i just looked and i think liketu is storing photos uploaded, so maybe that is the difference in 1% to 0% on peakd (peakd is at the moment using hive blog, there was a proposal for funding image storing, not sure who is paying that at the moment).
Would be nice to get some info on how that 11% is used.
Interesting. 1% isn't too bad at all.
Hopefully some sort of clarity in regards to the matter will come in a future comment on this post.
I didn't know about the 75/25 split. I really have no idea what was the setup like before and I'm learning a lot from you every time. 😅
This is really a controversial topic I agree. Tbh, I know 3speak is a good platform but there are just times I want to lower that beneficiary for 3speak. 😅
Agree, I hope they reconsider the percentage.
Sometimes I just want to post to youtube because there's no big percentage for beneficiaries but well, I want to support 3speak so I'm trying to post my videos in 3speak.
I hope they can also improve the UI of the 3speak, especially the uploading page. It would be nice to see the preview of your post before posting, right?
And I didn't like that there's a max 1k characters in the description. 😅 Sometimes when I want to say more, I need to update my post in peakd after it is published 😅
Anyways, I still would support 3speak. I agree with what you said, maybe reconsider and improve and maybe there would be a lot of users who will be encouraged to post in 3Speak.
It's been so long ago that I can barely remember if Hive ever had 75/25. I think it was only on Steem, but I've honestly lost track of it to be fully certain. All I know is that it used to be a thing. So did many other things that I'm glad have changed, such as bid hots.
This 11% may be integral for 3Speak's development. I can't say for certain since I'm not involved closely like that, but I have a feeling somebody will clue us in to why it's that high right now.
I see so many die-hard Hive users who still decide to upload to YouTube. It doesn't bother me, frankly YouTube is still one of my most used apps. I do not however want to leave 3Speak out in the cold because I think they are going to give all videos across the world a real chance to be seen.
As for the uploaded, we can agree that is not perfected yet. I write all of my descriptions in PeakD first and then just copy and paste it over to the 3Speak uploaded. I’ve yet to have too much text so the character limit hasn’t been an issue for me. Then again my video descriptions are usually shorter than a normal blog post.
Yeah I think the 11% is important to 3Speak. I just really hope though that they would reconsider lowering it down. We shall await the response from 3speak. I'm also curious about it.
Maybe the plan is to keep it where it's at now and then decrease once the value of their platform increases. That seems sensible to me, but I can't say for sure yet why the setting is currently at the number that it's at.
This makes me wonder why Exxp, for connecting your wordpress website to the Hive blockchain, is really worth a 15% beneficiary. I grudgingly accept it because I want my website connected. But sometimes I'm just... ugh.
I understand 3Speak having such a beneficiary amount due to video hosting and servers, but Exxp doesn't really have to worry about things like that.
Hmm.
Holy hell, I had no idea they took 15%. It’s a great option if you have your own website, but that is a massive cost. I seriously wonder what their reasoning is for such a high %. It’s a whole different story than 3Speak’s video storage costs.
Video hosting is expensive, so I can see why they went with the 11% figure. They aren't making money from ads or anything like YouTube does, so they need to be able to pay for the stuff needed to run. People tend to forget that even with 11% of the rewards going back to 3Speak, 99.99% of people still make more posting to 3Speak than they do posting their video content to YouTube. I have posted a lot of videos to YouTube and have not even made a penny from them, so I really don't have an issue with posting to 3Speak and them taking a portion of the rewards to fund the service they provide.
No doubt about it. Eddie chimed in and said he's seen the numbers and that alone is enough to make me feel more comfortable giving away that 11%. I wasn't sure exactly how much something like that costs, but evidently, it is NOT cheap.
I'm right there with you on YT, they've never given me anything, not even a thank you. However every day there is somebody waiting to reward many 3Speak users. We definitely have a better setup over here, when will the world realize this? Probably once all of the annoying bugs are gone and once there are sleek mobile apps for everything. Until then, people that are here early like us will just have to deal with some of the setbacks of these apps being so new to the scene still.
Video servers are expensive to run. I said that it was too much when they also threw random ads on my videos which I haven't seen in some time so I think they took that off. That I wasn't down with.
But I don't mind the 11% hit because I know how much those servers cost to run. Cost of doing business
You and a few others have mentioned those high server costs. I think that alone should make people feel more comfortable giving away that 11%.
I remember a short period of ads. Nothing annoys me more than the ads on YouTube and I refuse to pay for premium. That month's free trial sure was nice though.
I think that in the future if 3Speak ever decides to do ads again, then the beneficiary % should drop to balance it out. It's a tough call as to whether I'm for or against ads. I hate being forced to watch ads that I don't care about. However, I definitely get some ads that are perfect for me and inform me about something new. Plus, that ad pay is lucrative when there is a massive community to support it. Guess we will have to see how things change in the future.
Yeah, like I said, percentage I am okay with, percentage with ads, not so much. I hate ads, lol.
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I was in the camp that thought 11% was too much, but after reading the comments, I agree with them. We don't have a giant like Google behind us and if 11% is what it takes to run and develop the system for now, I won't hesitate to give it. I've used 3speak before and I learned how to use it from you. I'm grateful for that.
