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Bootstrapping Publicity

September 05, 2023

Whether you are reading this article from my personal website or anywhere else it doesn't matter much, since I was able to post it in such a way that allowed you to find it and read it. But what if I couldn't do that? Imagine a very simple situation: An editor of a magazine writes an article that the owner of that magazine doesn't like. So he doesn't publish it. Of course that's not the end of the world. The article could be published elsewhere. But what if nobody wants this to be published?

YouTube and Blogger are two large platforms for publishing videos and articles. A lot of people use those to publish things. But those people are like the editor in the example earlier. The platform might not like what those people want to say. And therefor might deny them the ability to say it.

This is partially why Tor and LBRY and other similar technologies exist. Those in theory cannot deny person a publication. But with that comes a very large bootstrapping problem.

Google searches, for example, do not include websites on the Tor network. And people that are mindlessly looking for something to watch will not stumble upon an Odysee publication, since they are most likely scrolling on YouTube. More than that, people are suspicious of links to websites that they never heard about. I personally known situations where people didn't open an Odysee link because they were afraid of it. Maybe this was ignorance.

On the other hand with Tor's .onion links ignorant people will most likely not understand why it doesn't work. And only those who realize that they need to install a specific browser for them will be afraid of the links. Because Tor has a reputation of a very scary place.

LBRY is not yet a very scary place. And it's only due to Odysee being as terrible as YouTube in censorship. Odysee is a website that is connecting to the LBRY network to retrieve publications and show them to people. But between retrieving and showing there is a step that could be inserted by Odysee. A step of censorship. Publications like that are not deleted, nor banned from LBRY. They are banned only from Odysee. Therefor to see them you might need a different LBRY app such as FastLBRY or LBRY-GTK. But most people the publisher is interested in are on Odysee. And even that is a stretch. And if their publication is not available there, it's as if it's non-existent in the first place.

Most people are on YouTube. You want to target them but YouTube will ban or shadow-ban your video, so you publish to Odysee. Maybe the few people that are on Odysee at least could see it. You frown, agreeing to this drastic decrease of viewership. But then Odysee is censoring your video too. Decreasing your viewership even further to the FastLBRY users only. But what if things will go so bad that the only way to spread your message, will be to send people DVD disks with your video? What if the only way to show people your video would be to set up a screen at your window and broadcast it to the street? What if the video will never leave your computer in the first place and only you could see it? What if even you would not be able to see it?

It could seem like some messages are just impossible to spread. Like the freedom of speech is successfully been reduced to non-existence without explicitly being so. But if you look at it a bit more generally, I think like it's not really the case. It's just a bootstrapping problem.

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Sheiny: No! We are not doing this!

Mr. Humbert: This is not illegal. We can post the trailer on YouTube. Nothing...

Sheiny: YouTube is a terrible, proprietary platform!

Ivan: Think about it, Sheiny. There is no way around it. You want views you go to YouTube.

Sheiny: So what?

Mr. Humbert: Do you want Sinking In The Fire to be watched by people or not?

Sheiny: We will do posters.

Mr. Humbert: One billboard costs about...

Sheiny: I'm not talking about billboards. I'm talking about papers that you glue to the walls.

Ivan: This is a joke! YouTube is the only...

Sheiny: And how much are we going to have? 10 views?

Mr. Humbert thought about it.

Mr. Humbert: She is right.

Ivan: YouTube is currently the biggest platform. It has the most users out-there.

Mr. Humbert: And also the most videos out-there. The platform is over-saturated.

Ivan: What are you talking about?

Mr. Humbert: The competition on YouTube is extreme. It's not feasible for a new channel to suddenly grow very large, because a lot of people trying to do the same thing at once. And views are finite. Even though YouTube has a lot of viewers. The amount of people trying to compete for them is too much already. We are destined to fail. Or we will need to pay for ads. Which nobody likes.

Ivan: You just need to optimize for the algorithm.

Sheiny: Nobody knows how the damn thing works.

Ivan: People reverse engineer it rather successfully.

Mr. Humbert: It changes way too often.

Sheiny: We can do that on our own.

Mr. Humbert: More than that. It's better to do that on our own.

Sheiny: Well, I don't know how it's better, but we can. We must!

Ivan: I never heard of anything else, but YouTube. And gluing around posters is just pathetic.

Sheiny: Well, first of all, I think, we should not put obstacles in a way of the film's spreading. And I'm talking to you thus, because if I say that it's a matter of being a good person, you will laugh at me. We will go with Creative Commons. I think Share-Alike will be a good license on it.

Mr. Humbert: So anybody could steal it?

Sheiny: So anybody could spread it forward.

Mr. Humbert: This will make it even worse! We have to hold to our asset.

Sheiny: We need to bootstrap the publication. Don't we?

Mr. Humbert: Bootstrap?

Sheiny though about how to explain it.

Sheiny: We are in a situation where nothing is moving nowhere. We have a product that we want to get "out there", but nobody knows about it. We have a snowball. It's nothing. A small snowball. What we want to do is to position it on the hill in a such a way that it will grow into a large humongous snowball. This is bootstrapping. We need to start rolling the ball. And when it will get relatively large, you will see that it's a good idea.

Ivan: So how small do you want to start?

Mr. Humbert: Wait. First of all the movie is not that small. It has decent effects, nice story and good amount of shocking material. This is already marketable. More than that, I have to remind you that nobody around here makes movies. If we market it for the people in here as a film made in here, it could get somewhere.

Sheiny: Hm...

Mr. Humbert: Sometimes when the market is over-saturated it's good to look for under-saturated markets. Here nobody makes films. So people naturally will find a film made here interesting. That same tactic will not work in Los Angeles. There the market is over-saturated.

Ivan: But how many people live here?

