Jeremy Kauffman on LBRY, a decentralized digital marketplace

0:20I'm excited to learn a little bit more I think you guys are having a pretty strong push to towards the beginning of 2020 here but if you could kick it off for the viewers by just giving a little bit of background on why you started library and what was the vision that you saw for this community run marketplace and content distribution network yes absolutely so library is the fancy way

0:41is it's a blockchain based decentralized digital content protocol that facilitates the discovery distribution and purchase of digital content that's a fancy way of saying we want to make services like like YouTube which is I think what brought us together here today we want to make services like that possible without the Google existing without having that middleman who has

1:05control over your channel who has the keys and so that was that idea was there from the very beginning can we create technology and blockchain is actually part of it of what made it possible to build this kind of technology that's great and you guys have been one of the more long-standing blockchain projects if I'm not wrong how long have you guys been

1:25around for now it's funny what constitutes old in the blockchain space because by any other company standard were quite young but yeah we are blockchain launched in June three half years ago right okay three Neph years ago so June of 2016 and that it's kind of an old school project in that sense right it was a couple of people sort of hacking on it in the beginning no I see

1:49oh when I say the blockchain launched the functionality the bare-bones functionality no graphical UI compared to now we have your web apps and a much fully featured ecosystem that's great and there has been a lot of you know word about library on social media recently on the traditional social media platforms that I've noticed but at the same time traditional social media

2:14forms like like Twitter and YouTube as you mentioned they seem to have that be really full of noise not very transparent and there's hints of censorship as well you know how are you guys making this social media experience more fair and transparent for everybody that's using it yeah so well in terms of transparent everything we do is open source we publish reports regular

2:37reports in terms of everything that the company is doing you know there's there's separate things transparency and the kind of user experience so in terms of the user experience the big aspect of libraries that we're leaving end-users in control right so there's only publishers and end-users are gonna have a say in what they see and what they watch we're removing our ability to

2:59have a set now we still have to write code and so that does sometimes mean that you're making algorithmic choices and that kind of thing but even in that sense everything we do is open-source everything can be read everything can be forked so you're never tied into one algorithm you know it came out with YouTube recently that if they have people just giving specific scores to

3:18channels you don't know what yours is and it's essentially this is a good guy this is a bad guy don't show the bad guy show more the good guy and they accidentally leaked some of this stuff and you can see it in a reclaim in that article and this is just ridiculous like maybe you can get better results that way I'm not ruling it out be sure and hide this stuff for people

3:33so definitely mom yeah well with that YouTube you know mention recently it was not even two weeks ago when a lot of the big YouTube influencers that have you know hundreds of thousands of subscribers all received strikes on their videos that had been made from years ago and it seemed like everything was fine and then all of a sudden you know this content is considered bad and

3:54all of a sudden there's a strike on your channel and then their channels get deleted and a lot of these content producers are actually using that as their main source of income as well because they do it every day so it's interesting to see you know how do you see the difference between you know those people that are deciding what's right and what's wrong and writing

4:11algorithms when it's open source it's great that people are able to see how you know what the code is but what is you know library stance on people that produce content and whether it's deemed good or bad and then as well how does library touch on controversial content or content that could be considered you know illegal yeah so our stance is as much as possible is to not have a stance

4:36so we see ourselves as a technology company that's creating technology technologies like HTTP or SMTP these are power the web these power email we don't expect there to be layers of interference and censorship at that level of the protocol and so the idea is the same kind of thing here let's just protocol eyes digital content moving bits around and saying who published

4:56them I can say is the easiest thing especially in document but it's not the hardest thing there are people they're harder technical projects then than this one we can do this and we can protocol eyes it we don't need to be trapped in a single platform in a single place so I can get into the specifics of how we deal with it gets complicated but it's also not that different from the

5:17traditional web in the sense you just have to go after the people right you can't go after one party to say take down a website and you're not gonna be able to go after one specific party to say take down a piece of content on library mmm-hmm it's it's you know so what we've done is we've just taken what the way that the web works which is which has some of these properties and

