Abstract
Blockchains have inspired imaginaries of a new iteration of the internet, hailed as Web3, where the power of centralized platform companies would be limited and the ownership of personal data and content could be retained by their individual owners and creators. Web3 is expected to facilitate the emergence of novel protocols and platforms that enable decentralized coordination of data and digital assets. This article examines critically the experiences and imaginaries of creators working on two blockchain-based video-sharing platforms: Theta.tv and Odysee. Building on the studies of creator culture and institutionalist blockchain economics and based on open-ended interviews with the early adopters of these platforms, the paper investigates how the creators experience these decentralized social media applications in terms of their processes of governance, community creation, and career development. We show how the affordances of blockchains and creator expectations can result in further convergence of community management and career-building functions potentially benefiting creators. We also show that the new wave of decentralization, against optimistic blockchain visions, has not yet led to the distributed ‘ownership’ of social media networks. Rather, while blockchains seem to have increased creator autonomy and added career opportunities, novel forms of platform governance and power have also introduced new perceptions of precarity among creators.
Keywords
Introduction
This article aligns with recent scholarly interest in a particular sector of digital media economies captured by terms such as ‘creator culture’ (Cunningham and Craig, 2021) or ‘social media entertainment’ (SME) (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). These concepts refer to the ‘proto-industry’ formed around ‘commercializing and professionalizing native social media users who generate and circulate original content in close interaction and engagement with their communities on the major social media platforms’ (Cunningham and Craig, 2021: 1). The term ‘creator’ signifies a wide range of different actors, including influencers, vloggers, bloggers, gameplayers, and live-streamers, operating across major digital platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, TikTok, and Twitter – the powerhouse platforms of Web 2.0. Differently from previous studies of creator culture, we shift the focus from Web 2.0 to the arguably more decentralized digital spaces heralded by many as Web3. Namely, we are interested in the formation of creator culture on blockchain-based video-sharing and streaming platforms. Doing this, we bridge previously unconnected fields of research including ‘platform studies’ (Burgess, 2021) with recent academic work on blockchain technologies and economics.
The early internet from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, often driven by experimentation with peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, was generally conceived as an open, relatively decentralized, and public environment. By the 2020s, characterized by the term platformization (Poell et al., 2019), a limited number of major technology companies had managed to gain control over much of this public space by diversifying their services which has led to the concentration of their cultural, economic, and infrastructural power over digital economies. The discourse around the new wave of decentralization during the last decade has fueled hopes of a more transparent and fair networked digital environment, not that different from the utopian visions from the early days of the internet (De Filippi and Loveluck, 2016; Swartz, 2017; Turner, 2006). Once again, distributed open-source networks are developed with the promise to transform how digital content is published, delivered, discovered, and remunerated.
From the perspective of institutional economics, blockchains are a technology for coordinating communities and resources (Davidson et al., 2016; Ibrus and Rohn, 2023), sometimes seen to unleash the full potential of a ‘sharing economy’ (Pazaitis et al., 2017). Unlike the industrial technologies that are primarily seen to impact the productivity of an economic agent per se, institutional technologies such as blockchains lower transaction costs of governance between a network of economic agents (Allen et al., 2020), potentially enabling new forms of participatory governance in digital economies. While the first systematic reviews of the already functioning decentralized social media platforms have been published (Abbing et al., 2023; Guidi, 2020), there are very few empirically grounded qualitative studies on the practices, experiences, or imaginaries of the users of such platforms to date (e.g. Nagappa, 2023). Yet, such empirical undertaking is necessary to gain an understanding of how users – via their communal creative practices – shape the evolution of digital media platforms (Burgess, 2021: 24). We, therefore, ask: how do creators experience and reflect on their motivations, activities, and opportunities on blockchain-based video-sharing platforms?
We will seek answers to this question by studying two cases – Theta.tv and Odysee – which have been often seen as Web3 alternatives or successors to Twitch and YouTube, respectively. Based on open-ended interviews with users of these platforms, we will present how the creators perceived and approached these environments in terms of their visions of governance, community, and career opportunities, especially in relation to what they had experienced in Web2.0. We aim to show that despite the political controversies associated with some of decentralized social media platforms, they could point to innovation trajectories regarding platform infrastructures as well as social practices. As a starting point, we will present critiques of the platform economy, focusing on YouTube as the foundational platform for creator culture, and explore the reasons behind the search for decentralized alternatives.
Theory
Digital platforms can be understood as ‘data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers’ (Poell et al., 2022: 5). Specifically, social media and video-sharing platforms like YouTube constitute multisided marketplaces interlinking three key types of users: content producers and suppliers, viewers, and advertisers – all benefiting from the ‘network effects’ powering the growth and continued market dominance of a few technology companies who own such platforms. From a critical perspective, their business relies on consumers and producers who fuel the platform with their interactions and content, while platform owners extract value through personal data appropriation to link users to advertisers (Limata and Santori, 2021; Mazzucato, 2018). Such business practice is also known as ‘rent-seeking’. Classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo defined rents as rewards for the ownership of resources but argued that value is primarily generated through labor, whereas rents typically do not contribute to this end. Similarly, according to contemporary scholarly accounts, the core problem of ‘platform capitalism’ is that unproductive value extraction is better rewarded than value creation by laboring creators, whereas platform control over user data and relationships create new inequalities – skewed access to the income generated from data (Mazzucato, 2018; Srnicek, 2017).
