I hadn’t quite realised the extent to which legacy social media like Twitter forbids references to Crypto based businesses. I tried to share a Steem Ninja sign up link on Twitter yesterday and noticed this morning that clicking on it gives this result.
I spent more than 30 minutes yesterday talking to the two people behind the company that runs Steem Ninja which provides a simple way to get onto the blockchain based Steem social media and blogging site for the payment of a small fee. Steem can be joined for free but that can take a few days. They’re real people running a real business. There’s no scam here that I can see, you give them something of value they give you something of value.
If you pay $2.50 you can get on immediately and you’ll have some crypto credit to get you started. It’s not a scam, it’s an alternative to the free to use social media that makes its money by selling YOUR work and information and YOUR attention to others while they show you adverts to pay for the “free” service. Remember, if you’re not paying for something, you are the product that is being sold!
I get a small bonus if someone signs up from the link. Either way, for Twitter to brand this business as potentially fraudulent when it is a direct competitor to its business model is exactly the kind of sneaky behaviour we now expect from these legacy social media sites.
If you do sign up to Steem, please be absolutely sure to note down the rather over complicated list of passwords and encryption keys that pop up just after you chose a user name and before you pay. Do not lose these. Steem is decentralised: that means nobody fully controls it and there simply is no reset system to get an account back if you lose your password.
I tell you a little bit about the early days of the EDL and how it grew by word of mouth amongst groups of football club supporters. This was mostly offline and in real life in pubs and clubs across the UK.
I make reference to JPB Liberty’s enormous law suit against Facebook and Google in Australia. For more details you can visit their site. If you do sign on as a class member or even decide to contribute let Andrew know where you heard about it: Brian of London! Andrew and I recorded an explanatory video about the case which you can watch here.
The business model of Silicon Valley is to reap outsized profits by achieving a (temporary) monopoly. This is the premise behind Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Instead of competition persisting over time, all the competition takes place in the startup phase, and the winner of this phase reaps all the profit. As a side effect, it creates a perfect environment for Modians to take charge, once the winner is declared. The effect is enhanced by the little-known (outside of Silicon Valley) truth that the best technology does *not* often win. Usually, it’s the best marketing.
David Boxenhorn, on Facebook
I watched YouTuber Law’s latest update on the letter he’s putting together about the deplatforming of Sargon of Akkad (and all the rest) by Patreon. His intention is to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in the US rather than bringing a suit against any of the tech companies directly. That’s probably a smart legal plan (he knows much more than I do) but he will be fighting huge entrenched interests. His videos are below but I’ll sum them up: he’s building an ad hoc team of (highly skilled) volunteers and he thinks he has enough case law and evidence to get the FTC to start an investigation which would have much more power and weight than a collection of law suits. It would also be financed by government money.
I wanted to put some broader context around this and that’s why I quoted David at the start on how Silicon Valley and modern Tech business works. This all feeds into and flows from David’s thesis of Mundia and Modia. It also links up with the law suit I’m supporting by JPB Liberty against Google and Facebook for banning many different crypto based technologies from advertising on their platforms about a year ago.
The Federal Trade Commission is part of government. As such it will staffed by modians, people who are far removed from objective criteria of success in business or success in a technical and engineering field. This is a hugely important thing to remember when dealing with them.
Patreon, PayPal, Mastercard have all achieved a degree of market dominance in their fields. There might have been better technical competition but these guys are mammoths. As such the objective business criteria for their ongoing success are far removed from the day to day operations of the companies. Mostly their staff can do whatever they want: riding a wave of profitability they inherited from early engineering skills, excellent marketing and a healthy dose of luck. This will carry them along for a while.
The FTC is going to be staffed (especially considering Mundia Modia thinking and following 8 years of Obama) via the revolving door system between big business and the US government. Massive lobbying money has completely corrupted Washington DC. It is into this quagmire that YouTuberLaw’s letter will be sent.
As we’ve seen this week with the massive layoffs across Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, in some parts of the tech world easy profitability is going away. My belief is the entire advertising supported business model is stretched very thin and the numbers upon which Google and Facebook have grown are being understood to be grossly inflated. Everything downstream from them (and that includes “businesses” like Huffpo and Buzzfeed) which rely on web traffic and eyeballs flowing from social media sites will start to feel pain.
There has been a recent uptick in linking the brands of online advertising with the nature of user generated content it appears alongside. Today this is a modian idea to drive forward their “social justice” agenda but it was first done a few decades ago by figures like Mary Whitehouse in the UK and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the US. It has been taken to new levels of effectiveness by the far-left today. Thinking this would help them fight against online competitors for your attention, the mainstream media (M5M) thought they’d ride the wave, they’re also getting caught in the destructive tsunami now too.
The promise of digital advertising was that it can be much more targeted, if that’s really coming true, every advertising based business, even Facebook and Google, the two most capable targeted advertising delivery systems, will do themselves out of business because advertising just shouldn’t be as big an industry as it is today and the entire media world that is built around it is probably a house of cards.
So returning back to the financial deplatforming of non-advertising supported media endeavours (like Sargon of Akkad, Alex Jones, Milo and even myself): advertising supported media is going to change dramatically. I still can’t see the future but I can tell the status quo is changing very fast. Everything that can be done to stop payment systems which bypass the advertising support model from capture by the far-left, cultural marxists must be done which is why I wish YouTuberLaw and JPB Liberty both every success in shaking up these industries.
My video with Andrew Hamilton explaining the JPB Liberty law suit:
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