This is the only application I've seen for a blockchain that isn't totally brain-dead. I'm certainly skeptical, but skepticism is better than certainty it will fail.
It looks like the tokens basically give some level of editorial control; therefore, wealthy individuals/organizations would be able to assert control over what gets published. And because of the anonymity, it wouldn't even be clear who is asserting this control.
I do like the idea of a digest of the article being put into the blockchain: it makes it impossible for sneaky edits or removal/denial of content at a later date.
When you hit publish, you better be prepared for that article to exist undeniably for eternity.
I'd like to see a twitter with the same features. Of course, blockchain isn't absolutely necessary here. You could sign a post with PGP 20 years ago and achieve the same.
Even after reading the previous comments in this thread? I'm really not seeing any benefit, just a shifting of company shares and maybe the benefit of all transactions publicly available on the blockchain, but some anonymity would make that seemingly useless.
> Unrelated side benefits include content archival and anti-censorship
I fail to see how any of those is relevant to the use of a blockchain. Mirroring a newspaper’s website gives you content archival, which in turns gives you censorship protection (unless the censor can attack all mirrors). A blockchain gives you those advantages because it relies on mirroring (the transactions).
Now I am no expert on blockchain and business administration but... Since these CVL tokens could be tradeable, and they grant "a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil"...
Uhm...
Doesn't this all look like, basically, company shares? Doesn't this mean that the problem has just been shifted but potentially not solved ?
And they shouldn't. News should not be determined by its shareholders. The idea that such privileges should be able to be purchased is so incomprehensibly stupid, I'm at a loss for words.
It's obvious when the Washington Post writes articles about Amazon that there's a conflict of interest. They definitely write them, but I don't remember anyone sharing any stories from them about e.g. the HQ2 process. People know to look elsewhere. And conversely, the moment the Post publishes a news (not opinion) article about how every city should want to be HQ2, or worse, mentions it off-hand in an article about something else, everyone knows not to trust that and possibly to lose trust in the news source in general. So they don't.
It's not obvious when ownership is a thousand pseudonymous private keys when there's a conflict of interest. If a random article about a random company looks a little more negative than it should be, who knows if the current pseudonymous owners are shorting that company?
Publicly-disclosed ownership of the media by the rich has a ton of disadvantages, yes. But I don't the blockchain solving any of those disadvantages, and I see it introducing a new one that is specifically avoided by publicly-disclosed ownership by the rich.
How many people are actually informed that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos? How many people know that Jeff Bezos has contracts with the CIA[1] & sits on a pentagon board[2]? I doubt many. It's one of the few "left" wing newspapers I refuse to read for the reasons above.
I'm not arguing for this blockchain solution, I think it makes things worse exactly as you said.
Given that the President of the United States went on a yelling spree recently about Bezos' ownership, I'd say most people who can distinguish the Washington Post from the Washington Times (owned by Sun Myung Moon's religion and absurdly right-wing) also know who owns the Post.
(Which isn't to say everyone knows that either—a lot of people seem to take the Times equally seriously—but solving the problem of bad-faith media existing is another one entirely, and quite probably the answer is it shouldn't be solved at all.)
Every time the Washington Post mentions Bezos, or a company he owns, even in the abstract (for instance, in this spaceflight article, which mentions blue origin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/15/f... ), they say that Jeff Bezos owns the washington post, in those exact words.
I haven't looked at the details of this in particular but on the surface it Sounds more like a so called "governance" token not an ownership token. To avoid running afoul of securities laws that is the way many new coins have been structuring themselves.
If the article can be taken at face value, then yeah, they're exactly company shares, and they will cause exactly the same issue that the Denver Post suffered.
The "good news", such as it is, is that that part of the article is bullshit. They won't grant you the holders a say in the paper's editorial processes. That control will instead reside with the person actually funding the paper, which will be...
...the billionaire Joseph Lubin. Meaning they've already got the same issue that the Denver Post suffered.
> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards, which are outlined in the Civil Constitution
This features the worst elements of public (e.g. the BBC), private (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) and patronage (e.g. the Washington Post) media.
Letting token owners “vote on whether...websites violate the company’s journalism standards” explicitly removes editorial independence. Worse, it ties editorial control to tokens/votes which are bought with money. Worse still, since ownership is pseudonymous, there is no way to detect someone (e.g. a wealthy individual, company or foreign government) amassing control across disparate wallets. Pseudonymity also makes shaming owners for bad behaviour difficult or impossible.
If the votes and results are made public, though, they at least reveal the instances in which stories/projects have been explicitly downvoted/killed. Even without knowing who voted for yes/no, that's still insight to what might be covered up.
Well, how would you incentivise journalism? I can’t tell where articles i might want to read come from; i know that any given newspaper will have plenty of content that i find head scratching—that’s your editorial independence for you. There’s no good model right now to patronize journalists or topics.
