DTube Delegation Renewal Application review
Deadline: October 8th, 23:59 UTC
We have prepared this commentary as a step prior to final processing of scores and delegation recommendations to Steemit. We'd invite you to respond to the questions presented here in the comment below.
We plan to score the application based on reponses provided here before submitting to Steemit.
Please submit one answer per comment below and reference the question number in the comment.
Questions from the Committee
Please note that scores above are preliminary and will be improved once the committee has received acceptable responses to the below clarifications.
Please respond to the clarification questions in the comments section below.
Please respond one question per comment and put the clarification number at the start of the comment.
(4) About terms of delegation:
(4.2) Please confirm that you accept that any approval of this delegation renewal becomes the terms for your future delegation.
(4.4) Please confirm if your delegation has been used for purposes other than those intended.
(8) Business Strategy
(8.3) How will your business strategy increase the amount of STEEM being powered up and/or burnt?
Please further clarify who will actually purchase steem as a result of using this platform
(8.4) About financial incentives to Steemit/community
Please provide any details for the benefit to Steemit.
(13) Metrics
(13.5) How many Guest (non Steem) accounts are interacting with your project
What path exists to turn avalon/dtube accounts into steem accounts?
(13.7) What is the total quarterly (USD) value of rewards disbursed directly tied to the delegation? (can be a negative number of your projects is a flagging project)
Please confirm how much USD value in steem is distributed from your project each quarter.
(13.15) Road Map
Are there any more long term milestones into late 2020 / early 2021?
(14) Other Questions
(14.1) Do you have published guidelines for how the delegation vote is used?
Deadline: October 8th, 23:59 UTC
100% Beneficiary set to @steem.dao
Thanks! That was a copy-paste error.
4.2: We understand the terms are changing and agree with the new ones
4.4: The only way we have used delegation is for voting on dtube content and giving more exposure to the best content on our platform. Unlike many other projects, we never changed the way the delegation has been used. We never self voted to 'pay staff' unlike many others, we don't charge users or ask for anything in exchange for votes.
8.3: DTube has already brought many people to discover STEEM, and we just want to push this further. The idea of a decentralized video ledger (with proof of work / reward pool) is a clear use case for blockchain and dpos.
We have no idea how much STEEM was purchased from users who discovered STEEM from DTube, it would be very hard to even estimate. But nonetheless, we will keep on bringing many real people on STEEM, some of those have money and will organically purchase steem or try different services/apps in the network.
We are open to suggestions, if you think we can implement simple solutions to our product to increase the average 'investment' of our users, without killing the '100% free to use' aspect.
8.4: We are a struggling start-up with limited funds, it is technically impossible for us to 'purchase' the delegation with cash or equivalent, even though we understand that's what you'd prefer.
However, we will soon have our own token (DTC), with a public tradable value, as well as a similar voting power mechanism as STEEM, that allows generating curation rewards. We would be okay discussing trading either stake for stake, or delegation for delegation with SteemIt Inc. However, we are still in an early-stage ourselves and such a deal can not really be discussed until we launch our own main-net (before the end of the year) and our token gets traded on the markets.
We are also open to helping SteemIt Inc with our accumulated knowledge about the video industry. For example, we could facilitate a video upload feature directly from steemit.com.
13.5: Currently no path, because DTube accounts are still testnet accounts (and free, and easily to get multiple of) and it's just not technically possible yet. However we still already forbid people to use existing STEEM usernames on our signup.d.tube page (feel free to try it), this way the user is able to have matching usernames on STEEM and DTube if he registers on both.
Once live, we think we will onboard more people than our RCs will allow us to create, so if you want us to give free accounts to our users we can probably set up something linked with our curation process. (i.e. an avalon account receives a vote from our curation team but doesn't have a steem account? => we create it for him and encrypt+email him his keys). Such a system could already create a bunch of accounts, which would be 99.99% real new users because confirmed by our human curators through video.
13.7:
We have been managing our voting power and rarely hit 100% voting power through time, with 99.9% of the voting power being spent on dtube users videos. On the current STEEM value, that's about $500 per day, or $45K per quarter.
13.15:
Our project's vision is pretty clear, we are a video platform and want to get better at it. Everything on our roadmap is interchangeable and won't necessarily get made in the order currently listed or deliver on time (see whitepaper page 44). More unlisted features (like playlists, client-side encoding, self-hosting, etc) will probably get added too but it's hard to tell when. Tech moves fast, we have a lot of competition in decentralized video / media and need to adapt quickly, and to develop our software iteratively. So milestones are definitively not set in stone so and creating 1 year+ milestones would be more about imagination than rational planning based on facts.
14.1
We keep the curation process 'private'. We have a clear list of guidelines for our curators, and it's very straightforward but we'd rather keep it private so people don't try to 'game' our vote too easily. A simple rule that we revealed to our community already is the fact that we would never upvote someone twice in the same day.
Our staff tries to remain kind-of separate from the curation process, we just hire new community people once in a while, and kick whoever shows any sign of abuse.
In terms of how it works technically, we have an open source curation bot. It connects to a private discord channel, where our curators can interact with videos with emojis (thumbs up, thumbs down, heart, 100%, etc) and the votes from multiple curators on the same content can stack. After 15 minutes, based on the collected 'emojis', the bot will vote on STEEM.
P.S: Sorry about the delay to answer those and thanks for giving us slightly more time.