Topic: Can online platforms like Youtube and Facebook really be decentralized? - page 3. (Read 1128 times)

Not entirely. But there are significant progress made in terms of striving towards decentralisation.

You look at projects such as Steemit, which used to be extremely hyped up and had actually a lot of quality content, but as soon as the money incentive dried up there is now a lack of users for the platform which is concerning.

Perhaps new innovations can come that solves this issue, but I doubt it'll be the near future. I think decentralisation of ideas is certainly a needed concept though.

I started a project like this for music before, already was into this years ago, even before YouTube

But its a tough thing, most content producer are tied for life to a distributor ( even on some planet not yet discovered for some contract) , and there are very few good quality producer who are independant, and distributor generally took the habit to hate internet and in the end no real plateform of decentralized content distribution really existed. Majors did everything they could for this not To happen.

And now with competition as YouTube which is totally free with gigabytes of low value content uploaded / seconds, its hard To really compete with a serious plateform, either it will be free and based on volunteer and not very stable or professional, or it needs To be non free, and will be hard to attract users.

Even kim dot com wanted to start being a content distributor before he got arrested.

I stil think the current state of things with content production/distribution is not ideal, and blockchain could add a stone, but it would need some user attracting content producer associated to it that user would pay for. Lot of labels and producer are starving as well, so they could take any solution that bring them profits.

The main income from YouTube remain ads and it would be hard To force people To watch them in decentralized setting. Maybe it could be linked To a faucet and people would require tokens To watch certain content.

But it would need something différent than YouTube anyway.

Paid streaming and watching has been an idea behind certain altcoin projects. But I guess they all went unsuccessful quickly.

In a centralized setting, there will be no central controller that would screen and review the videos being submitted. This will somehow encourage many people to flood submissions with many of them actual low-value and low-quality videos.

I thought this was the case with plex where you can be your own server and provide people with your resourced or the other way around but I can't see it any more efficient than the traditional thing called youtube. The thing is, people want the implementation of blockchain into this streaming platform which blockchain is not suitable for in my opinion. Imagine if the size of every content takes up an entire gigabyte and then it accumulates that'd be sill. Also the method you mentioned some torrent apps are already have the feature of streaming torrent nowadays so it's no different than creating new ones.

But it needs to be a different model than youtube, because youtube hosts lot of low value content, without very advanced content promotion, so it's hard to see a competitor to it that could host large amount of data for free.

With content that has more value density, with paid streaming it could be workable, as nodes that host / stream the content can be rewarded on the streaming value.

It could be an option moving forward when some application comes up with a p2p model and bittorrent is trying for a similar model and if they are able to fulfill that then it would be a great success, the original team tried the p2p streaming model but they did not succeed completely and now and different team is working towards the goal, lets see how that goes.

@OP youtube and facebook as a centralized company will be making use of the decentralized network to power their servers and services round the clock but do not expect them to change their financial model .

Yes but if viewed from the development of Yes little by little industry has adopted the blockchain starting from tourist attractions or payment tickets, then the bank will also start to use the blockchain technology. I do not know if BTC and alt included It.
But if seen from time to time I suppose that YT and FB will also do it for development, such as Libra for Facebook.

To be honest, I think the use of p2p technology is perfectly well suited to some applications for video streaming. Streaming video is too resource intensive and services that need reliability better than youtube are already utilizing the resources of their users to spread their content and reduce usage of their servers' bandwidth and processing power. For this, we are already seeing major providers such as TV channels using it in their websites. We don't need a cryptocurrency attached to these IMHO. If somebody wants to watch free content online, then contributing some bandwidth could be an option.

Online platforms cannot be decentralized because there is a reason towards everything there are people responsible for it , there are governmental issues regarding this body and one should understand that Making then decentralized would not only affect the market it would also affect these companies , now someone can hold someone credible and it could easily turn upside down when even these things are made decentralized , it would be a mess and who would take care of the updates and frauds concerning this ?
And why would someone give up the profit ?

The company have it's centralized system and they already earning using this for sure there's  no way for them to migrate. Though the possibilities
in case that the demands of blockchain increases, who knows maybe this two giant companies will also adopt, it's business and they will take for
considerations if they have see good potentials.

Facebook and Youtube have never been decentralized they are a corporation and had a board of directors and they are a profit-driven company, they will always never show you how much they are really making, and they will not go decentralized they have an interest and a profit to protect.
Remember Facebook was fine for data breach I don't think they will ever shift to being decentralized, they don't want to exposed.

Not every nodes have to store everything, only the index and public key/signature of the data. Each node can store locally only the data it needs.

But i don't think either blockchain are really going to be competitive for mass free social networking, more for archiving or small to medium user base, for less than 100k posting users or so it can be manageable.

Or it needs some sharding, but that could be easier to do on applications or social networking that already have information on circles and groups, like data for a group would be very easy to shard, and not everyone has to store all the data from the all groups, while data integrity as well as origin can still be checked publicly.

But at the scale of facebook or youtube, handling millions or billions or user seems difficult, or with a very efficient sharding, because all together most user only need to access a very small amount of the whole data, and data relationship/hierarchy can be made easy to shard, as the relationship of new content with existing content can be made easy to figure out in lot of cases, unlike transaction where any transaction can potentially reference any other transactions, content on platform like facebook can still be segregated more easily.

