Odysee and LBRY have changed a great deal over the years and as someone who helped endorse them, referred thousands of people, recommended it, and did LBRY first exclusive videos, we need to talk about what has happened to them.
This is my 515th episode/article. I put a great deal of work into this content so if you find it valuable, please do like, share, comment and subscribe!
When it started out, there was no KYC of any kind, you could freely earn LBC, it was inexpensive to post content and they gave out enough free LBC for people to still afford to use the platform. They claimed that if you used LBRY the “decentralized” application that it was different from Odysee and that it was in fact decentralized and censorship-resistant. They claimed they were not only a YouTube alternative, but a YouTube successor.
That has all changed. TLDR: you have to pay to use the platform, they have ads with no ad share for users, they want you to pay with a credit card, they have KYC, they didn’t payout LBC they promised to creators who promoted them for 2 years, it’s not decentralized, they ban channels, monetization is completely centralized, and basically everything they were championing themselves for doing isn’t really something they offer.
Here's why I’m concerned:
- The governance of LBRY and LBC is 100% centralized and controlled by them (Lab From Mars).
- They ban channels on the "decentralized" application. – https://odysee.com/@paintythepirate:4
o You can spin up your own server and do a bunch of extra work to view banned content which is better than nothing, but the reality is almost no one knows about it, how to do it, nor will they do it, just like with the LBRY 100k LBC claim mentioned below. - They tanked rewards, I now get like close to just 1% of what I used to earn as a creator there. I earn more from Brave browser ad rewards now. You also need to do a lite KYC “verify” to earn rewards.
o The tokenomics were short-sighted and clearly don’t work. The LBC monetization is 100% centralized and always going down. Since they prepared so poorly what really happened is the top creators and early creators got all the LBC and then they massively lowered rewards for everyone else. I don’t know many crypto social platforms that do this that weren’t rug pulls like Bitclout, SoMee, or Uptrennd.
o https://verify.lbry.com/ - You need Discord, two legacy social platforms and to try to make a pitch with as much personal details as you can in hopes that they will approve you after manual inspection. Not only is this a ton of KYC, it relies on legacy platforms which also need tons of KYC, and they leave it completely open to human bias with the manual inspection. The biggest problem with censorship isn’t that evil people exist, it’s that you give people the ability to potentially do evil or make mistakes when you could provide a trustless solution with blockchain instead. - They just announced ads (and there is still no ad share for creators).
- You have to pay LBC to post videos.
- To buy their new premium membership so you don't see ads, you have to KYC & use a credit card.
- There is no incentive to keep holding LBC – The way it was used previously hardly works now and creators are mainly incentivized to just sell right away now.
- They didn't release a claim feature for LBRY partner founders who were owed 100k LBC on February 14 2022
o This was probably one of the more egregious things they did. They provided very hard to follow instructions that very few can or have been able to follow. You can just email them and go through a manual process, but I believe this was just a way to setup obstacles for this process to slow down and or entirely mitigate a massive dump of LBC. With it’s current 40,000 trade volume in the last 24 hours, that would suggest that 1.1 million LBC would be an entire days worth of volume which would just be 11 creators who received the 100k selling. It’s almost been two months and there is still no feature for these users as promised.
You might be thinking hey this guy is a nobody, who cares what he thinks about this stuff, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Well, I was one of the first creators and that’s why I got the 100k for being a founding partner creator, I was in their LBRY first program, had upgraded rewards, interviewed Julian Chandra and Jeremy Kauffman, and am the 47th most popular creator on the platforms according to https://lbrynomics.com.
Interview 1: https://odysee.com/@ScottCBusiness:4/Julian-Chandra:b
Interview 2: https://odysee.com/@ScottCBusiness:4/Interviewing-Jeremy-Kauffman-From-LBRY:7
I genuinely believed for a long time that I was one of few people who even truly understood the mechanics of the platform and in the early days I even used the command line to do my claims. I had a whole channel dedicated to educating people on how to use LBRY: https://odysee.com/@HowToLBRY:e.
