Can someone please explain how/why readers would pay for the content? That's the important part, isn't it?
How? Readers can pay newsrooms for content using a debit/credit card or purchasing and sending CVL to the newsroom.
Why? Because they like the pieces coming out of a set of newsrooms and want access to that type of content.
Effectively, journalists end up running their own newspaper, but that newspaper is a subsidiary of a parent company that is hands-off for content but not for governance (which just means it's not totally hands-off for content). This newspaper would compete against other subsidiaries of the parent, and would have a certain percentage vote on what other subsidaries exist. Moreover, journalists would often be paid by selling their stock options in the parent.
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Obviously, the hypothesis here is that such a direct connection between journalist and reader will lead to higher-quality content then can be found at the MSM rags. I'm agnostic about whether that is the case.
In Italy we had cooperatives running newspapers and magazines as long as I can remember, doesn't this happen elsewhere?
I _think_ the advantage of Civil might be that you get to pay directly a journalist rather than the group, but I'm not sure it's a big improvement.
Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this).
My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate.
When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world.
Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
In other words, censorship is embedded in the platform.
The only real rebuttal to your point is that journalists have effectively always been censored, to a degree, as the market so demands. Assange is perhaps the least censored, if not totally censor-free, but I'm not sure his model of censorship-free journalism is particularly scalable.
Crypto whitepapers, even read charitably, are difficult to interpret and not because what is being said is too complex or something.
It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls..
The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls)
The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc.
The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens.
Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)
"""with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall?
Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well?
They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.
I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts.
The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless.
(caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)
This just leads to censorship by the most powerful users in the system.
Starting with the game theory: If the TCR shows a specific bias (ie: political inclination) or some form of censorship, less people will want to own the token because the "fairness" promise is broken and that should reduce the token price.
If the curated items (newsrooms in this case) have low adoption (few people use tokens to purchase viewing rights) then the tokens will lose value too.
For token holders this should motivate them to be judicious in their curation efforts.
The voting mechanism also plays a significant part on the whole system. Traditional TCRs use a partial lock commit reveal scheme that allows us to find the Schelling point for a challenge.
Personally I'm quite partial to other voting systems that reduce the impact of token ownership disparity like the one Glen Weyl, Buterin and others have called "Liberal Radical" and its simpler root the quadratic voting mechanism. The way this works is that only the square root of voter's balance counts as voter's voting "weight". So 1 vote costs 1 token but 2 votes cost 4 tokens and those with less "power" have a higher representation relative to their balances.
edit: typos
The Civil Constitution [1] has no guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead they say they are "committed to the ethical practice of journalism," which is open to be arbitrarily abused by the majority of voters, irrespective of the voting system.
I don't actually understand why there is any voting at all.
The author of the original article says he believes that Civil's leadership has 'good intentions" but if they can't understand that their system will not solve the problems they set out to solve, then perhaps they don't deserve to gain the funding and attention they have actually managed to get.
[1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/178BBxXh60bEsFN5E5AYaZnej...
Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business. That's one of the premise of blockchain native businesses, the decentralisation of equity and power.
The voting and incentive mechanisms are the cryptoeconomic properties of the project and what I can discuss intelligently. The Civil constitution is out of my scope but I trust the incentives are there to allow high quality media to enter the list regardless of political bias.
That's not determined. They may well gain credibility by rejecting alternative views.
>Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business.
Bitcoin doesn't have any governance, and it seems to work fine. Adding governance layers just seems to lead to more problems.