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Value for Value

V4V - Frequently Asked Questions

The Freedom of Value - How Value-for-Value Fixes the Monetization of Information

The default monetization model of the online world is advertisement, a model that relies heavily on surveillance and gameable analytics. V4V offers an alternative. 

So-called "free" platforms have to sell ads (or worse: user data) to make money. And to sell this data, they have to accumulate as much data as they can and convince their buyers that the data is useful. When selling to advertisers, for example, they have to convince them that people are looking. How do they get more people to look? Outrage, conflict & arguments. Better yet: make people addicted to outrage, conflict, and arguing, and they will maximize "time on site" and other engagement metrics. Advertisers love these! Who cares about truth, wisdom, beauty, nuance, or value? Who cares about honest dialogue if you can maximize clicks instead?

Platforms and payment providers have the power to censor, a power that V4V removes. By cutting out the middlemen and allowing for self-sovereign hosting and monetization, the Value4Value model puts you and your audience in the center.

Financial Censorship

Depending on your circumstances, it might be difficult or impossible to receive funds via traditional means. Payment providers and banks are often forced to deplatform content creators for political reasons. Millions of people are unbanked in the first place, be it due to a lack of infrastructure or due to a lack of identity.

Luckily, bitcoin fixes this. It banks the unbanked and provides censorship resistance to those who need it most. Free speech and free value transfer are at the core of the V4V movement, which is why bitcoin is such an important piece to the puzzle.

Self-Censorship

Nobody likes to bite the hand that feeds them. This, unfortunately, leads to a chilling effect when it comes to discussing certain topics, depending on your source of income. You wouldn’t bad-mouth an advertiser of yours, would you? Well, most people would not, which is why advertisement, in the end, often leads to censorship.

An increasing number of people is getting deplatformed from all kinds of services. Whether you are booted off YouTube, banned from Twitter, kicked from PayPal, or removed from the SWIFT network, the result is always the same: someone in power doesn’t want you to do a certain thing, which is why your access to said thing is being denied.

Value4Value is an idea that builds upon protocols, not platforms. It is an idea that connects people directly, in ways that can’t be shut down, can’t be censored, can’t be stopped. Open protocols and open standards allow for a flourishing ecosystem of competing service providers, in addition to giving you the option to do everything yourself.

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Allowed Opinion "It isn't so bad," we say to ourselves. "Look at all the useful information!" we exclaim as we scroll through our feeds, inadvertently feeding the machine that is feeding us dopamine hits in return. But make no mistake: the companies in charge are not in the business of feeding us useful (or truthful) information. They are in the business of tricking us into feeding the machine. How could it be otherwise? You are what you track, and you become what you optimize for. From the platform's perspective, this is clicks, not quality. At first, maximizing clicks and watch time might be an innocuous thing. After all, you have to make money to survive. It's just one ad. How bad can it get? Unfortunately, the problems that come with it all are invisible at first. Just like cancer is invisible to the smoker who just smoked his first cigarette and liver cirrhosis is invisible to the drinker who just had his first drink, deplatforming, censorship, polarization, and manipulation of public opinion are invisible to the prosumer who just saw his first ad in a walled-garden ecosystem. We can probably agree that we are past the first inning when it comes to these issues. Censorship is the norm, deplatforming is cheered on, polarization is at an all-time high, and public opinion is manipulated manually and algorithmically like never before. The consensus is that you are too stupid to know what is good for you and your public opinion is too outrageous to be voiced publicly. Even worse, it shouldn't be your opinion in the first place. "Here is why you're wrong. Here is a source pointing to an allowed opinion. Here are some experts that agree with us. Our smart and helpful algorithms did all the thinking for you and they are never wrong. Neither are the experts." This is the world we are already living in. You are not allowed to speak freely. You are not allowed to think freely. You are not allowed to express yourself freely. Your picture is offensive; thus, it has to be removed. Your meme is too close to the truth or too criminally funny; thus, we have to put you in Twitter jail for a week or two. You are saying something that we don't agree with; thus, we have to ban you for life—even if you are a sitting president, mind you. You have said the wrong word in a video or played a copyrighted song in the background; thus, we have to take away your income. You have posted a picture of yourself without a mask; thus, we'll have to ban you and report you to the authorities.1 The fact that the sentence above is not purely in the realm of dystopian science fiction anymore should have everyone worried. Removed from cyberspace for wanting to breathe free. Strange times.
How much are content distribution platforms charging?

How much are content distribution platforms charging?

These platforms help you to distribute your content but charge hefty fees:

  • YouTube Super Chats: Youtube takes 30% from every super chat donation on the platform.
  • Facebook stars: 28.6% of the payment by your audience goes to Facebook
  • Twitch Bits: 28.6% fee goes to Twitch paid by your followers
  • Twitch Subs: 50% of the payment by a subscriber goes to Twitch

How much are subscription platforms charging

These platforms help you to create followers that send you payments regularly.

  • Patreon: 5%-12% of the monthly income goes to Patreon payed by the creator

How much are traditional services charging for donations?

These services do not help you in distributing your content. On top many users globally cannot even access these options:

  • PayPal (international): 4.39% + 0.49 USD per transaction goes to PayPal paid by the receiver

Stripe (international): 3.9% + 0.30 USD per transaction goes to Stripe paid by the receiver