Thumb-up triggered micro-donations

Hello PeerTube community,

Thank you for your great product! We’d like to help you in solving some of the challenges for its mass adoption. To attract content creators one would need to make sure they get visibility and money, build in « the circulatory system », to improve user experience a new liberal and decentralized kind of content filtering and discovery is needed.

We develop a free nonprofit micro-donation processor with a focus on privacy and freedom. It could be a good fit for PeerTube in multiple ways:

  • Thumb-up triggered or recurring micro-donations: transparent and optionally anonymous with no service fees, connected to PeerTube keys so that they don’t require additional clicks for checkout. Instance domain owners can choose to receive a share to make hosting sustainable and scalable.

  • Visibility: applications built on the open donation statistics enable users to follow their favorite creators no matter where they publish. There’s not much difference where your creators choose to publish - YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion or PeerTube - you will see them alike, even if they happen to get banned from one of the platforms. Micro-donations to embedded content are shared between creator and PeerTube instance host.

  • Decentralized crowdsourced moderation: while universal moderation practices of the market leaders underperform, complete absence of moderation on some PeerTube instances doesn’t improve user experience either. Smartlike helps develop systems where users decide on whether or how to filter the Internet.

Details on Smartlike

Let us cooperate!
Thank you,
Vadim Frolov, smartlike.org, Vienna

Hi again.
I need your opinion on the proposed method to relay PeerTube likes as micro-donations:

Outside PeerTube
Anonymous micro-donations are accumulated per video and shared between PeerTube channels and hosting instances (example). To get paid out, users need to connect their PeerTube to Smartlike accounts by mentioning their Smartlike account number in their profile description on PeerTube. Instance administrators can add the signature as DNS entry and choose what share they would like to receive (0-100%).

Inside PeerTube
When users connect their accounts, they can opt to have their PeerTube keys trusted on Smartlike in order to make one-click micro-donations when pressing thumb-up buttons on PeerTube. An instance of the proposed relay then follows PeerTube instances and transparently forwards signed thumb-up/comment transactions from connected users to Smartlike where they are turned into micro-donations.

What do you think of relaying likes? Shall we proceed in this direction or take another approach? Thank you for your feedback!

Hello,

Likes/Dislikes may not be federated and may be private so your relay could not be notified about this action

Thank you for responding @Chocobozzz
I’m testing with the latest PeerTube version and it works. Aren’t likes supposed to give all (federated) users a hint on video popularity and help deciding on whether to watch it or not? They seem to be federated. I’m a fedi novice, of course. What am I missing?

We plan to stop forwarding likes to everybody in the federation in the future to improve user privacy. We prefer to keep like information (« who likes the video ») on the server that hosts the video and the server that hosts the user. Other server would just have the like number information, but would not know who likes the video. But maybe it will still be a valid federation for your use case?

1 « J'aime »

It surely makes sense.
I hope you still support a federation option for micro-donations. Anonymous user accounts may prefer convenience and transparency. I believe the feature might be vital for PeerTube development since popular content creators need to be attracted and conventional monetization models don’t fit well.

Ideally, micro-donations should have a separate explicit button visible in case user connects profile to Smartlike. I tried to make a plug-in but it seems that plug-ins cannot sign transactions, that’s why the non-intrusive relay experiment with thumb-ups came first.
Are you interested in micro-donation development on PeerTube?