I love doing crypto experiments. I love comparing crypto projects to their mainstream competitors. I do this for several reasons, the main one being, ease of use. How easy is it for Joe Normie to hop on board and get involved. I also like to see how ease of use compares to the traditional mainstream product.
2013 is over! Blockchain prouducts have been around for a bit now. If they're not easy to use, they're just not going to get used. At least that's my take on it, and it really affects how much I'm willing to invest into a platform.
HIVE is a good example of that. Sign up and onboarding is way better than the Steemit days. I have to admit, when new users can't get signed up, it makes me a little more than concerned about the amount of money and time I'm willing to invest into it.
Hive is easy to use, has community, and we're seeing a lot of development happening. It's also super easy for the averager person to get singed up and started. I'm way more confident in HIVE than I ever was with Steemit!
Today eTorroUS sent over a swag box and I thought I'd do a video unboxing. My first instinct was to upload it to 3speak, I have no idea what's up but I couldn't even get signed up or logged in.
Next d.tube. It used to be my go to platform but they've had some issues in the not so far off past. I decided to give them another try. I used to be able to sign in with my Steemit credentials, figured my Hive credentials would work just fine.. No such luck. NEXT
In all fairness, I will give both 3speak and d.tube another chance. I was just expecting to login, upload a video and be done with it. On to lbry
LBRY.tv - No problem logging in. Video uploaded fine, I did get a message about my bitrate being over 5Mbps. I continued on, uploaded the video, selected a thumbnail, wrote the description and done!
For the most part, no problems at all with the exception of the lbry.tv wanting me to fix this bitrate issue. I'll have to research this for my next video upload. The video did upload to the server, no problems really. Got buffering on the playback but that's probably due to the bitrate warning I got. Again, I'll research a fix for that on my next upload. I really do love the lbry platform though, and plan on posting more there in the future. Here's a link to the lbry TV post if you want to check it out for yourself.
https://lbry.tv/@BitcoinDood:a/eToroUnboxing:c
Youtube! The devil himself. Guess what. No issues at all. Video uploaded no problem. No issue with bitrates. No buffering on playback. Logged in with Google account. Easy peasy and upsetting as hell. I don't like anything about this platform other than it's ease of use.
Copy paste link and it's available in my Hive blog.
Hands down YouTube wins! Boo... Hiss...
Anyway, my point to all this is that we have a ways to go to catch up to where YouTube is at. I was really disappointed that I couldn't use the HIVE based dApps as well. Not sure what was happening there but I'm going to have to figure this out. Still HIVE is my go to for blogging now!
This was kind of an important experiment for me. I hate these corporate platforms that deplatform users, censor or select what type of political content is acceptable (censorship), and use sneaky algorithms to select content for users. Not to mention the abuse of user data.
Our blockchain based platforms have to be just as easy to use as the mainstream competitors. This is the only way we compete. The end user is extremely fickle. They don't care about the stuff I mentioned above. All they want is a seamless easy to use experience with no hassles. Until we're able to give that to the general public we remain a second best alternative used only by people in the industry with no chance of advancing or competing with the mainstream!
UPDATE and EDIT: I finally got signed in with 3Speak. I have no idea what the problem was earlier but I'd click the signup button and nothing would happen. Tried again after dinner and got signed right up. I posted the video to 3speak. Encoding took some time but no problems at all. I'm really looking forward to posting video content to 3speak now. With the exception of the wait time, it was pretty darn close to YouTubes ease of use. Also, no buffering issues on playback. Here's the 3Speak video. I'm really happy I got this working now!
You are right that the alternatives have to be as good as the mainstream to succeed. Youtube is so easy. It takes just about any form of video. I do use @threespeak, but it had to be MP4 and you have to upload your own static image for it to use. That can be a real pain on a phone as it has to be a pretty small file. I see dtube videos on Hive, but I have not used it recently. Not tried libry, but then I'd have to start from scratch there.
Apart from ease of use the other issue is the size of the audience. If your videos are not seen then there is little point. As I see it amateurs like me are doing better than they should as it stands. If real pros can move into Hive and bring their audience then the rewards distribution will change in their favour. I will make the most of it whilst it lasts. At least I have enough HP to give fairly good votes.
!BEER
So is there a trick to signing up for @threespeak? The signup page asks for an email and password, but then doesn't do anything. At least that's how it worked for me.
You should crosspost to LBRY with your video stuff. You would probably do good there. A lot of the crypto community is over there and everyone is supporting each other. I actually have to get over there more, but you earn for watching videos and participating too.
Working on building up my voting power now. I'm a lot more confident in HIVE! going to be doing another decent power up on PUD day and get my HP up over 2K. I'm still really small, but I'm going to keep growing this account. Doubled my vote power already since Steemit. I'm loving the community spirit that's growing now too. We didn't have this with Steemit! There's a pride factor growing now! That's awesome!