For instance, i like some journalists on the NYT, but i think i’m supporting poor journalism more than good journalism by funding them at all. The editorial independence is the source of the problem there.
Editorial independence refers to an outlet's freedom to cover topics of their choice with the coverage they judge best. So, is your concern the quality of the reporting, which is an problem of poor editorial practice, or the focus of the coverage, which is a problem of poor editorial independence? Or is it simply that you don't agree with a lot of the coverage?
The coverage itself is acceptable. It’s the way the headlines are written to subtly nudge tone in ways that alter perception of the front page (ie clickbait headlines) and the opinion section (most of those people I don’t give a damn about and I actively resent their continued employment.... anywhere. Get a damn blog.). In my understanding, both of these thing fall into the category of editorializing.
That doesn't scale particularly well. It's fine if you like one or two media sources, but there are thousands of them, and many are high in terms of quality. Having people buy subscriptions for all the media they like would be financially untenable, and probably hurt many of the less popular ones even more.
There are thousands of restaurants in New York. That doesn’t mean I don’t eat out.
The people who I know who subscribe to news subscribe to multiple publications. The set of people who (a) want limited access to lots of publications and (b) would pay for them is limited.
Can't emphasise this enough. Any system that lets (rich) people vote on what the truth is cannot be called journalism. It is simply not how facts work. This is also why Elon Musks recent initiative ("Pravduh"?) has all the populist appeal in the world, yet contains the risk to do serious damage to journalistic independence.
This is shifting the goal posts. The point is we have a media that's already well under the thumb of 'rich people', to use the phrase of the person I originally responded to. And so comparing any idea to an ideal of an independent media free of this control is rather disingenuous.
For your shift, is anonymizing control in exchange for a clear ledger of control a bad deal? I'm not sure. Seems like an interesting idea at least, and given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.
You have a good point, but that doesn't make this proposal any more viable.
>given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.
Sounds like an intuitive statement until you really think about it for a second. Then, you realize that it's a reckless and possibly dangerous approach to problem-solving.
If you start down the solution path by asking the question "how could things get any worse?", then it's very likely that you'll find out.
Journalists don't seem to need any help in damaging their reputation and the public's trust in them. These alternative distribution schemes seem to be a response to the bias and selective reporting done over the last two years.
Eh, I would call very few people at the Murdoch’s and Mercer’s media conglomerates and the like journalists, and while they’ve significantly amplified extremism in the last two years, they’ve never been considered legitimate journalistic organizations like the New Yorker or the Washington Post.
WSJ is a pretty renowned newspaper. Coincidentally, they published the Theranos investigation which probably cost Murdoch $100mn.
I'm somewhat entertained by the posters in this thread shitting on media organisations. You need to understand: the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone.
$5 and your sarcastic comment will buy you a cafe latte, but the very last thing journalism needs more of is disruption. It's been disrupted every quarter for ten years straight and now reporters in Colorado are clinging to the goddamn blockchain because it's the last shitty hope left.
You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.
So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?
FWIW I subscribe to the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Economist, and New Yorker. I buy books and music (I think I might be one of the few left who still buys albums despite listening to them on Spotify, too).
This move is very concerning to me. The best I can say about it is that if people are willing to buy coverage, hopefully that will directly pay for more coverage in general (a rising tide lifts all journalism). But it clearly removes the editorial independence that has been THE hallmark of serious journalism since serious journalism existed.
You should point your snark cannon at each person who chooses to read a journalist created piece of content over the web without paying for it (as I'm assuming you just did with this article). It's very easy to point to those "wealthy tech bros in Silicon Valley" for all of society's ills when, for the most part, the real culprit is staring at you from the mirror.
> You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.
Case in point, almost all of open source software exists because someone else paid for it, and releasing it as FOSS didn't directly contradict their business interests.
>So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?
Tech companies aren't responsible for the decline in quality of journalism. They are responsible for shining light on how bloated and bad they were all along.
Checking facts and multiple sources on news stories was a major undertaking before the internet. Media has always been biased and bad, it's just that the internet is shedding light on how bad it is.
Transparency and widely available information is the pillar of democracy, not news organizations.
Are you arguing that New York Times and Washington Post of 20 years ago were secretly just as vapid and outrage-focused as the stars of modern clickbait media?
The Wall Street Journal has significantly amplified extremism in the last two years? It is not considered a legitimate journalistic organization? Please give examples.
OP didn't say anything about journalists' reputations and the public trust in them. He said something about journalistic independence.
For example, Seymour Hersh clearly possessed journalistic independence in his story on the SEAL team assassination of bin Laden. However, at least initially, public response to his story was lukewarm and the Obama administration in particular and the press broadly spent a lot of time and pages trying to discredit the story. In this-- and many other cases-- public trust and reputation is orthogonal to journalistic independence.
