One of the most appealing promises of the internet is to revolutionize creativity. The internet, with its decentralized core, promised to flatten hierarchies, remove gatekeepers, and to empower creators to not need middlemen to exist and to be able to monetize their creativity directly via their fans in a peer-to-peer fashion.
The internet is great at spreading information. Content travels at staggering speeds, it goes viral, and exponentially propagates through various content delivery networks, caches, social media platforms, media hosting platforms, email, messaging services, etcetera. In theory, this velocity should be great for creativity, since a creator's work can easily and instantaneously touch a massive amount of people at zero cost. Creators can now be their own publishers, since the cost of publishing is essentially zero, and in theory if the creator made something of value, they should be able to find an audience that cares and wants to reward them.
But this is not the case. There is a fundamental problem at odds with the benefits of the velocity of information: attribution. Attribution is not native to propagation of information online.
Lack of native attribution provides fundamental problems to success of creators and creativity on the internet:
- Attribution is easily lost as content leaves the place it was originally hosted.
- Lack of native attribution increases user reliance on centralized platforms (E.g., Creators rely on Youtube, Instagram, etc. to preserve attribution, so they end up having vendor lock-in because that is where they build their hard-earned followings, likes, etc)
- Less incentives to be a creator because successful creativity isn't natively rewarded by attention or monetization to creator
- No innovation or experimentation in new ways to consume or monetize media, we are stuck with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (an open global attribution database would incentive new media consumption applications, new p2p monetization strategies for content, but now the value, identity and content is trapped in centralized platforms)
An open attribution database can be retroactively filled with attribution for legacy creative work. This can be done by:
- community crowdsourced effort (e.g. image annotation platform)
- collaboration with institutions (museums, rights holders)
- ingestion, flattening, normalization of open datasets (musicbrainz, imdb, etc)
Because the open attribution database uses perceptual identifications, consumers or platforms can opt-in to add an attribution layer to their consumption experience or platform.
Can install a browser extension, mobile extension or app, that would automatically look up attribution in the database and render it in real time.
Platforms can opt in to check content flowing in their system against the global attribution database and to surface this attribution to consumers at an infrastructure level.
Incentives to do so are less clear for platforms that benefit from attribution opacity for media like Pinterest or Facebook.
But, platforms like Ello are aligned through their mission to benefit creators and could be an early adopter. (Tumblr too?)
A shared open protocol for media attribution empowers developers to attempt to disrupt centralized applications. It would be foolish for a developer to compete with Tumblr or Spotify and to create a centralized alternative. These existing platforms have large userbases, high switching costs due to strong network effects, expensive deals for access to rights for content, etc.
A shared open protocol for media attribution allows developers to create alternative applications built on different values and a different relationship with creators. Values of openness, of empowering creators, of encouraging creativity, of helping creators monetize directly. These values are made concrete by a shared protocol that enables this in practice, giving developers an advantage over centralized platforms because having closed data, squatting on identity, etc. is something centralized platforms will never give up.
Developers get to be part of a new philosophy/movement and provide a value proposition to creators and consumers previously impossible.
A shared open protocol gives developers free access to a trove of media metadata they can use in their application, and be part of a larger movement of decentralization. This enables permissionless innovation where developers can experiment with new kinds of communities, build on fundamentally different values, and enabling new ways to help creators monetize. This kind of innovation is long overdue because it has stagnated with the proliferation of centralized platforms.
We imagine a new movement of applications built on this shared data layer, having a philosophy of openness, transparency, and user ownership, experimenting with new ways to monetize content directly and to remix open data contributed by various applications in the ecosystem.
Each new decentralized application strengthens the value of the others built on the same decentralized infrastructure, creating a platform network effect.