The CEO of Dlive decided to do an AMA on Dlive & Steem after the migration announcement. My internet was very weak at the time so I couldn't watch it and a few days later I noticed he had taken the vod down, apparently another user who streamed herself watching the stream had her vod taken down off dlive as well (or should I call it clive at this point) but luckily she had uploaded it to youtube before that happened and I was lucky to get to watch it.
I decided to check what went down and after he took it down my curiosity rose even more. So let's go through some of the questions he chose to answer so you guys don't have to watch this clusterfuck of an AMA. If you don't know what AMA stands for, it's "ask me anything" that started on Reddit way back. On Clive apparently its "ask the right questions or get banned from chat".
@allseeingewe starts out by saying that she isn't prepared for this stream at all but I think she is way more prepared than Kent is, I don't even understand how he thought this was a good idea with the lack of knowledge he seems to have about blockchains. Anyway let's go through this. If you want to watch the whole AMA then check out her video here and vote on her post here.
Anyway, I'll try writing down to my best ability what he says (he isn't making it easy to be clear about that) followed by my own opinion on the answers he gives.
He starts out by talking about video embedding feature and that it will be available soon. He goes on to say that he was very excited about announcing the migration and was hoping everyone would be just as enthusiastic about it and that he did not expect the massive feedback from the steem(it) community and even some "conspiracies" and that he has no idea why. Then he goes on to say that it is going to be amazing to be on the "new blockchain" and that the community that will follow them will be the first group of people on the new blockchain which apparently means a lot in his opinion.
I'm sure the 10 million Lino he received onto his account has something to do with his excitement.
In the next question he answers about curation and that everyone will be a curator on Lino because tipping will work as curation there.
Which is kinda funny considering Steem pretty much killed tipping and tipping has been considered to be a dying field on most platforms cause consumers don't want to get rid of money to tip their favorite streamers when they instead can locate the reward pool towards them and earn curation at the same time. Oh well. Let's see what is up next.
The next question is an interesting one asking if this migration was his plan all along and he starts off by saying that the Lino team have nothing to do with this and that it was a business decision. Dlive and Lino are two separate companies which are totally different. "Why people think is plan at all?" he asks by adding what they have done in the past 9 months on the Steem blockchain and that they have been doing better and better.
If you have followed the Dlive drama this far you're probably aware that the CEO of Dlive is affiliated with Lino developers as they've all gone to the same college. It's almost weird that he doesn't bring this up at all here and is baffled by people wondering if this was his plan all along.
In the next question he promotes the new DLive and that everyone should try the new UI and "infra" which I'm guessing means infrastructure and that the backend and stability of the whole site is going to be different.
5 minutes in he asks if the stream is awkward and if he should play some music, but decides to ask the audience if he should do some donations instead... ???
@cyberdemon531 asks where the value of Lino's tokens will come from compared to Steem. He starts off by saying that you will see it in the new Dlive and that Lino is not listed on any exchanges yet but that the team is probably working on that and that the value of the token comes from the community.
Someone asks if they can delete their data before the migration, he and team members of Dlive mention that its "opt in", if you want your data deleted you just do nothing or don't claim your account on the new Dlive.
Now this is really funny because I personally have not claimed my account on the new Dlive yet it exists there. Without any content uploaded but my following and followers intact and some weird transactions going on which you can find here: https://dlive.tv/acidyo if you click on "earnings" you will see donations going out from my account. Now that's weird, huh? :) For some reason they've also changed my profile pic as I don't remember using that one on the original Dlive. I do wonder what they have to say about this one.
Someone asks why the team is lying about decentralization which he responds with "if decentralization sacrifices user experience I would rather choose UX." Then he goes on to talk about how IPFS is not a good solution. Decentralization for him means the value content and 100% of the rewards go back to the community and that will be fully decentralized.
"Just like Steem and Dlive, Dlive is also a dapp on the Lino blockchain so if you have question about Lino's long-term plans go ask them, I have no idea".
Wait, what? How did he make a business decision for Dlive without knowing Lino's long-term plans? I... I have no words for this.
10 minutes in and @allseeingewe is banned from the chat. So much for decentralization.
Kent starts watching a random stream then reads up the question "why Dlive on the Lino blockchain, why not on both?" To this he responds with him not being sure about the question ... ??? and that he will move onto another one. Okay, lol. Someone from team Dlive should've ELI5'd the questions for him.