I poured in countless hours to this platform and there is really no benefit for me to share all of this aside from alienating LBRY users and upsetting them with all this information. The reality is that if you don’t have your policies and promises hard-coded into the blockchain, they aren’t real promises and policies that you can rely on.
While I understand they are in an SEC lawsuit right now and that has made things hard for them, I don’t think that abandoning everything they originally stood for it the right play. It also makes me wonder about giving out the 100k LBC to founding creators as they knew about the SEC lawsuit during that time and had us going around promoting it anyway for a 2 year timelocked period. When they finally announced the SEC case their coin skyrocketed then tanked in what “looks” like a rug pull in retrospect.
https://odysee.com/@lbry:3f/lbryin2022:f – In this blog they said it perfectly. “LBRY is not the future of web3 social video” and “The future of LBRY social video is Odysee.” I think this perfectly sums it up. The future of the platform is not about decentralization, it’s about their centralized front end of Odysee.
Also anyone who tells you “it’s just one interface and that you can make your own” is making a disingenuous argument since no one is building interfaces on LBRY except them and they control the entirety of the governance of LBC and the LBRY protocol.
~~~ embed:1503774789709844482 - This is the Twitter thread where I started talking about this and Jeremy responded there. His responses made sense, but don’t change the reality of the situation or the results we have now. twitter metadata:U2NvdHRDQnVzaW5lc3N8fGh0dHBzOi8vdHdpdHRlci5jb20vU2NvdHRDQnVzaW5lc3Mvc3RhdHVzLzE1MDM3NzQ3ODk3MDk4NDQ0ODIgLSBUaGlzIGlzIHRoZSBUd2l0dGVyIHRocmVhZCB3aGVyZSBJIHN0YXJ0ZWQgdGFsa2luZyBhYm91dCB0aGlzIGFuZCBKZXJlbXkgcmVzcG9uZGVkIHRoZXJlLiBIaXMgcmVzcG9uc2VzIG1hZGUgc2Vuc2UsIGJ1dCBkb27igJl0IGNoYW5nZSB0aGUgcmVhbGl0eSBvZiB0aGUgc2l0dWF0aW9uIG9yIHRoZSByZXN1bHRzIHdlIGhhdmUgbm93Lnw= ~~~
If you are sitting here wondering “then what do I use?” – 3Speak on Hive and D.Tube are your best bets right now for decentralized video that lives on the blockchain with decentralized monetization.
Am I wrong about LBRY/Odysee? Am I missing something? How important is monetization and decentralization? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and is purely for entertainment purposes. What you see, hear, or read is my personal opinion, and any statements made are based on my views and should not be misconstrued as fact. My crypto portfolio may or may not be simulated
👥 Support Me & Follow Me Elsewhere 👥
👉 http://www.scottcbusiness.com
Ask questions in my Telegram: https://t.me/cryptoandthings
You can find all my cryptocurrency addresses on https://cointr.ee/scottcbusiness
You can find all of my referral links here: https://linktr.ee/scottcbusiness
▶️ 3Speak
From now on, stay in Hive.
Post more on 3Speak, at the end our “boring chain will be too exciting to be ignored”.
We are the true leader in decentralization, web3.0
Yeah I mean I've always used Hive and started here :) I'll still post everywhere though
Agree. You should post everywhere. Any competition is better than no competition. This isn't a zero sum game.
Exactly :)
Congratulations @scottcbusiness! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s):
Your next target is to reach 66000 upvotes.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:
Support the HiveBuzz project. Vote for our proposal!
Seems like either a bait and switch or the SEC blackmailed them...
Yeah, I don't want to make accusations, but I'm suspicious
This is a recurring thing. Many decentralized apps and networks are fairly centralized if you look closely
1000%. I gave LBRY too much benefit of the doubt
This is good information for the next generation not to waste their time on this project! I wish there were more of these.
!BEER
I will be doing my comprehensive review soon. Of course, hive is at the top.
Great, I look forward to reading it!
Thanks for tuning in!
View or trade
BEER.Hey @scottcbusiness, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @stdd for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.Could be result of all the trouble with governments they've been getting.