Sheiny: It's more than the three of us. And all we need to do is get the ball rolling.

Ivan: Okay. But think it about it. Let's say we do the advertisement for the people here and they roll our ball. Why not also have the thing on YouTube? We can collect ad revenue.

Sheiny: Why not post it on Tor? We can make it sell for Bitcoins.

Mr. Humbert: Because people are scared of it.

Sheiny: Why?

Ivan: Because of the child porn! Because of the drugs! Why?

Sheiny: So you are telling me that this is not a market?

Ivan: How do you want to target YouTube users with Tor?

Sheiny: I don't want to target YouTube users.

Ivan: But you want the snowball to grow. And eventually outgrow Tor.

Sheiny: Not necessarily. We might grow Tor with it. And if it outgrows Tor, well fine.

Ivan: So it will need to be on YouTube eventually.

Sheiny: It will be.

Ivan: What? But you don't want to.

Sheiny: I will not put it up there myself. But I will provide a license for it. Though I'm skeptical of it being there for long.

Ivan: What? Why?

Mr. Humbert: Because of the nature of the film?

Sheiny: Exactly.

Ivan: I don't understand.

Sheiny: Our film is more Tor material and less YouTube material. It starts with a masturbating little girl.

Ivan: We are not showing it. We are only implying it. It's not supposed to be illegal.

Sheiny: Do you think YouTube cares if it's legal or not? They care only if it's making people feel bad. This is by the way why people are scared of Tor. Tor, by it's nature created a place where it's very easy to stumble upon something that makes you feel bad. And this is why I think we have to have a hard bootstrapping process. Our movie is too uncomfortable for YouTube. You cannot post it on other big platforms either. Porn-Hub could have cared less. But the main characters are children. Therefor they will ban the thing outright. So we have to do it on our own. Using our resources. Maybe with a slight assistance from Tor. Those who visit it regularly will not have any uncomfortable feelings from the movie.

Mr. Humbert: We talked about it, Sheiny. Controversy in film is good.

Ivan: Dead-pool!

Sheiny: Yes... I know.

Ivan: Dead-pool's trailers are not banned from YouTube.

Sheiny: Because it's a major Marvel character. He is too famous already. And people know him to be slightly uncomfortable. It's not the same feeling as with an unknown film. More than that, Dead-pool is a comedy. It makes it easier to swallow some ideas. While Sinking In The Fire is more of drama.

Mr. Humbert: Sinking In The Fire is a masala film.

Sheiny: It doesn't have singing numbers.

Mr. Humbert: But it pretty much has all of the other things.

Sheiny: It's not famous.

Ivan: Well, that's good. Since they probably will not notice it to ban it.

Sheiny: We want the snowball to roll passed them noticing it.

Ivan: And the problem is?

Sheiny: If we set it up so people will gravitate toward the YouTube publication. In other words, if we make the YouTube link for it - the official link, we risk with YouTube shutting us down. So instead the official link should in a place where we control it. With Tor we control it.

Mr. Humbert: But with Tor nobody wants to see it.

Sheiny: We will make our own website and everything...

Ivan: On Tor?

Sheiny: Yes, through Tor.

Ivan: Why not .com or something? So it would work in a normal browser...

Sheiny: Tor gives us more control. Normal sites are much easier to ban.

Ivan: Do both!

Sheiny: Then, people will gravitate toward the .com site. And it will become the official link. So if we will be banned, we will have to start rolling our ball from scratch. But if the official link is the Tor link. Then the ball will roll there to begin with. And it's not that big of a problem. But we can do a .com promo site. Explaining how to reach the main site.

Mr. Humbert: People are less likely to go to Tor just because it gives the publishers more control.

Ivan: Yes! People do not want, by mistake, to see something they do not want to see.

Sheiny: Freedom of Speech is to tell you what you don't want to hear.

Mr. Humbert: Yes, but we are trying to sell the product.

Sheiny: This product has a message. This product is my speech. And this message is probably not something that people want to hear.

Mr. Humbert: You are impossible.

Sheiny: You are scared that we will grow too slowly?

Mr. Humbert: I'm scared that we will not grow at all.

Ivan: Sheiny, even if you do an explanation site. People are too lazy to install programs to reach websites. Sometimes they are too lazy to leave YouTube.

Sheiny: Those same lazy people, when watching a new Marvel trailer, still pick up their butts and go to the cinema.

Mr. Humbert: You are comparing trash to gold.

Sheiny: They just have a bigger ball. We need to start rolling.

Ivan: And for how long will we roll? With such growth it will take...

Sheiny: It's exponential!

Ivan: What do you mean?

Sheiny: Banal example, but I think you never thought it before. Say we have 8 by 8 chess board. And we will start putting rice on it. On the first cell we put 1 grain. On the second 2 grains. And so on. Doubling the amount each time. How much there will be in the end?

Ivan: With such a slow growth? I think 100 grains or so... Right?

Sheiny: No! We have 8 by 8. It means 64 cells. Right? First sell 1 grain. Second 2, third 4, then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128... You see I already got 128 and I'm only on cell number 8. If we keep going, by the end it will be eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred and nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred and fifteen grains of rice, over 1.4 trillion metric tons of the stuff.

Ivan and Mr. Humbert both stood there mind-blown. Ivan at the largeness of the number. Mr. Humbert was a bit smarter and he remembered this example from somewhere. So he knew that the number should have been huge. He was mind-blown that Sheiny could remember the damn thing.

Mr. Humbert: Ah... So what do we need to do?

Sheiny: We need to stop being afraid to do the right thing. I will open a website, through Tor, and we will publish first our trailer there and subsequently the movie itself. And we will only need a few people there to start the rolling. After which we will be able to sit back and enjoy how we grow without doing a single thing.

Happy Hacking!!!

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