But the advantage is also not huge, because what make blockchain interesting is in the way it can settle disagreement on transactions which can include ordering or dependency problems, with files or social media there is not a huge need for conflict resolving and it's easy to end up with the same data on all nodes, as there can hardly be some mutually exclusive branch, unless it rely on access on limited resources like transactions depends on coins, there is not much at stake with the consensus on regular application data like for social media, the advantages would be content signature and timestamp, making the application easy to distribute in a secure manner with the cryptography, making it censor free on the global chain even if all nodes can filter the data they want to have locally and/or serve, and making page generation and data sourcing publicly verifiable.

Social media also generate lot of waste and temporary data that is only going to get viewed for short period of time, like instagram or instant chat, so for casual non important temporary data, blockchain are not necessarily a good target, but for a target like archiving, or blog post that are supposed to stay and be viewed for a long time it could have an interest.

I think it is possible.

Data can just be indexed in the blockchain with proof of existence, and the data being stored/shared separately.

Such apps would need user (or site) level filtering to only download data based on address/pubkey white/black list or other filtering.
 
Data set is much less problematic to verify than transactions, no quadratic signature problem or complex validation, or ordering problem, so it can scale virtually at machine speed.

Data can be stored in crypted form and private key shared with diff hellman key exchange.

In a full decentralized scenario, each user would run their own node and store personal data locally, then it needs some routing system to route clients toward the nodes hosting the files.

For setup like social media, there is not even a huge pressure for confirmation, because lot of data is new data that doesn't depend on previous state unlike transactions, so there is virtually no need for confirmation once the new data is in the memory pool with the signature that prove its origin, it can be considered as confirmed and will be integrated in a block sooner or latter. And it can be relatively easy to filter the data you want to have locally, like data from friend list identified with public key, if all content is signed it can allow all users to verifiy the authenticity of the message, as well doing filtering based on public keys.

For video like youtube it seems relatively hard for all reason mentioned before due to economy of scale, and seem hard to beat youtube where you can upload gigabyte everyday for free with high availability, plus all the tools of encoding/reencoding that can become costly and probably too much for most user especially if it has to be free as youtube, seems complicated. For audio or photos it could be viable though.

The other issue is that content can't be modified or deleted after it's integrated in a block, but if only the index is stored on the blockchain, and the data stored only locally, deleting the local file would make it unavailable to other nodes.

The best would be to figure a flexible fee system that can be settled by the miner to avoid object/file transaction to be cancelled because of the inputs used for the fees, to have priority objects based on fees that can still be confirmed instantly given some garantees to the miners about the fees. But even this is not a big issue for new content that doesn't depend on previous state (like new posts on social media), as it can just sit on the memory pool with no fee and cannot be canceled anyway, or some portion of blocks size can be reserved to store such data, as the problem of block size is much less acute for data than for transaction validation.

Decentralization and centralization is not something a company will stumble upon neither is what they will meet along the line or a conviction that they can accidentally get and then switch gear. Its something fundamental that you either have it or you don't. Its a way of life that will guide all of the inventions that will come from such group of people and the unique thing about it is that, its not for the motive of fame or profit or recognition now these two companies you have mentioned, which one is contrary to profit or recognition? So, no they cannot be decentralized.

I fear it's not possible. These platforms, especially youtube, have powerful and expensive datacenters to keep their data. It must be profitable for them as company and free for its users at same time. If it were decentralized, would that be possible?
And these files are constantly increasing in size, as more and more informations are uploaded each new day, only a big business can handle it.

it is true that blockchain technology can only be used to store data in the form of encrypted writing on every transaction that uses blockchain technology which is why youtube and various video platforms that make development with blockchain are a bit more difficult to happen, whereas for the facebook platform I think it is still possible to do decentralization.

The real question here is why they will not use bitcoin instead of creating something brand new that would apply all the changes.

Here is the thing. They want to create their own coin.
Question is why?
You want a semi decentralized exchange. Again! The question is why?
There is already a working decentralized exchange. Why not pick it?
You want something as your own which you can control. Again!!! Why?
We will go back to the question over and over again.

people always wants more I guess. The people who are not really into tech always prefer something that works regardless whether the service they are using is centralized and decentralized this kind of thing is definitely out of their understanding anyway. Platform like Youtube and Facebook will definitely not turn into decentralized anytime soon because they are corporate and only seeks for profit. They also need the authority to take down any content they deemed harmful to the community they maintain.
It's just a no brainer that a platform that already success and having a really good revenue stream will definitely not change their entire system and risking their entire existence just because of such frivolous matter.

One of the main reasons why people move to decentralized networks is basically to make it difficult or almost impossible for someone to take it down.

Some companies would decentralize their storage for instance to prevent hackers or rogue governments to hack a single centralize database and/or

to prevent one single disaster to wipe out their service. (Like a massive earthquake or Tornado etc.) The big boys have several data warehouses

for their storage as a redundancy measure to counter these threats. (This is part of their disaster recovery strategies)  Disruptive technologies that

are taking on these giants, use decentralization to prevent governments or the competition to take them down. (Bitcoin and other Peer-to-Peer

networks like BitTorrent etc.. are good examples of that)  So, if the big boys wants to go Peer-to-Peer, they would have to trust public nodes

with the reputation of their company and I do not think many companies would do that. The performance issues will also be a problem, because

not all nodes have super fast internet access.  

I can't see how these websites would implement decentralized systems. It would generally need more complicated framework just to give you the content you want. I see however, that their server might be decentralized in a way that their servers are split and located in different geolocations to make content delivery much faster on a local geographic location. They may be decentralized on terms of location, but these servers would actually act like a centralized server and there's no publicity in their data. It's also to bring security and control what goes in their website, as long as have some performance advantage over decentralized systems that would have their access times depend on the nodes actual processing power.