Even if that fails we have SPK & their airdrop https://spk.dlux.io/
Hope you are claiming the free LARYNX 😄
!PIZZA
Yes I have been :) Yeah my concern was that they knew about the lawsuit when they gave us the 100k then it tanked before we could claim because they announced it.
PIZZA Holders sent $PIZZA tips in this post's comments:
@d-zero(2/5) tipped @scottcbusiness (x1)
Please vote for pizza.witness!
I make tons on Dtube. Just from my comments, the trick is to buy about 5,000 Dtube coins on Ionomy then let your Dtube Voting Power climb to 10 Million. VP. I just comment with 1% VP.
Ionomy: https://exchange.ionomy.com/en/aff/f7862c1aeae8e0399176a908fcecbcfe
The trick is spending $5000? lol I get it but like
5000 Dtube coins…. That’s only $750 USD …
Kind of insane and not super reliable that it's selling for $0.97 on Uniswap and $0.14 on Ionomy in CAD.
Or maybe Uniswap is just being wonky and FTX is being trash for pulling it from there lol. I guess my concern then is that it being only tradeable on Ionomy is a pretty big risk. Yikes I guess my earnings are also exponentially lower :(
Yes ... I just send my Dtube to Ionomy and convert to Bitcoin there for very low fees. It adds up very fast.
I may have to start holding more DTC I guess eh. So your main plays are DTC, Blurt, and Hive?
No… my main plays are Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cosmos (Atom) … I have almost nothing in DTC, Blurt or Hive. But I like how I can earn these coins from just powering up and earning from Curation. Comments and upvoting.
We have always known this about lbry. It was inevitable to go this way based on their tokenomics. Their tech was ahead of the time of their tokenomics and it has hurt them.
We hope that SPK.Network will help them with tones of web3 tools to get back to true ownerless web3
Agreed. I guess I had a little more hope for the platform going the right direction than I should have
We always check like this:
Is there a company?
Is there an ICO?
is there a CEO?
Is there a pre mine?
Is venture capital involved?
Is the entity suiable?
If the answer is yes to any of these, it’s probably centralised.
Decentralised community chains must answer no to all of the above. And even then they might not be decentralised.
We have found keeping SPK network community owned and decentralised is counter intuitive and very difficult.
But we are moving along nicely now. Our miner token is out and our governance token will be built soon.
It answers no to all of the above questions.
We welcome you to be a part owner and claim your larynx monthly based on your jan 6th hive balance.
Web3 owned by the community
What you explain is very interesting, it's incredible. From what I see you have invested a lot of work consistently, surely you will have good results.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 37/47) Liquid rewards.
what a disappointment...
seems like we are always coming back to Hive ;)
Yes indeed. Good ol Hive!
very good video
Thanks for watching!
I agree, LBRY haven't been the same since Jeremy Left, I still use it since It's still better on YouTube But I also go to other platforms.
Yeah for sure
I still check in there from time to time but sounds like I won't need to anymore. I watched a lot of your videos there. I'll just watch on 3speak from now on. It might be nice to contact a bunch of creators over there and move them here.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Yeah, I will be funneling people here instead
Sad news all round. Sad for you after you've put in so much work and sad for us all that another option has effectively put itself out of play. Thanks for the clear and comprehensive update.
Yeah I will still use it, reluctantly.
#1Ham
Oops, forgot this uses markdown.
NUMBER ONE HAM!
Sorry took me a while to get around to watching. Thank you for the video and making this known. It's extremely sad that all they've done is take the long road to building just another YouTube and deceived so many people, me included in the beginning.
I never got to say thank you for influencing me to get on decentralized social media 2 yrs ago. It's the greatest thing I've ever done.
Long live the Freedom of Speech!
Now wheres those audio podcast!?!? ROFL!
Speaking of audio podcast. have you looked at the Hive dapp Aureal?
https://aureal.one/
Kinda like Anchor but is on Hive cause Anchor sucks, lol.
Ah okay true, I definitely need to get those audio podcasts going for sure!
Lol!
You get to it eventually. With all the stuff you do you almost need a staff of people to get all your posts done across all your platforms.
Yeah it almost takes longer to post than to edit and create lol