WeTubethe new revolutionary p2p media provider
AbstractWeTube comes in a time in which we are seeing enormous efforts from the people to overcome the problems of censorship and central information control over all Internet. Notorious are the examples of YouTube, Vimeo, and other regulated places. YouTube itself, for example, is directly censored in many countries (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Censorship), impeding people to access to the biggest media database available today for humans, and therefore making a precious source of information not available for human evolution and free interchange of information.
But not only censorship occur to websites, but also the websites themselves are obliged to censor many of the contents that the users upload, many times to adjust to arbitrary regulations that are imposed by a few, only serve a few, and restrict the majority.
We believe this is a serious problem, and we should overcome it by the means we can for the moment: technology.
We are happy to present here a good solution, and we expect that the technology expressed in this document can make you excited enough to understand the big implications that this is going to achieve very soon.
We extort you to join us. We truly need you, as this is a movement from humans to humans. Please read on.
The three pillars of WeTube: freedom, privacy, voluntary moderationImagine a web page where you can upload any video, music, image or document, and it will be immediately available to everybody without restrictions, without anybody knowing who you are (if you want), without anybody censoring you.
Imagine a web page where you can access any media you want without anybody having to know what are you doing, not being imposed to authenticate with your real ID, IP, or associated credit card number, not being observed by the big brother, and at the same time the content you access is of high quality and helpful for your evolution and relationships.
Imagine you are a publisher, a journalist or an editor, and there is a place where you can safely publish your discoverings, but without any censorship at all, while at the same time you are able to get rid of the junk and noise around you, providing only good quality researches and associations with you audience.
Imagine you are an artist that lives for and from your art, and you have a free place where you can express your ideas and concepts, participate in community with your followers and other artists, and even earn the money you deserve for your hard work, without imposing others and not having to pay big commissions to any private editor or distributor, nor having to support their greed and censorship.
Imagine a media where you can get rid of the junk so easy as doing a click. Imagine being your own moderator, where you can select what is good and bad for yourself and your family, without having to surrender yourself to what other has decided, specially when that other is trying to impose you a vision you don't agree with.
Imagine a place where you can choose multiple moderators, including yourself or no moderators at all, being them people and organizations you really trust, and the possibility to add or remove them without restriction. Imagine how good a free moderator could be if their motivation is to serve only what people want while removing what they don't, not what a big guy on top of him/her decides. Moderators with big impositions and bad appliance of filters would be rapidly abandoned by the community, and their reputation diminished.
Imagine that the media you see is temporally stored on your computer so you can see it multiple times without having to reload it. Imagine that the content you like most is permanently stored on your computer so if you lost your internet connection you can still access it. Imagine a safeguard of all the important media you have in case of media server shutdowns, human crisis, war, or government censorship. You don't have that in today's standard media providers, as they prohibit you to store the content. Even companies like Google prohibits the publishing of browsers add-ons that use a trick to record the media, making YouTube videos very difficult to get stored locally with the Chrome browser.
Imagine that you are a legit entrepreneur and have a useful and good business that you need to promote. The audience of this new media provider will be large and a real opportunity for you to come in. Every single area of business you can think of is covered, and you'll be able to perfectly select the categories you want to be in. Even better is the fact that advertisers can select to what moderation they want to be attached, so you can perfectly choose moderators who provide legal only content in your country.
Imagine that you are a programmer and/or a system administrator and you want your deserved reward for your hard work while being useful to humanity. You can host a server and earn bitcoins proportional to the amount of bandwidth, space and maintenance you serve. At the same time, the protocol is specially designed to protect you against the arbitrary laws, as you can select which moderators you're going to serve, and therefore, the content your server helps the user to download. But not even that, most of the contents are actually not stored in your servers, but interchanged between users alone, making this protocol a really distributed anonymous one. We even optionally protect your IP with a technology similar to hidden Tor services if you want to serve delicate searches, at only the cost of some added latency. You are a crucial part of this revolution.
Is this another moderated system?Yes and no. It is moderated in the sense that oneself can be the moderator, or relay the task to a trusted moderator or a group of moderators. The magic of this system is that it allows full freedom, while maintaining the convenience of good-quality results and potential legality, as explained bellow.
First things first. In WeTube, there is a root moderator called “unmoderator” which accepts everything and cannot be violated in any form. This moderator resides in no place and all its content is purely in the cloud of users. Not a single part of this moderator content and searches resides in any server, except if the server administrator decides so, which s/he must explicitly configure to. This moderator fulfills freedom and zero discrimination, which unfortunately includes low quality results and potentially some illegal content in some countries.
You can compare this unmoderator with raw eMule, Tor hidden services, Gnutella, Kademlia, and other p2p protocols offering searches and/or magnet links. One who has used those programs knows that the results are more often than not of very low quality, when not illegal or honeypots. But yet, people use those programs because of censorship and copyright issues in their countries, so they accept the junk in favor to obtain some valuable content.
That drives us to a problem: because no moderation is taken place, both the quality and legality of the content is diminished, and most people don't use them because of that.
So, what to do? We don't want to be illegal, and at the same time we want full access to quality content which is censored in central mainstream medias. We also want privacy, one thing which we don't have today unless we use very complicated technology.
The point here is: you can't have legality and good quality content in an unmoderated system. After a while, the system will be full of junk and legally dangerous staff.
So we introduce moderators. But let the thing be WELL done. We choose to be OUR OWN moderators. Certainly not a good thing for oppressive business and governments, who want to be the only one moderators (we should call them oppressive censurers, or just fascists), but still a good thing for governments and entrepreneurs who embrace freedom and really take care of their citizens/clients.