Not that I disagree with your two sentences. Clearly this is an attempt to somehow "technologize" better journalism given the low quality of reporting in the run up to the 2016 election.
But if you take "journalistic independence" as your input and reflexively give "reputation and public trust" as your output, something is broken in your journalism parser.
I would pick a different hill to die on than Seymour Hersh's story about the killing of bin Ladin, there is as far as I can tell one unnamed primary source for Hersh's reporting versus the official story - almost everyone that is not in US intelligence went on the record and all those people and the US intelligence sources would have to be in on one big conspiracy.
Big conspiracies require more proof. This is not Watergate level where there was corroborating evidence behind the FBI assistant director's reveal to the Washington Post.
Seymour Hersh thinks US special forces members are like the bad guys from that Da Vinci Code book and are actually working for Opus Dei, and this why they would be so good at keeping the Hersh conspiracy hidden. Hersh did good with My Lai but that doesn't mean he can coast on his laurels forever.
Exactly. What enforcement mechanism is there, exactly? Who decides what action should be taken if the mass of owners deem the journalism of insufficient quality? This seems basically like a more toothless version of offering public stock.
My expectation is this will transfer wealth from blockchain zealots to journalists. It is telling, however, that the best defense I can rouse for this project is “the novel elements will probably fail”.
Do you have any evidence that editorial independence even exists in the face of a complete capital controlled environment?
Sinclair made a blunder and showed the world that there was no independence, at least in their company. It was even set on a local level. It sets a very plausible model for other large media/news companies.
Hello! I'm an engineer at Civil, happy to discuss some of your concerns.
The CVL token is used to vote on whether or not the community believes a newsroom follows well understood journalistic standards (more information about these standards can be found in our "constitution" - https://blog.joincivil.com/the-civil-constitution-beta-64460...).
We use a system known as a Token Curated Registry (https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...) that incentivizes people to vote judiciously according to a shared understanding of values and not simply according to their own political leanings. TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur. We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.
We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith. We'll have more to announce on that front soon!
Being "whitelisted" or not on our TCR does not determine whether or not a newsroom is able to publish. Newsrooms are independent and have full editorial control of their content. Being on the TCR is a (we hope valuable) credibility indicator for newsrooms. The idea is that when you see an article by a newsroom that is on the TCR, you'll know that they have been vetted by the community and are very likely a trustworthy source.
TCRs are a new and experimental system, and we don't claim that our first implementation will be flawless and fix all the issues in the news media landscape. But we will iterate and improve it and firmly believe that some form of TCR can be used to help people understand their news sources better, increasing media literacy and trust, in a way that can scale worldwide.
> TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur.
Can you give any examples you can share? You have state/non-state actors which have mass resources to use to their advantage directly or indirectly (e.g. troll farms). What prevents people from buying these CVL tokens and/or creating multiple accounts to bias your ledger? It's not like they really are taking a hit on these transactions unless they're above $5-$10. The Internet Research Agency had a small budget compared to other actors which were in the millions.
It also could go the other way for voting against reputable journalism. Is there prevention in this area as well? It seems like the Vote Quorum could be abused in this area.
It seems like it might be much easier to challenge your system around voting with an algorithm rather than the social engineering that occurs on social platforms.
Though I might come off critical, I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'm pretty new to blockchain and don't understand it all. Though, I did see the "Attacks against token-curated registries and mitigations" in your whitepaper. How expensive are these coins?
First, acquiring enough tokens to singlehandedly determine outcomes of votes is incredibly expensive. The simple act of buying tokens increases demand on the tokens (which have a fixed supply) thus increasing the market price. By the time a bad actor has acquired 51% (or close to it) of the tokens, they will likely have spent the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Second, even if they are able to acquire some huge percentage of the tokens, the public nature of the blockchain means we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors (if not by name, at least by account). The community can then decide to "fork" the bad actors out of the system (Essentially the community can deploy a new token that is identical to the old token except the bad actors' account balances are zeroed out. If everyone decides to switch to using the new token, the bad actors' old tokens become worthless and they just spent millions of dollars to slightly inconvenience people).
Specific details of our initial token distribution (how many tokens does 1 ETH buy, etc) are forthcoming, but after that initial distribution, the price of the tokens is determined by the market forces. It's those market forces that (theoretically) make the TCR actually "work" as token holders are incentivized to make the registry as "good" as possible and increase demand for the token (because people want to be on the registry).
Nick, it sounds like you mean-well, but it is very difficult to imagine how linking what is essentially the right to make a moral judgment to one's ability to pay for that right will turn out well.
>We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith
If you have the ability to determine who would use them in good faith, then why do they need to pay for the privilege? Also, this implies that those who would explicitly use them in bad faith may still obtain influence. And, where does this leave the people who would use them in good faith but cannot afford to buy them?