There are some bugs and problems with the platform, but they will go away in the future. Especially considering that there is a good team behind it. I'm sure you have enlightened a lot of people about this. I'm sure a lot of people wonder about it but either don't ask or just stop using 3speak. Now that everyone knows why, we should all continue to support 3speak together. Thanks for the great post.
You’re absolutely right. Now that people know why the 11% is there, hopefully there will be more people who are willing to give the platform a chance. Once we are further into the development of all this, things will change for the better. Just gotta be patient. .
I totally agree, 11 % is too high if your post is not curated by 3speak. In Kerala for that, we say like "pichha chattill ki ittu varuka".
That's not all, the interface of 3speak sucks (post preview has zero logic, I don't even know how to upload images using the 3speak interface, and overall congested feeling while using it), file size limitations and encoding failure are also annoying (you will lose everything that you wrote).
I would say that, they should reduce it to 1-5% max. So that those people who don't get curated by 3speak won't get affected.
3speak if you are seeing this please make some logic in the writing section. Who wants to see the thumbnail of the video, while writing their blogs. Instead, place the video on top and provide a post preview on the right side like peakd and ecency.
As long as you are pulling in some views, the threespeak account does a really good job of curating usually. I'd say that 9/10 of my videos end up getting a chunky vote from that account. That alone balances out the high 11% usually since they are giving it right back by way of vote.
A temporary solution for any of the upload issues you have is to format your post on PeakD and then just copy and paste all of it into the video description as you are uploading it. Saving to your drafts on PeakD is also a great way to make sure that you never lose your post if encoding fails.
After seeing some of the comments today, it seems that the 11% is justified and going towards making sure 3Speak is a success. I'd say that once HIVE and SPK go big, these small percentages can probably be reduced even more. The thing to keep in mind is that many of us being rewarded on Hive and 3Speak most likely wouldn't earn on any of the legacy Web2 social media. Even if we somehow managed to find success, there are so many rules there. We have it better here.
I thank you for your valuable input though.
I feel sorry for saying like that before, after reading the comments. I think they will have their reasons for fixing it at 11%.
When compounded over time 11% can be a very high cut to take. I think it's too much. Also, consider that it's also a 50/50 split in the rewards.
I think the main point is why are they taking 11% cut? Maybe they've said the reason why before, maybe they've not. But this new post of yours will allow us to know why. Hopefully, there's a sound reason behind it. 3speak has a great team behind it and they're doing incredible work.
If you're somebody who posts 100% of their Hive content to 3Speak, that 11% becomes a lot more noticeable.
I'm sure there is some reason behind this decision, just not 100% sure exactly what that is yet. I do think their team has the community in mind always, so I know it's nothing malicious... maybe just an afterthought at present time.
yea man, 100% agree with u.
i don't even pay attention to those %'s, but yea, it matters. plus why would anyone make a vid that IS difinitely cool (at least in daltono's case) but take MORE time to edit and stuff AND gets less rewards on average than using an easier/faster posting method like liketu, PLUS they are not taking so much of your rewards?!
:P but yea, 3speak is very cool, but I wouldnt say its any better that seeing a liketu or d.buzz post, or even just a good ole peakd post. not to even mention the 11%
maybe the 3spk team is also the ones who cut that grass, so don't expect it will happen too often.. :P j/k
If it were all about rewards, I wouldn’t be using 3Speak quite as much. Liketu and 3Speak are both great options for photos and video respectively. We are lucky to have them although they are still in their primitive stages.
I guess to answer that one question… I spend time editing although I know it will most likely result in less rewards than a photo post… simply because I enjoy it tremendously.
all good. 😉 we do the hivin for more than just the rewards anyway.
Great post for the comments man! I didn’t know it but have learned a lot from the comments made. Makes sense how expensive things are! I was curious listening to your video the other day what was controversial but here it is. Didn’t get to listen to this one yet but maybe one day, going on vacation myself! :D
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I have learned a lot from all the great comments too. It pays to ask questions, quite literally in this instance. Now that I've talked to some people on the inside about it, the 11% really doesn't seem that controversial to me anymore. At this stage it seems essential and hopefully once things blossom that number goes down. Until then we gotta just keep going and work together so we all win!
Where are you headed for vacation?
I dont have a problem with the 11%, especially based on some of the points brung up in the comments like business expenses, more support from curators, etc. But I definitely appreciate the post! These discussions give users a better understanding of what is happening in the background and create more transparency !PIZZA
Very happy to see another person come in here with a sound mind and drop something positive. I’m much more okay with the 11% after making this post. A lot of people brought up some great points.
the truth is that it is a somewhat complicated issue and if they don't explain it it could be more complicated but some rewards of 11% I imagine will be to improve the application in the future but of course if we compare it with other applications those who use 3Speak are at a disadvantage
Luckily one of the team members took the time to explain in another comment on this post. This is indeed complicated, but it seems like the 11% beneficiary rewards are being put to good use.
the truth is that this 11% seems very excessive but they will have their reasons
Many great comments on this post. I feel that if you read some of them, you will feel more okay with the 11% number.
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