Maybe talk to the 3speak people on Discord as I'm sure they will want you on board. I think I had some issues initially, but now I just log in each time. Had to connect it to my Hive account. It's been a while, so not sure what was involved.
We need to build on what we have with Hive. We need to pull in other crypto communities as well as content creators. I think we have a good basis, but growth has been a struggle for various reasons. It has been frustrating.
!ENGAGE 25
I got it straightened out. I have no idea what was going on this afternoon. After dinner, clicked sign up, and was good to go a few minutes later. Posted my first video their and all went well. Might start doing a weekly vlog on the crypto space.
Good to hear that. I am using Youtube less these days, but I never made a cent from it anyway. We need to encourage people to move away from it.
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.ENGAGEtokens.You need to stake more BEER (24 staked BEER allows you to call BEER one time per day)
I'll have to look into this. Thanks and will do.
Absolutely agree! This is something I’m advocating from my early days crypto blogging space. HIVE is progressing indeed, but still, some steps to go.
3speak, should be possible with HIVE account. Also with email. Maybe you have to signup with email and only after that can connect HIVE account. I remember vaguely they changed something not too long ago.
I'm going to mess with that later tonight and see what's up. For the life of me, I just couldn't get logged in. Thanks.
I just checked: indeed, login first with email/pwd. When you dont have such account, then register first. When having this email account, then you can connect your existing HIVE account. The cool thing here is that people can use 3Speak without having an HIVE account, which makes this service more accessible, also for those who dont understand crypto/HIVE and all. Am not a frequent user of 3Speak, but never had problems to watch 3Speak based content through hive.blog and PeakD, ie stable service. Unlike DTube. Maybe the later became a bit more stable in last period, but before, many problems watching content. Good luck with setting up 3Speak! :)
Seems to be working now. I'm having login issues though. Besides that everything is working great. Strangely, this morning I wasn't able to log in. I closed all my browser windows, the reopened 3speak and everything worked fine. Same thing last night after dinner on a different computer. IDK, everything working fine now, and I'm loving this platform a lot. I've already found a ton of great content and videos I liked. A wonderful platform indeed.
Yea, I like 3speak much better than other video platforms in crypto space. One time I uploaded a large documentary without any problems. It took a few hours, but it was high resolution 45 to 60 minute video. Never had a problem with playback and all. I think they still have some part of their service centralised using ipfs for storing of the videos itself (guess the content is distributed but access to it is centralised). They plan to change this to distribute content storage AND access to all participants running the 3speak application, therefore these users will become part of distributing the content to others, kinda like bittorrent, or maybe exactly like bittorrent. Those who distribute content to others, will earn tokens.
The idea behind this is that when access to content is distributed, no authority is able to shut it down. That said, there are always methods to shut things down, if not by technology, by fines and all, but I guess the 3speak owners dont believe in authority :)
Interestingly, the people behind 3speak are so against Justin Sun and TRON, but Justin saw the light already long time ago. He bought some service based on bittorrent a long time ago, probably for that reason!
just logged in on 3speak, works fine. they did the email login and than you need to connect your hive acc, but it was while ago.
I'm going to get to the bottom of this right after dinner. Thanks!
There are some teams working on that, but it is a long road for them. Youtube had issues when they first started, but with years of ease of use for the average user, it has become the standard.
I keep reading that block chains are great for text, but when it comes to imagery, video and photo, it is not so simple, thus the image servers. At least there are a couple teams working on the video option as you mentioned.
I remember when YouTube first came out and they had serious issues, plus a lot of people were still on dial up connections if I remember correctly. Broadband was just starting to catch on. They certainly did have a long time to work all the bugs.
I finally got signed into 3Speak, I have no idea what the problem was earlier but I got the video loaded and was pretty impressed. Looking forward to posting there more in the future.
Hive has world wide reach, and I follow a lot of people from a lot of countries. For a YT video, most often it I get the Not available in your area, and have to do a manual search for the linked video. I have not had that problem yet on dtube or 3speak videos. So for a person wanting world reach in the video depart meant with out the target audience having to go out and hunt for a version in their country I think those two are going to be the video future.
Thanks for the review. I agree about the ease of use. The same can be said for about anything on the Hive blockchain, but it is getting better in some ways.
The few times I have used 3Speak it seemed to work just fine. Best of luck with it in the future.
I used d.tube a bunch of times, I don't think I've used 3speak yet. Thanks
To fix that bitrate issue on LBRY, download FFmpeg and point LBRY at the EXE. It'll transcode it in-app before uploading it. The reason why they don't include that automatically is due to licensing, I believe. There should be some info on it in your settings...
Just seen this comment. Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for that. I'll look into trying that next time.