In general and in spite of precautions you describe, it has the distinct feel of buying access, which is not something of which the world, and certainly journalism, is in short supply.
Hi, I'm also an engineer at Civil. I would describe it more as staking access, it's a way to ensure that all those who play have skin in the game. I don't believe that bias is something you either have or don't or that bad outcomes always come from bad intentions. Bias is endemic of the system itself and I don't believe through any effort you could remove it. We are working hard to ensure that those who initially own CVL have the best intentions, but intentions are not a perfect guard against bad outcomes. The purpose of using TCR and tieing votes to a token is to align the rules of the system to the behaviors we hope to promote. Token holders participate in an economically incentivized game where they are rewarded for predicting whether the rest of the community will find the listing to be inside the guidelines of the civil constitution. While these ideas are not entirely new, they have not been well tested in this application. I'm sure that there will be aspects of the system that will need refinement as we learn more, but my hope is that, despite the system's shortcomings, it will represent a dramatic improvement over the status quo. There can be no question that this is a difficult problem to solve, and likely one that has no perfect solution. I like our solution because it does not intentionally privilege the opinion of the "blue-chip" institutions over new or small operations as many other companies in the space are doing.
How is the BBC of all "the worst" element of public media? Compared to what? I have not yet seen a better public media outlet (there are some good pan-European collaborative projects but nothing of the scope of the BBC).
Like Steemit, this cannot incentivize production long term unless it has more efficient means of monetization, which it doesn’t. Steem subsidizes content through inflation of a token during a speculative mania. To put it mildly, this is not sustainable. Though the founders did astonishingly well on their exit.
Putting a newspaper on a blockchain, to the extent the idea is even coherent, does not exempt it from the economics that makes journalism unremunerative.
This is not to say that we cannot use crypto currencies to perform activities that were traditionally performed by journalists. However, this will look more like anonymous information bounty markets or prediction markets.
But even prediction markets need someone to subsidize them, willfully taking a loss to provide liquidity. I think there is a good case to be made for using demurrage to do this. But for this to work there has to be actual long term economic value on the blockchain, which most lack.
While our TCR will not solve the economics of journalism on its own, we believe it will help provide transparency into the inner workings of newsrooms and increase media literacy in ways that could encourage more people to fund journalism organizations. Furthermore, we think it can vastly improve discoverability especially for smaller (but still ethical and reliable) news organizations.
From there, it's about giving newsrooms tools to run and monetize their business how they want. For some this might look like traditional newspaper subscriptions, for others we might see more experimental monetization schemes that are only feasible on the blockchain (such as bounties).
-- Nick Reynolds
p.s. - Have you looked into TCRs generally? There's a fair amount of overlap with prediction markets, you might be interested in learning more about the incentive system.
There are many good studies from more than ten years ago, about participatory voting systems. I think many of the knee-jerk cynical posts here are premature.
Steemit has been running for some time to demonstrate that a blockchain based publishing platform is possible. I suspect many more papers will launch private blockchain based storage, it provides transparent voting and censorship resistance, both valuable to a publisher.
The “Civil Council” is, arguably, a lot like saying the “Ministry of Truth”. Once seen through Orwellian lenses, euphemistic organizational titles-as-masks tend to reveal themselves. Sort of like those sunglasses in “They Live”.
I propose a new rule of the internet, much like the rule of "if you can think of it, there's porn for it." If you can think of it, there's a alt coin for it.
It's genuinely difficult. One friend suggested "a coin for space travel". Nope. Mars coin is a thing. What about a coin for students? Nope. A coin for Kanye West. Nope. A coin for porn? Nope, of course that already exists. There's even a coin for keeping track of blockchains.
How about a coin for pedophiles? I know it’s extreme but it’s the only group in society that’s vilified even by health professionals so they’re really hidden.
Maybe. But also a honeypot for clueless pedophiles.
Seriously, though, pedophiles make great canaries. Everyone hates them, even those who create and manage systems for security and privacy. And police love to brag about busting them. For example, we learned about Freenet vulnerabilities and CMU's Tor exploit through pedophile busts.
What makes this different than a co-op, aside from the "definitely not a scam guys, honest!" overtones of selling unregulated stock disguised as tokens? That and hosting everything "on the blockchain" for some inscrutable reason?
And what does hosting news "on the blockchain" even mean in any practical sense? That I'll have to install a crypto-mining client just to read their articles? Or that they won't use normal webservers to host their content?
Ridiculous story. When was the last time you heard of a newspaper going under because its stories weren't "written permanently into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain"?
Newspapers are dying because other kinds of companies ate their advertising revenue.
We can add the Denver Post to a list of old-guard companies desperately grabbing for blockchain straws on their slide to oblivion (Long Island Iced Tea, Kodak).