When a user enters in the WeTube network, s/he is usually attached to a moderator which only censors things which are not relevant to the theme s/he is attached to. For example, one moderator can specialize only on providing news, throwing out the rest. Another moderator could provide a good collection of music of a specific style. There could be also more general moderators which only accepts everything which is legal in his/her country. And there could be another interesting type of moderator which accept content which is censored in his/her country, but that content is globally considered good in the rest of the world, making him/herself an activist pro human rights against dictatorships.
A user of WeTube always can choose whose moderators s/he wants. He is presented with a default, which is usually a group of moderators which keeps things legal. But s/he can all ways choose to exit that moderation, or combine with others. Yes, multiple moderators are allowed, but interesting enough, the system allows also to be attached only to “unmoderated” (moderators themselves enter in this mode to pick good staff throughout filtering).
Anyone can be a moderator and no personal information is required. Just register a nick and go to the moderation area, and there you got it.
Now it is time to introduce the concept of WeTube entry points:
The entrance to the world of WeTubeThe p2p programs are a problem in themselves. They require the user to install an application in their computers and configure things. The learning curve is also usually high, and passing links to another person is complicate because requires both sides to have the program installed and configured. Another important problem is that those programs are not really real-time, so the user must wait for the entire media to download in order to start watching it, which is extremely slow and inconvenient.
So we propose a very nice solution: WeTube can run in your browser and in your mobile device, so you can pass links around, use a nice interface, embed videos in your blogs, send by email, and do with the content all the things you can actually do with with any page.
But, because WeTube is in fact a p2p protocol, with thousands of servers and users connected to it and making it run, the web is only one of the possible interfaces. As a protocol, it can run on web-pages, but also in the form of applications which uses the WeTube libraries to present themselves in other convenient forms. Desktop applications and mobile applications are perfectly possible.
The average user will use a simple web interface as his/her entry point. Many WeTube servers will also provide an entry point that will download the JavaScript program that runs in the browser, which is in fact the interface for WeTube. Optionally, every entry point to WeTube can choose their default moderators, and even disallow the users to select moderators which provide illegal material, just to avoid legal issues. Of course, in this case, the user can change the entry point for another less restricted that allows more moderators, or simply download a full-featured browser extension with unlimited access.
The matter of allowing entry points to be fully moderated has many advantages:
The site itself can avoid legal issues.
A site that is meant to provide content for just one specific area, for example, news or scientific, can filter the rest out.
A site with content only allowed for children, could be considered safe and can provide only useful and educative content for them, filtering out violence or sex, and also boring things.
Those sites are also a way to promote WeTube itself.
The rise of privacyPrivacy is a big problem today. Corporations and governments keep track of everything yo do, and use the information they collect from you to make a profile of your personality that they then use to impose certain things and make decisions.
People tend to think that the information they collect from them is just for advertising purposes, but that is only a tiny part. And I will put some examples:
The main target are libertarians, anarcho-socialist, anti-capitalists, anarcho-captitalists, communist, people aware of their rights as citizens, artists, media distributors (incorrectly named “hackers”), protesters, open source activists, many minorities, people protesting against governments regulations, people protesting against monopolies, scientific out of the statuesque, and more. In a sense: people who embrace freedom, whether they are from the left or the right.
Wars are used as an excuse to impose vigilance and coercion against the people. Actual corporations want to earn money, yes, but the point is that, meanwhile, they are a tool to impose censorship and control. Any good company who is worried about their clients privacy is usually forced to give all the information they gather to government agencies. And this is happening in most countries, some more than others.
But we believe in freedom and self-responsability. And privacy is vital at this point, because we must protect ourselves against censorship. It doesn't matter what you have to say, what are your ideas, if you can't spare them.
Important is also your economic privacy. Remember that most media providers requires you to give your credit card number in order to start downloading media, even if it is free media. iTunes and Google Play are examples. When you give your credit card to them, not only are you de-facto telling them who you are exactly, but you are telling banks and therefore government agencies what are you doing with your money. This is a very strong form of coercion to artists too, because that implies that only artists approved by them can reach a sufficient audience to make a life.
So we embrace Bitcoin and derivatives for the economic parts of WeTube, because it allows anonymous and non-coercible transactions.
More importantly, we base our identity parts in Keyhotee, that has an impressive list of privacy and security features, including the possibility to register any nick in a completely distributed network, not owned by anybody, and therefore out of the information collectors. This is the only way today to obtain real private anonymous IDs.
Of course, we also protect your IP. Even if you need an internet connection to connect to WeTube, in the very moment you enter into it, your privacy is guarantied because all data travels encrypted and completely distributed. So the only thing that a man in the middle can see is that you are connected to WeTube, but cannot know what are you truly doing.
But what about criminals? Couldn't they have impunity in this system?They can't have impunity because this is a moderated system. Criminal activities should be immediately rejected by most moderators. Illegalities could also be cut-off.
Yes, they could still broadcast media to the unmoderated area, but that area will be mostly ignored by normal people.
We believe that if you try to censor terrorists or psychopaths, the only thing you will obtain is a stronger response from those groups, and motivate them to use actual physical forces. Most moderators and users do understand that the best they can do is ignore criminals, or even better: create content that severely expose their badness and identities by investigations.
Also, we should consider that most people are actually good people and don't like violence. Most of the biggest threads to humanity did precisely came from wars and false-flag actions, of course motivated by the dark sides of governments and bankers.
Contact InformationIf you'd like to talk to us or ask us questions, you can find us in #wetube on freenode IRC. There will usually be someone in there willing to talk to you.
You can follow the progress here:
https://github.com/wetube/wetube-webBitcloud, our protocolWe base our work on Bitcloud protocol which is activelly being developed and decided right now. Please join us!
https://github.com/wetube/bitcloud