5:35we're applying it to digital content so you're not trapped in one place I think I may have missed part of your question I was curious yeah no it was great and in the final part of the question was just touching on you know if you guys don't have a stance and the algorithms have things to remove illegal types of content yes so if we're told that content is illegal we well

5:55first we like verify it was this about is this actually true that's what we're registered TMC agent we're United States company we try our hardest which gets hard and blockchain land because these laws aren't always written with this technology mind but we're trying our hardest to follow them and so we register if something is illegal we put it on a blacklist the software that we

6:14ship is in terms of the way that it's configured is not accessing that stuff and I also none of our servers no way and we're that we're participating will ever host that stuff can people configure their software to do things illegally they can we strongly discourage them to but you can configure an HTTP server to do things illegal right this is again this isn't new you

6:37can do illegal things with technology so cool I am worried a little bit with block there's always anytime new technology people think crime X but this way and then there's a big brouhaha about it I am worried that's gonna happen and watch him and it's like yeah people can commit crimes with watchin tickets yo people can commit crimes with bricks

6:54like me and I think that you guys have a great host of good content on the platform and there's a lot of people that seem to be joining have you guys had a lot of growth in the last you know as you guys continue to make better UI and more updates a ton Alexa confirms if you want to see our web particular but we I mean we of course predated even the web stuff but a huge surge of youtubers

7:20which I think thousands of youtubers just in the last couple of weeks coming on to sync their content some really big ones in fact the one what we're sending out and I think this email may not have gone out yet but whatever I don't care talking about it I said Naomi whoo the sexy cyborg will be a featured in a email letter about new content creators

7:42that just join but the cheese-face and censorship issues herself she's a very popular creator from China I believe millions of followers and yeah it's exciting there's been a really big surge in interest I think people are really realizing even if YouTube made a mistake here if you don't have the keys if you don't control your identity if you don't control your content you are

8:01building a business on top of quick-set you are you never know when the rules are gonna change underneath you and it's only with technology like library that can you have that kind of trust have that confidence that you're not gonna get bait and switch the rules the game aren't going to change that warning that kind of thing yeah and as a Content producer myself I've noticed that I'm

8:19looking for alternative platforms to post content on but one of the main problems is that YouTube has this giant network effect that everybody's there searching for it and you can't get off the site and it's great to have that you know censorship free site where we can voice our true opinions but how do you guys find besides the fact that you just

8:40have a gradual increase in users moving to the site is there any kind of turning point where these new sites will all of a sudden you know get mainstream adoption yeah that's a great question so it's a classic business problem two-sided marketplace in an egg problem right and so the answer is that manure you sort basically work at the margins so you

9:02find the people who are the most underserved who are the most affected you also you again using that kind of economic thinking you'll see what we did with the YouTube program right you find ways that are low cost for someone to participate in your marketplace or low effort right that's a big part of what of how some of our content got the original you now we have a lot more

9:22original content and we had original content in the beginning but a lot of youtubers we found some youtubers came on like oh yeah I click the button a year ago just to feel like my content was safe and they come back a year later and they found that they have you know five thousand followers that they've been accumulating funds and all and they have an audience of library like oh

9:38wow this is really cool I just kind of did that on the whim because it wasn't easy yeah and so that's a you know so you look at at doing things like this yeah you can't expect the amount of people are gonna just jump in with two full feet to something completely new I'm you have to find ways of like slowly easing them in low cost low friction and that's the way we think about doing

9:57that and that's why we have more than two million pieces of content on the network already including I think we're 30,000 plus youtubers Yoriko publishing a lot of original stuff you can find Hollywood films on the library so there's a ton of stuff on there alright mmm-hmm that's great well that's great growth and it's just elaborate of that a little more on the content creator side