I'm all for innovation in applied cryptography. But these desperate stories of blockchain cargo-cultism need to stop.
I often click a bunch of links on here and receive a "Sorry, you've exceeded the free limit" message. Why can't I dump $5 into an account on NYT and then be able to click "I want to read this, use my tab." I'm not talking about a subscription. I'm talking about a "buy 10 reads" which I would absolutely use. I will not subscribe.
Having run a business (in an unrelated field) that offered both a subscription and a paygo model, the reason was pretty clear: you lose more from people who would have subscribed opting for paygo than you gain from people who would never subscribe but would choose paygo.
The subscriptions are surprisingly valuable. Paygo not so much.
Usual caveats apply: on average, in my experience, YMMV, etc etc.
Like in most cases a blockchain is useless here. Why not just used a centralized system? Nothing is gained from decentralization since the organization has to be trusted to recognize the voting power of the tokens either way. Totally pointless.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Once the Registry contract is deployed on the blockchain, it will continue to function and provide utility no matter what happens to the "Civil Media Company". No involvement on our part is needed to "recognize the voting power" as any individual, entity, or website can use the information contained in the registry however they want. A social media site, for example, could query the registry and decide to render a "credibility badge" when displaying links from a news organization that is whitelisted.
Happy to help clarify if you still have questions.
> A social media site, for example, could query the registry and decide to render a "credibility badge" when displaying links from a news organization that is whitelisted.
Yes, the key word is "decide". To use your "credibility badge" example, an organization could ostensibly behave like they accurately respect the registry while also surreptitiously ignoring the registry in situations that suit them. You might say, "well those organizations will develop a reputation for dishonesty", which might be true if they get caught, but also isn't at all different from the status quo today where selective reporting and partisan bias are bemoaned loudly and often by every side regarding every issue.
Since the registry is public, it would be very easy to write tools like a browser extension that would handle validating against the registry, preventing the type of fraud you're talking about. More generally, there's an interesting project called MetaCert that is doing just that (fraud/phishing prevention) using their own cryptoeconomic incentive system.
> We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.
Isn't this still centralisation? Either the Civil Council would not be necessary, in which case it's odd that you're setting it up, or it's still a centralised entity that has the final say and you might just as well skip the blockchain - or is my understanding incorrect/incomplete?
I think of the relationship between the voters and the Council to be like a 2-branch government with checks and balances. The voters are the legislative branch, but their decisions can be overturned by the judicial branch (the Council). Those judicial decisions can themselves be overturned by a supermajority of the legislative branch.
Decentralization is a spectrum, not a binary. While a centralized entity plays a part in the process, ultimate authority rests with the voters. The Council also has a plan to decentralize itself over time and voters will eventually be able to vote on removing or replacing the Council.
> They will be partnering with the Civil Media Company, an ambitious New York start-up that aims to use griddles and pancake recipes to start 1,000 publications nationwide by the end of the year.
...actually I think the original quote said something about crypto, not pancakes, but I don't think it changes the underlying meaning. Why do you need a distributed, trustless database to run a local paper?
> The new publication will have a conventional website whose data will be written permanently into a MySQL database.
Whups, sorry, that actually was meant to say "...into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain." Which...okay. 1) I think they mean "a blockchain", and 2) why do we...care? Is this so people will notice if the article is edited? Why not just push the content to a public git repo when it's published? Maybe sign the commits?
> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards
So in other words, it's a lot like...a public company, that owns a newspaper, that then strips out every hint of editorial control, and then lets its shareholders directly have a say in every detail of what gets printed? So it's like...literally an attempt to create a newspaper even worse than the one they're quitting in order to form this one?
> Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said that by selling ownership stakes to the public, the company seeks to eliminate the possibility of one company or a small group of investors exerting power and influence over a journalistic organization and compromising its mission — exactly what many employees of the Denver Post accused Alden of doing.
By selling ownership, they think they're stopping one rich person from amassing a major ownership stake, as happened when their last newspaper sold ownership and allowed one rich person to amass a major ownership stake? What must it feel like to live with this level of blinding naivety?
The good news, such as it is, is that ownership of the tokens doesn't actually give anyone control over the newspaper, meaning that this is actually just meaningless hype. But, by the same logic, there's also no reason to actually buy the tokens. They have value only to the extent they allow editorial independence to be violated. So either they'll be valuable (but will undermine the journalistic ethics of the organisation), or they'll be worthless. There's no upside here.
It's early Monday morning in this part of the world, and I literally cannot figure out if this is an overly subtle troll or merely the dumbest idea I've heard in quite some time. This basically seems to be an attempt to use inappropriate technologies in order to carefully craft a "solution" that will make the problem worse. If you're worried about local newspapers being financially unviable and subject to intrusive editorial control...how does this do anything but make it worse?
> Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said that by selling crypto tokens masquerading as ownership stakes they could raise a large amount of capital without setting any expectation of returns.
It's just another coin capital scam. Launch a crypto coin, get suckers to buy it, go yacht shopping.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI'll be watching it with interest.
It looks like the tokens basically give some level of editorial control; therefore, wealthy individuals/organizations would be able to assert control over what gets published. And because of the anonymity, it wouldn't even be clear who is asserting this control.
When you hit publish, you better be prepared for that article to exist undeniably for eternity.
I'd like to see a twitter with the same features. Of course, blockchain isn't absolutely necessary here. You could sign a post with PGP 20 years ago and achieve the same.
I fail to see how any of those is relevant to the use of a blockchain. Mirroring a newspaper’s website gives you content archival, which in turns gives you censorship protection (unless the censor can attack all mirrors). A blockchain gives you those advantages because it relies on mirroring (the transactions).
What problem do you think this is solving?
Uhm...
Doesn't this all look like, basically, company shares? Doesn't this mean that the problem has just been shifted but potentially not solved ?
It's not obvious when ownership is a thousand pseudonymous private keys when there's a conflict of interest. If a random article about a random company looks a little more negative than it should be, who knows if the current pseudonymous owners are shorting that company?
Publicly-disclosed ownership of the media by the rich has a ton of disadvantages, yes. But I don't the blockchain solving any of those disadvantages, and I see it introducing a new one that is specifically avoided by publicly-disclosed ownership by the rich.
I'm not arguing for this blockchain solution, I think it makes things worse exactly as you said.
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-joins-p...
(Which isn't to say everyone knows that either—a lot of people seem to take the Times equally seriously—but solving the problem of bad-faith media existing is another one entirely, and quite probably the answer is it shouldn't be solved at all.)
The "good news", such as it is, is that that part of the article is bullshit. They won't grant you the holders a say in the paper's editorial processes. That control will instead reside with the person actually funding the paper, which will be...
...the billionaire Joseph Lubin. Meaning they've already got the same issue that the Denver Post suffered.
This features the worst elements of public (e.g. the BBC), private (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) and patronage (e.g. the Washington Post) media.
Letting token owners “vote on whether...websites violate the company’s journalism standards” explicitly removes editorial independence. Worse, it ties editorial control to tokens/votes which are bought with money. Worse still, since ownership is pseudonymous, there is no way to detect someone (e.g. a wealthy individual, company or foreign government) amassing control across disparate wallets. Pseudonymity also makes shaming owners for bad behaviour difficult or impossible.
There are thousands of restaurants in New York. That doesn’t mean I don’t eat out.
The people who I know who subscribe to news subscribe to multiple publications. The set of people who (a) want limited access to lots of publications and (b) would pay for them is limited.
Point being we can answer this question. If you put ownership on the blockchain, we can’t. It’s exactly what we have today, but worse.
For your shift, is anonymizing control in exchange for a clear ledger of control a bad deal? I'm not sure. Seems like an interesting idea at least, and given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.
>given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.
Sounds like an intuitive statement until you really think about it for a second. Then, you realize that it's a reckless and possibly dangerous approach to problem-solving.
If you start down the solution path by asking the question "how could things get any worse?", then it's very likely that you'll find out.
sorry, had to comment as it’s still in recent memory.
I'm somewhat entertained by the posters in this thread shitting on media organisations. You need to understand: the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone.
$5 and your sarcastic comment will buy you a cafe latte, but the very last thing journalism needs more of is disruption. It's been disrupted every quarter for ten years straight and now reporters in Colorado are clinging to the goddamn blockchain because it's the last shitty hope left.
You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.
So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?
This move is very concerning to me. The best I can say about it is that if people are willing to buy coverage, hopefully that will directly pay for more coverage in general (a rising tide lifts all journalism). But it clearly removes the editorial independence that has been THE hallmark of serious journalism since serious journalism existed.
Case in point, almost all of open source software exists because someone else paid for it, and releasing it as FOSS didn't directly contradict their business interests.
Its just being exposed for what it is... the only new thing is discussion about it became common enough to pass the threshold for you to hear about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Tech companies aren't responsible for the decline in quality of journalism. They are responsible for shining light on how bloated and bad they were all along.
Checking facts and multiple sources on news stories was a major undertaking before the internet. Media has always been biased and bad, it's just that the internet is shedding light on how bad it is.
Transparency and widely available information is the pillar of democracy, not news organizations.
For example, Seymour Hersh clearly possessed journalistic independence in his story on the SEAL team assassination of bin Laden. However, at least initially, public response to his story was lukewarm and the Obama administration in particular and the press broadly spent a lot of time and pages trying to discredit the story. In this-- and many other cases-- public trust and reputation is orthogonal to journalistic independence.
Not that I disagree with your two sentences. Clearly this is an attempt to somehow "technologize" better journalism given the low quality of reporting in the run up to the 2016 election.
