The three pillars of WeTube: freedom, privacy, voluntary moderation
Imagine a web page where you can upload any video, music, image or document, and it will be inmediatly avaiable to everybody without restrictions, without anybody knowing who you are (if you want), without anybody censoring you.
Imagine a web page where you can access any media you want without anybody having to know what are you doing, not being imposed to authenticate with your real ID, IP, or associated credit card number, not being observed by the big brother, and at the same time the content you access is of high quality and helpful for your evolution and relationships.
Imagine you are a publisher, a periodist or an editor, and there is a place where you can safetly publish your discoverings, but without any censorship at all, while at the same time you are able to get rid of the junk and noise around you, providing only good quality researches and associations with you audence.
Imagine you are an artist that lives for and from your art, and you have a free place where you can express your ideas and concepts, participate in comunity with your followers and other artists, and even earn the money you deserve for your hard work, without imposing others and not having to pay big comissions to any private editor or distributor, nor having to support their greed and censorships.
Imagine a media where you can get rid of the junk so easy as doing a click. Imagine being your own moderator, where you can select what is good and bad for yourself and your family, without having to surrender yourself to what other has decided, specially when that other is trying to impose you a vision you don't agree with.
Imagine a place where you can choose multiple moderators, including yourself or no moderators at all, being them people and organizations you really trust, and the posibility to add or remove them without restriction. Imagine how good a free moderator could be if their motivation is to serve only what people want while removing what they don't, not what a big guy on top of him/her decides. Moderators with big impositions and bad appliance of filters would be rapidly abandoned by the comunity, and their reputation disminished.
Imagine that the media you see is temporaly stored on your computer so you can see it multiple times without having to reload it. Imagine that the content you like most is permanently stored on your computer so if you lost your internet connection you can still access it. Imagine a safeguard of all the important media you have in case of media server shutdowns, human crisis, war, or goverment censorship. You don't have that in today's standard media providers, as they prohibit you to store the content. Even companies like Google prohibits the publishing of browsers add-ons that use a trick to record the media, making YouTube videos very difficult to get stored locally with the Chrome browser.
Imagine that you are a legit enterpreneur and have a useful and good business that you need to promote. The audence of this new media provider will be large and a real oportunity for you to come in. Every single area of business you can think of is covered, and you'll be able to perfectly select the categories you want to be in. Even better is the fact that advertisers can select to what moderation they want to be attached, so you can perfectly choose moderators who provide legal only content in your country.
Imagine that you are a programmer and/or a system administrator and you want your deserved reward for your hard work while being useful to humanity. You can host a server and earn bitcoins proportional to the amount of bandwith, space and maintence you serve. At the same time, the protocol is specially designed to protect you against the arbitrarian laws, as you can select which moderators you're going to serve, and therefore, the content your server helps the user to download. But not even that, most of the contents are actually not stored in your servers, but interchanged between users alone, making this protocol a really distributed anonymous one. We even optionally protect your IP with a technology similar to hidden Tor services if you want to serve delicate searches, at only the cost of some added latency. You are a crucial part of this revolution.
Is this another moderated system?
Yes and no. It is moderated in the sense that oneself can be the moderator, or relay the task to a trusted moderator or a group of moderators. The magic of this system is that it allows full freedom, while maintaing the convenience of good-quality results and potential legality, as explained bellow.
First things first. In WeTube, there is a root moderator called “unmoderator” which acepts everything and cannot be violated in any form. This moderator resides in no place and all its content is purely in the cloud of users. Not a single part of this moderator content and searches resides in any server, except if the server administrator decides so, which s/he must explicitly configure to. This moderator fullfils freedom and zero discrimination, which unfortunately includes low quality results and potentially some illegal content in some countries.
You can compare this unmoderator with raw eMule, Tor hidden services, Gnutella, Kademlia, and other p2p protocols offering searches and/or magnet links. One who has used those programs knows that the results are more often than not of very low quality, when not ilegit or honeypots. But yet, people use those programs because of censorships and copyright issues in their countries, so they accept the junk in favor to obtain some valuable content.
That drives us to a problem: because no moderation is taken place, both the quality and legality of the content is disminished, and most people don't use them because of that.
So, what to do? We dont want to be illegal, and at the same time we want full access to quality content which is censored in central mainstream medias. We also want privacy, one thing wich we don't have today unless we use very complicated technology.
The point here is: you can't have legallity and good quality content in an unmoderated system. After a while, the system will be full of junk and legally dungerous staff.
So we introduce moderators. But let the thing be WELL done. We choose to be OUR OWN moderators. Certainly not a good thing for opressive business and goverments, who want to be the only one moderators (we should call them opressive censorers, or just fascists), but still a good thing for goverments and enterpreneus who embrace freedom and really take care of their citicens/clients.
When a user enters in the WeTube network, s/he is ussually attached to a moderator which only censors things which are not relevant to the theme s/he is attached to. For example, one moderator can specialize only on providing news, throwing out the rest. Another moderator could provide a good collection of music of a specific style. There could be also more general moderators which only accepts everything which is legal in his/her country. And there could be another interesting type of moderator which accept content which is censored in his/her country, but that content is globally considered good in the rest of the world, making him/herself an activist pro human rights against dictatorships.
A user of WeTube allways can choose whose moderators s/he wants. He is presented with a default, which is usually a group of moderators which keeps things legal. But s/he can allways choose to exit that moderation, or combine with others. Yes, multiple moderators are allowed, but interesting enough, the system allows also to be attached only to “unmoderated” (moderators themselves enter in this mode to pick good staff througout filtering).
Anyone can be a moderator and no personal information is required. Just register a nick and go to the moderation area, and there you got it.
Now it is time to introduce the concept of WeTube entry points:
The entrance to the world of WeTube
The p2p programs are a problem in themselves. They require the user to install an application in their computers and configure things. The learning curve is also ussually high, and passing links to another person is complicate because requires both sides to have the program installed and configured. Another important problem is that those programs are not really real-time, so the user must wait for the entire media to download in order to start watching it, which is extremely slow and inconvenient.
So we propose a very nice solution: WeTube can run in your browser and in your mobile device, so you can pass links around, use a nice interface, embed videos in your blogs, send by email, and do with the content all the things you can actually do with with any page.
But, because WeTube is in fact a p2p protocol, with thousands of servers and users connected to it and making it run, the web is only one of the possible interfaces. As a protocol, it can run on webpages, but also in the form of applications which uses the WeTube libraries to present themselves in other convinient forms. Desktop applications and mobile applications are perfectly posible.
The average user will use a simple web interface as his/her entry point. Many WeTube servers will also provide an entry point that will download the JavaScript program that runs in the browser, which is in fact the interface for WeTube. Optionaly, every entry point to WeTube can choose their default moderators, and even disallow the users to select moderators which provide illegal material, just to avoid legal issues. Of course, in this case, the user can change the entry point for another less restricted that allows more moderators, or simply download a full-featured browser extension with unlimited access.
The matter of allowing entry points to be fully moderated has many advantages:
- The site itself can avoid legal issues.
- A site that is meant to provide content for just one specific area, for example, news or scientifics, can filter the rest out.
-A site with content only allowed for childs, could be considered safe and can provide only useful and educative content for them, filtering out violence or sex, and also boring things.
Those sites are also a way to promote WeTube itself.