Decentralised curation is among the early promises of the web.

To grow exponentially, content platforms, recommendation engines and information feeds of any sort can’t rely on filtering mechanisms whose outputs scale linearly.

Most content platforms today already crowdsource curation: flags, likes and reactions are all objective signals that end up being interpreted and turned into endless outputs (e.g. recommendations). But even if you leverage the wisdom of the crowd, and accrue a lot of information, such model presumes decisions on how to generate “outputs” from these data is taken by a central entity. Decentralising curation, in turn, means getting distributed inputs and reaching consensus on the product they should output in a decentralised fashion.

Some of the well known methods for doing so include variations of proof-of-stake. The most solidified ones, although still early crypto economic primitives, are probably Curation Markets and Token Curated Registries. We’ll talk about them later on.

Staking: locking tokens that may be lost, as a punishment, if you fail to perform a function; or multiplied, as an incentive, if you perform such function well. Illustration by Agata Krych

Demonetisation and the fallacy of profitable niche-content

Youtube originally catered to the long-tail. We all remember how creators would be able to reach global audiences, build tribes, and live off their content. It has arguably happened, to some extent, but what was a romantic story between independent producers and an emergent technology turned into a messy love triangle once Google stepped in.

The internet is essentially open. Navigating its entropy is costly to our scarce time. To optimise its expenditure, we turn to attention-allocation engines that provide curatorial services (and a bunch of further facilities out of scope here) in exchange for sovereignty over the portion of attention they handle. Facebook is de facto owner of the ~40 minutes we spend on its feed every day.

Curation for whom?

Discovering, sorting and packaging information are activities that may serve different interests. Youtube’s adpocalypse, for instance, has shown us curation takes place in multiple levels:

Platform-centric : filtering out videos that infringe top-down content policies.

: filtering out videos that infringe top-down content policies. User-centric : sorting the relevance of videos in order to provide individual recommendations and approximate creators to their potential audiences.

: sorting the relevance of videos in order to provide individual recommendations and approximate creators to their potential audiences. Advertiser-centric: curating or validating the content alongside which specific media buyers will end up showing.

Youtube has even considered decentralising the platform-centric aspect of curation, in the past, through a secondary market for videos. But the highest level of curation doesn’t present many problems once users who sign up for the service necessarily agree with stated policies. What has caught public attention, lately, is how much user-centric curation is losing importance to advertiser-centric curation.

Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash

Playing favourite: the Hollywood of the Internet

Youtube has become a label. And its stars are the Hollywood of the internet.

Although creators and consumers have essentially symmetrical demands/offers towards the market (one has content and seeks attention, the other has attention and seeks content), the mechanisms devised to match them have gotten skewed in favour of attention-dynamics dictated by third parties. These third parties have the piggybanks that keep the “free services” running for all. And, collectively, they’re more essential to the business and thus a bigger force than any creator can be.

How to get out of this quicksand?

We must distribute the infrastructural costs of maintaining such video market, diminishing its underlying reliance on bill-paying third parties. DSNs like IPFS lay down a viable path for this.

We need ways of moving value out of the shadow of gatekeepers, to which Ethereum, for example, comes to the rescue.

Then we can start distributing the power to participate in relevance extraction engines, moving towards distributed curation. Internet people have gotten used to buy this service by giving away sovereignty over their attention. There is no problem in doing so — watching ads in exchange for the right to watch free content is like paying a negative price for stuff you don’t want to see before paying a positive one for what you seek. Attention-allocation services can and should be provided, but on a market-basis instead of on the basis of the wills of specific third parties. The access to relevance extraction engines must be unbundled from the access to the bigger system itself.

People should participate in distributed curation as much as they’re willing to. This is the seed of distributed governance, if one frames governance as the curation and enforcement of rules. Politics should be engaging, rather than obstructive. It might just be how web3 ends up spawning an era of anti-Tubes.

A short history of TCRs

Humans have always flirted with lists. Some of them we make frequently (e.g. shopping lists); others, once in a year (e.g. Oscar candidates). A few are there all the time, even though we rarely notice (e.g. accredited suppliers for the bakery we have breakfast at).

Most of these can be abstracted into whitelists or blacklists — sets that classify items in a binary fashion (either they’re in or out). And, in both cases, “the contents of a list uniformly satisfy some criteria” (all items are aligned under a same focal point). “A token-curated registry uses an intrinsic token to assign curation rights proportional to the relative token weight of entities holding the token”.

The mechanism was formalised in a short paper by Mike Goldin (author of the quoted sentences above), from ConsenSys. AdChain originally implemented a registry of accredited domains for advertisers, and was followed by a handful of other teams with diverse approaches. Here you can find a list of TCRs in development. AdChain, District0x, Messari, Medcredits, Ocean and Relevant are a few of the spearheading efforts. A list of relevant reads has been compiled by the folks at Token Curated Registry, and contains most of what’s been experimented on the subject.

The general flow

To make curation happen, TCRs lay down a propose-challenge mechanism through which any token holder can object to an item, raise an open voting round (to which other token holders are always invited), and let a smart contract wrap up all inputs to produce a final decision. Hence, a token curated registry is a list that takes subjective inputs and produces for each item a binary output. A generic framework for distributed curation.

challenging an application, from the AdChain whitepaper.

In the core of the design is the concept of staking. To submit an entry to the list, one must stake at least a min_deposit . To challenge a listee requires staking an amount equal to that behind the item being challenged. Participants in the open voting round also stake a small amount in their votes. Once participation thresholds are crossed, an outcome for the item under challenge is achieved by weighting votes: in either case, the losing side has stakes forfeited, and the winning side gets the loot, each participating individual according to its stake (a full walkthrough can be found here).

Token curated playlists

The idea of token curated playlists combines a “mother” Token Curated Registry with potentially infinite “children” registries. In our given system, the items subject to listings are hashes of videos stored on IPFS.

Uploading videos into IPFS is essentially permissionless, but applying one of them to such TCR requires a min_deposit of, say, initially 1 TOK. TOK are finite tokens, with deflationary issuance. For now, let’s assume all agents interested in the TCR already have some tokens at hand. The mother registry serves as a whitelist for content that:

(1) does not infringe copyright (meaning its owner, as defined by metadata, has the right to publish the content under the conditions he specified);

(2) does not infringe international laws.

We won’t wait until the application_period of a submission expires without challenges before listing it, but rather allow it to be listed immediately, and extend the period during which it can be challenged indefinitely. The permissiveness (in relation to the original TCR implementations) is justified by the fact that the real curation we’re most interested in comes after our whitelist.

For token holders to become active stakers, they can either make submissions to the list, participate in challenges and open voting rounds, or stake towards already listed items, thus increasing the cost of challenging them.

So far, most interactions required for users to take part in the propose-challenge mechanism could be translated into UI already familiar for the average Tube user.