Someone asks if they planned this from the start and he replies with it never being planned and that they always wanted to do it on the Steem blockchain but that the problem first appeared after a certain growth of the project. The decision to the migration to the Lino blockchain is because they think it is a better platform and that its a simple solution. He doesn't want to comment on the pros and cons between the two blockchains, if you're interested then go to Lino and ask the difference between them.
Oh man this is getting ridiculous, so without even attempting to stream on their platform nor knowing the pros and cons and pointing to the Lino devs constantly for answers it still is a better business decision because they "think" that. Wow, I already feel sorry for the people wasting their time on there.
"Why should content producers continue to trust the platform if they don't (have knowledge of the chain)?"
(I just wanna say here its really hard to hear what questions he reads up and they are scattered all over the place so its hard to even find the original ones, please bear with me)
He starts off by saying that he wants to apologize to the Steem team that he didn't inform them in time but that this is a decision they've been thinking about for a long time. The migration idea came out in July, after he approached their team and discovered their solution for livestreaming video they feel its a better solution for us (Dlive).
"The reason we built this platform is because we think content creators should make more than currently on centralized streaming platforms."
This is funny considering they had 2 million delegated SP to curate with, rewarding streamers with $5-10 per stream even at times like these where Steem is at the bottom. Many of the people in the mod team had earned up to 3-5k SP during this time for curating and streaming (with many of them powering down right around July when they made the migration decision, might I add). If you know anything about centralized streaming platform like Twitch, I dare you to go ask streamers in the 5-30 viewer range how much they are earning, it will be nothing compared to what they have earned on Steem.
Someone asks why the migration date is on the 25th which is the exact date of Hardfork 20 and he responds with it being an accident. It was supposed to be on September 17th but due to some reasons it was delayed to this date. He also adds that the hardfork won't solve any of the problems of Steem.
It was a bit difficult to hear what he said here due to @allseeingewe talking at the same time and she was right, it is funny how unprepared for this he seems and it was probably a good decision to delete the vod right after, but you know the saying "once on the internet, always on the internet" :)
Talks about them working on a feature to let you go live directly from your phone instead of using OBS.
"Lino didn't do an ICO, they did a private sale. I don't care about Steem price I care about the growth of Dlive."
"Who are the designers and engineers of Dlive, I wanna meet them?"
"Next Dlive meetup will be in Turkey and "I'll show them to you guys during the meetup""
Hmm okay...
Someone asks why Lino is a better solution and how it would lower the cost of distribution.
"Lino blockchain provided a solution to cover the cost of infrastructure by providing it themselves as livestreaming has major monthly costs. Lino covered (covered? :)) (TTS message makes the rest of the sentence unhearable)
This could've easily been handled with beneficiary rewards, if they hadn't been so busy trying to steal users off of dtube.
"... the more you make the more you receive bonus rewards from the blockchain inflation pool" (couldn't catch everything there)
Skipping some questions here and there, apparently they don't even have a whitepaper out but you can request it by sending them an email? Hmmm.
"you will definitely make more on DLive, we are supporting everyone" (hopes and promises of making more money on Lino)
Alright so, I'm taking a break from this video right now as this is taking way more time than I anticipated and I wanted to get in some more thoughts of my own of what I think has gone down over over time with Dlive on Steem. If there is interest to have me go through the rest of the video (at 25 minutes in right now) for those who can't watch it themselves or want to read it instead, let me know in the comments and I'll take the time to do that another day.
General overview.
The CEO of Dlive sees an opportunity to create something that doesn't exist on Steem yet and receive support from Steemit inc during times with high price of Steem and a lot of attention to our blockchain. People are excited and not many question it, the CEO of Steemit gets in contact with them early and they have a working product quickly going on Steem. Things we don't know here but have suspicions of after recent news of affiliation of the CEO of Dlive with Lino developers is that they could've planned the migration from the beginning but needed time to get their blockchain funded and working while having one of the team members work on the first app on Steem. Although the CEO of Dlive invested in Steem himself and apparently paid from his own pocket for Dlive server costs it shouldn't surprise anyone that he got compensated by the Lino team in their own tokens (he seems to have 9.5 million of them after distributing some to Dlive team members on Lino - who knows what the total supply is since there is no whitepaper or how the project was funded since it's through a private sale).