But if you take "journalistic independence" as your input and reflexively give "reputation and public trust" as your output, something is broken in your journalism parser.
Big conspiracies require more proof. This is not Watergate level where there was corroborating evidence behind the FBI assistant director's reveal to the Washington Post.
Seymour Hersh thinks US special forces members are like the bad guys from that Da Vinci Code book and are actually working for Opus Dei, and this why they would be so good at keeping the Hersh conspiracy hidden. Hersh did good with My Lai but that doesn't mean he can coast on his laurels forever.
My expectation is this will transfer wealth from blockchain zealots to journalists. It is telling, however, that the best defense I can rouse for this project is “the novel elements will probably fail”.
A better alternative would be to let token owners vote on what story to research next.
Sinclair made a blunder and showed the world that there was no independence, at least in their company. It was even set on a local level. It sets a very plausible model for other large media/news companies.
The CVL token is used to vote on whether or not the community believes a newsroom follows well understood journalistic standards (more information about these standards can be found in our "constitution" - https://blog.joincivil.com/the-civil-constitution-beta-64460...).
We use a system known as a Token Curated Registry (https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...) that incentivizes people to vote judiciously according to a shared understanding of values and not simply according to their own political leanings. TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur. We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.
We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith. We'll have more to announce on that front soon!
Being "whitelisted" or not on our TCR does not determine whether or not a newsroom is able to publish. Newsrooms are independent and have full editorial control of their content. Being on the TCR is a (we hope valuable) credibility indicator for newsrooms. The idea is that when you see an article by a newsroom that is on the TCR, you'll know that they have been vetted by the community and are very likely a trustworthy source.
TCRs are a new and experimental system, and we don't claim that our first implementation will be flawless and fix all the issues in the news media landscape. But we will iterate and improve it and firmly believe that some form of TCR can be used to help people understand their news sources better, increasing media literacy and trust, in a way that can scale worldwide.
-- Nick Reynolds
Can you give any examples you can share? You have state/non-state actors which have mass resources to use to their advantage directly or indirectly (e.g. troll farms). What prevents people from buying these CVL tokens and/or creating multiple accounts to bias your ledger? It's not like they really are taking a hit on these transactions unless they're above $5-$10. The Internet Research Agency had a small budget compared to other actors which were in the millions.
It also could go the other way for voting against reputable journalism. Is there prevention in this area as well? It seems like the Vote Quorum could be abused in this area.
It seems like it might be much easier to challenge your system around voting with an algorithm rather than the social engineering that occurs on social platforms.
Though I might come off critical, I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'm pretty new to blockchain and don't understand it all. Though, I did see the "Attacks against token-curated registries and mitigations" in your whitepaper. How expensive are these coins?
Second, even if they are able to acquire some huge percentage of the tokens, the public nature of the blockchain means we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors (if not by name, at least by account). The community can then decide to "fork" the bad actors out of the system (Essentially the community can deploy a new token that is identical to the old token except the bad actors' account balances are zeroed out. If everyone decides to switch to using the new token, the bad actors' old tokens become worthless and they just spent millions of dollars to slightly inconvenience people).
Specific details of our initial token distribution (how many tokens does 1 ETH buy, etc) are forthcoming, but after that initial distribution, the price of the tokens is determined by the market forces. It's those market forces that (theoretically) make the TCR actually "work" as token holders are incentivized to make the registry as "good" as possible and increase demand for the token (because people want to be on the registry).
-- Nick Reynolds
To control a central hub of communication for society, that's pocket change.
> we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors
If you're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, gaming the process properly won't cost much more.
>We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith
If you have the ability to determine who would use them in good faith, then why do they need to pay for the privilege? Also, this implies that those who would explicitly use them in bad faith may still obtain influence. And, where does this leave the people who would use them in good faith but cannot afford to buy them?
In general and in spite of precautions you describe, it has the distinct feel of buying access, which is not something of which the world, and certainly journalism, is in short supply.
-- Walker Flynn
Putting a newspaper on a blockchain, to the extent the idea is even coherent, does not exempt it from the economics that makes journalism unremunerative.
This is not to say that we cannot use crypto currencies to perform activities that were traditionally performed by journalists. However, this will look more like anonymous information bounty markets or prediction markets.
But even prediction markets need someone to subsidize them, willfully taking a loss to provide liquidity. I think there is a good case to be made for using demurrage to do this. But for this to work there has to be actual long term economic value on the blockchain, which most lack.
While our TCR will not solve the economics of journalism on its own, we believe it will help provide transparency into the inner workings of newsrooms and increase media literacy in ways that could encourage more people to fund journalism organizations. Furthermore, we think it can vastly improve discoverability especially for smaller (but still ethical and reliable) news organizations.