10:15I know I've I've used library and I've done the YouTube synchronization myself and it seemed really easy but what are what are the specific incentives for content creators to sync to library to reap rewards and to build contributions to build the community yeah that's a good question so we for youtubers coming onto the platform we offer rewards based off of the size of

10:37your audience to start co-publishing and you it's one click it's all described at library comm LBI comm /youtube that's exactly what Ashton went through hopefully you found that process pretty easy pretty easy to do and you get monthly rewards as well as rewards for views although everyone gets rewards for views so that's not specific to being a youtuber I'm the youtube specific

11:01rewards are really just how big was your audience before you started publishing on my bread and it's all a pretty you're pretty easy process you can come and check it out and then once you should we construct your channel for you we then send you your wallet file and that wild file contains the keys to your channel and if you if you if you retain control of that

11:22well file you are the only person who has ultimate control over that Joe that's great and it's it is very easy to use now I know it's great to use and there's a lot of people gaining every day but you guys are probably working on more updates and you have a roadmap for even more development features throughout 2020 maybe could elaborate that what's coming up next yeah

11:43we're just working on making our 2020 roadmap public which will definitely be public before the end of this month of January so and we and I will talk about some of the sexier stuff coming up next because I know that's whatever wants to know about that I want to say that actually one of the biggest things is continuing to make the same stuff better you know it's it's the if you

12:03would what does YouTube do you can watch videos right you can describe it really simply but truthfully it does a lot of stuff really well and you know you get into the fine grained detail ball you know how fast is how fast the videos play what kind of processing do you do on content to make it easier how good is discovery like sure you might have had a

12:20search bar two versions ago but you know you iterate iterate iterate iterate until your searches is really good so like really ill I don't you know I think a very good portion of our effort will be making the same stuff that yeah right yeah but new things I do expect us to finally tackle iOS it's the only platform that we are not available on we have a new feature coming out called

12:44reposts not like called repost that's what they're called on other sites it's not something we invented it's like retweets repost on tumblr yeah I think that's really cool because a lot of discovery is channel based on library and so this way you'll be able to share content from other channels and have people who are followers of that discover it also help library users

13:01share stuff you know intra intra library audience building I think it'll be really cool for that I feel like I feel like there's got to be big stuff that missing oh yeah we want to really tackle that to the extent that we can and this one I'm not this one's not going to come out immediately but onboarding off-boarding you know we wanna we want we want people who want

13:22to just be able to build an audience via the protocol who want you know dollars or other things at the end of the day we want to continue to facilitate that it's frustrating how hard it is to exchange cryptocurrency and other currencies at times and so we want to look at what we can get as a company to bring them better that's great well sounds like you

13:39guys have a lot on your plate and best of luck towards that and with that said are you guys expanding your team I know you're obviously looking for more influencers more people to use the platform but are you looking for more team members or more strategic partners or more investors or any other anything else yeah yeah we're I mean so we're always looking looking for all those

14:01things if we could run down the list specifically but you know we are business people and we like people who have come to us with all kinds of ideas whether that is people who have ideas for the product people who have ideas for marketing people who want to partner with us promote us you know we love working with creators and that kind of thing I'm always been we're very

14:21available so I'll surely even go ahead and say you know people want to come and talk to me and pitch me that stuff sure you can email me I'm Jeremy and I'll be a cop you can also find us in our chats and other places what was what else was the quote was in that question about things I might strategic partnerships team members influencers I know you know

14:40obviously you can find them out your email your website if they're any other social medias I can link those all in the description box below for you guys yeah sure I mean I would say like if you astron can do the full links of all of our profiles so you can follow us on your desired one you know we're on most of them library TV is the easiest place just just go sign up there just create

15:00an account follow follow Ashton so you don't miss any more videos and it's a great way to start learning about library you know consume your content about crypto on a on a crypto oriented platform if you're not doing that all right amazing thank you so much Jeremy and thank you for taking the time for this interview and it's all the time that we have this time but it sounds

15:21like you guys are doing great things and let's follow up in the near future thanks Ashley you