It seems clear that members of the Dlive team were aware of the migration as early as July with many of them starting to power down during the same time but no one else knew about it due to it leading to the loss of the 2m SP delegation provided by Steemit inc.
Some of you may remember some controversies of Dlive early on with using authorities of Steem account to spam follow @dlive and another associated account. Come to think of it the "insider hack" that burned all of their voting power that one time could easily have been a publicity stunt considering a lot of votes went towards @haejin who at the time had a lot of attention towards his account.
The Lino network seems very private, there is not a lot of news about it except articles about the successful private sale of $20m, their own homepage and a Twitter account with obviously bought followers as you can see here:
Compare this to the old Steemit Twitter account and you will see what I mean by "obviously bought followers":
or the new one that has approximately the same amount of likes with a fraction of followers:
I wonder what Twitter thinks about such activities. :)
Anyway, having been in the Dlive Discord, the Dlive "friends" discord where they had Steemians with a lot of followers that received votes more often whether they were posting streams or videos (as they were attempting to steal users from dtube with their 0 beneficiary rewards) and having been on another chat platform where the CEO of Dlive resided but was literally never active it seems that the interest of being on Steem in the long run was never really there considering how he didn't connect with anyone. I'm sure most of the decisions and talks went on their own discord with team members and possible NDA's and/or contracts. :)
Even though some of us should've seen this coming, some maybe even warned us but we were too blind to see it due to this awesome project promising so much and seeming so invested into our platform that we just didn't want to. It does seem to me as if this was planned all along to just use the Steem platform + delegation to experiment with their streaming platform until it's ready and polished to them team back up with his college friends, receive a massive stake while at the same time putting down Steem as they will be directly competing versus each other as content producing blockchains. If you can even call Lino for a blockchain at this point.
The steps moving away from Steem are much clearer now, first making chats centralized and not through the blockchain even though they had access to info saying the 20sec limit was going to be reduced (in HF20) and creating a new following that was not connected to Steem.
As someone mentioned the 2m SP delegation has resulted in over $3m being rewarded to streamers since the start of Dlive and I have a feeling that once Lino hits the exchanges it will struggle a lot to distribute the same value over the next 9 months even in a bull market compared to the bear market that occurred since Dlive existed on Steem.
If you compare the $3m distribution to current centralized streaming platforms that rely on ad revenue, donations from viewers and subscriptions from viewers where the centralized party gets a cut all along the way I believe that the streamers on Steem have been rewarded handsomely compared to their viewercount which is understandable to be dropping in a bear market as activity and google trends of all cryptos go down proportionally to the hype that prices create.
People have asked me why feel so angry about what they did and why I don't just continue streaming on Dlive, I want to address that it feels even worse for me because compared to Dlive rewarding streamers at no cost (free delegation) I have been rewarding streamers with my own VP and delegation that is not completely free only to see many of them blindly trust this company that backstabbed a whole platform and follow them onto another blockchain.
I want to thank the streamers that are seeing through their motive and are sticking with Steem not just because of my efforts and the efforts of a few other bigger curators that joined in to support them, but because they may see what decentralization truly is about. Even if one project decides to screw everyone over you still have your Steem and Steem Power safe in your wallet and no one can take that away from you as the laws of mathematics are on your side.
Dlive tried to create a big rift in our streaming community and I am glad I have spent all this time streaming, curating and building relationships with other streamers and it seems to me at this time that the best ones are staying on the right path. Don't worry, we will create something just as great as Dlive if not better and more decentralized. It might even already be here through @vimm and/or @dtube streaming and I will try my best to continue to support these in the near future as streaming is becoming huge all over the world but it will become bigger on truly decentralized platforms.
I apologize for making this post so long, hope it has been worth the read, I'll try writing them in shorter parts in the near future. I had to take this time off of my vacation to get my thoughts and opinions about everything out there after having researched and read a lot of relevant posts. Shoutout to @meno for his detailed posts about this as well, make sure to follow and read his posts in case you haven't. I haven't been able to read too many posts about dlive, his and this AMA are a few of them so I might have missed some other important ones, feel free to link them to me in the comments. Thanks @allseeingewe for re-uploading the AMA after Dlive deleted it.
Feel free to discuss this in the comments, I will read all of them and try to respond to most. Thanks for reading.
Acidyo out.