From there, it's about giving newsrooms tools to run and monetize their business how they want. For some this might look like traditional newspaper subscriptions, for others we might see more experimental monetization schemes that are only feasible on the blockchain (such as bounties).
-- Nick Reynolds
p.s. - Have you looked into TCRs generally? There's a fair amount of overlap with prediction markets, you might be interested in learning more about the incentive system.
It's genuinely difficult. One friend suggested "a coin for space travel". Nope. Mars coin is a thing. What about a coin for students? Nope. A coin for Kanye West. Nope. A coin for porn? Nope, of course that already exists. There's even a coin for keeping track of blockchains.
Not yet, I guess?
Seriously, though, pedophiles make great canaries. Everyone hates them, even those who create and manage systems for security and privacy. And police love to brag about busting them. For example, we learned about Freenet vulnerabilities and CMU's Tor exploit through pedophile busts.
And what does hosting news "on the blockchain" even mean in any practical sense? That I'll have to install a crypto-mining client just to read their articles? Or that they won't use normal webservers to host their content?
Newspapers are dying because other kinds of companies ate their advertising revenue.
We can add the Denver Post to a list of old-guard companies desperately grabbing for blockchain straws on their slide to oblivion (Long Island Iced Tea, Kodak).
I'm all for innovation in applied cryptography. But these desperate stories of blockchain cargo-cultism need to stop.
The subscriptions are surprisingly valuable. Paygo not so much.
Usual caveats apply: on average, in my experience, YMMV, etc etc.
blendle.com
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Once the Registry contract is deployed on the blockchain, it will continue to function and provide utility no matter what happens to the "Civil Media Company". No involvement on our part is needed to "recognize the voting power" as any individual, entity, or website can use the information contained in the registry however they want. A social media site, for example, could query the registry and decide to render a "credibility badge" when displaying links from a news organization that is whitelisted.
Happy to help clarify if you still have questions.
-- Nick Reynolds
Yes, the key word is "decide". To use your "credibility badge" example, an organization could ostensibly behave like they accurately respect the registry while also surreptitiously ignoring the registry in situations that suit them. You might say, "well those organizations will develop a reputation for dishonesty", which might be true if they get caught, but also isn't at all different from the status quo today where selective reporting and partisan bias are bemoaned loudly and often by every side regarding every issue.
Elsewhere you said
> We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.
Isn't this still centralisation? Either the Civil Council would not be necessary, in which case it's odd that you're setting it up, or it's still a centralised entity that has the final say and you might just as well skip the blockchain - or is my understanding incorrect/incomplete?
Decentralization is a spectrum, not a binary. While a centralized entity plays a part in the process, ultimate authority rests with the voters. The Council also has a plan to decentralize itself over time and voters will eventually be able to vote on removing or replacing the Council.
...actually I think the original quote said something about crypto, not pancakes, but I don't think it changes the underlying meaning. Why do you need a distributed, trustless database to run a local paper?
> The new publication will have a conventional website whose data will be written permanently into a MySQL database.
Whups, sorry, that actually was meant to say "...into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain." Which...okay. 1) I think they mean "a blockchain", and 2) why do we...care? Is this so people will notice if the article is edited? Why not just push the content to a public git repo when it's published? Maybe sign the commits?
> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards
So in other words, it's a lot like...a public company, that owns a newspaper, that then strips out every hint of editorial control, and then lets its shareholders directly have a say in every detail of what gets printed? So it's like...literally an attempt to create a newspaper even worse than the one they're quitting in order to form this one?
> Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said that by selling ownership stakes to the public, the company seeks to eliminate the possibility of one company or a small group of investors exerting power and influence over a journalistic organization and compromising its mission — exactly what many employees of the Denver Post accused Alden of doing.
By selling ownership, they think they're stopping one rich person from amassing a major ownership stake, as happened when their last newspaper sold ownership and allowed one rich person to amass a major ownership stake? What must it feel like to live with this level of blinding naivety?
The good news, such as it is, is that ownership of the tokens doesn't actually give anyone control over the newspaper, meaning that this is actually just meaningless hype. But, by the same logic, there's also no reason to actually buy the tokens. They have value only to the extent they allow editorial independence to be violated. So either they'll be valuable (but will undermine the journalistic ethics of the organisation), or they'll be worthless. There's no upside here.
It's early Monday morning in this part of the world, and I literally cannot figure out if this is an overly subtle troll or merely the dumbest idea I've heard in quite some time. This basically seems to be an attempt to use inappropriate technologies in order to carefully craft a "solution" that will make the problem worse. If you're worried about local newspapers being financially unviable and subject to intrusive editorial control...how does this do anything but make it worse?
It's just another coin capital scam. Launch a crypto coin, get suckers to buy it, go yacht shopping.
Kill the CEO Hang the CEO Kill the CEO Hang the CEO