Functioning as a three-sided marketplace as described above enabled YouTube to lay the foundation for creator industries, or SME, as we know them today (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). In 2007, after its acquisition by Google, the company introduced partnership agreements – the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) – with their most popular content creators based on a split of advertising revenue. While the YPP started as a ‘bonus offered to already motivated and prolific creators’, it became ‘structured more like independent contract work’ as the creator base grew (Caplan and Gillespie, 2020). However, the terms of YPP have been constantly changing, bringing about uncertainty for the creators, many of whom have become dependent on advertising revenue. An example of such policy changes is the ‘advertiser friendly’ content filter set up as a response to increased public concerns regarding hate speech, terrorist or extremist propaganda, and misinformation, but most importantly, to meet the demands of advertisers. As Caplan and Gillespie (2020) show, such instances of platform governance – or, more specifically, algorithmic content moderation (Gorwa et al., 2020) – are largely perceived as opaque and arbitrary by creators, have caused sudden loss of viewers and revenue, and harmed creators’ sense of security and fairness (e.g., ‘demonetization’ or the ‘shadow banning’ controversy, see Savolainen, 2022). This is just one illustration of a multi-layered critical scholarly discussion of the precarities and instabilities, immaterial, affective or gendered nature, even exploitation of the creative labor market in the digital platform economy that extends beyond Youtube to other platforms, each with their distinct sets of affordances for creators (see, e.g., Baym, 2015; Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Duffy, 2017). As Christophers (2020: 188) highlights, it is typical of platform rentier-businesses that the revenue model is opaque to the platform users, both to content providers and consumers. This is because users do not pay for content directly, but by making data about themselves available to platform companies. That is, the uncertainties to all parties derive from data-driven advertising being the core source of income to the platform ecosystem and the basis for the rentier-model of platform governance.
Against this backdrop we are interested in the potential of emergent internet decentralization technologies such as blockchains to de-platformize and diversify digital audiovisual content markets. As hinted by several commentators (Davidson et al., 2016; Ibrus and Rohn, 2023; Pazaitis et al., 2017; Swartz, 2017), the promise of a blockchain-based creator economy is to cut out the large platforms as intermediaries that control the three-sided markets, as distributed ledger environment is expected to facilitate consensus without the need to trust third parties. Specifically, institutional cryptoeconomics (Berg et al., 2019) sees blockchain protocols as software-encoded rulesets that facilitate ‘high-trust economics’ of services such as dApps (decentralized applications) and organizational forms such as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) that rely on self-enforcing smart contracts. Creative applications of these features could turn social media platforms into two-sided, transparent protocols of economic and reputational incentives where creators and users meet, interact, and co-create value (Davidson et al., 2016; Pazaitis et al., 2017).
The created value, therein, could be expressed in the shared ledgers and the valuations of the money used for payments in the network. Let us unpack this idea. Swartz (2020: 16–18) has proposed that the networks of people that are connected by a shared belief in specific money as a medium of value and that make payments in that money constitute a ‘transactional community’. Such communities are distinguished by what, how, and when is typically bought and sold for this money – what is valued by the particular community. In the context of the present article, this could entail access to specific video content or relational labor (Baym, 2015) around such content – users watching, recommending, reposting, commenting, etc. Such interactions have the potential to strengthen the network which has led to the expectation that in the blockchain-based social media context the networks themselves would become the core sources of value – that is, that the relational labor in these networks would translate into exchange value, as reflected in the valuations of the network’s currency. While the creators of such systems often try to further motivate user engagement by designing incentivizing reward mechanisms, the underlying principle of blockchain networks remains overall value growth that would benefit all participants. That is, the network effects would work for the community itself. This also presumes that the ‘ownership’ of the network, its currency, is reasonably distributed among the network participants that could facilitate novel forms of participatory governance. Alizart (2020: 37) has suggested that as blockchain participants all have roles (such as block creators or validators, etc.) they are not only utility receivers, but also network owners and at the same time its ‘civil servants’. In this way, what is private and what is public tends to converge in such networks (Ibrus and Rohn, 2023), and professional careers would have to be communal, dependent on relational labor. Therefore, while topics such as ownership structures and governance, communities of users and their value systems, and creator careers and labor are certainly interlinked in Web 2.0 then in the context of Web3 they are expected to become programmatically intertwined on a consensual basis to enhance the value of the network for each participant.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the early steps taken toward this potential. While the focus of contemporary media studies has been reserved for the analysis and criticism of the dominant corporate platforms, we want to shift the attention to the periphery, where potentially novel forms of governance, communities, and creator careers are being experimented with. Some of these alternative video-sharing platforms, such as BitChute and Odysee, have been rightfully framed as sanctuaries for the producers of misinformation, alt-right conspiracy theories, and hate speech, extremist, or other types of harmful content, mainly for creators who have been banned from YouTube and other mainstream platforms (e.g., Guhl et al., 2022; Marshall and Tanfani, 2022; O’Connor, 2021). We acknowledge and are concerned about these practices and acclaim recent scholarly efforts in combating polluted information (e.g., Phillips and Milner, 2021). Yet, we also believe that it is important to explore the sociocultural functioning of emerging Web3 spaces from the perspective of individual users and their everyday experiences for the insights they can provide into the evolution of future internet economies.
Method and sample
This study is based on semi-structured interviews with creators on blockchain-based video-sharing dApps. Specifically, our core empirical material includes eleven interviews with streamers on Theta.tv and ten interviews with creators on Odysee. We also interviewed several users of BitTube (built on its native blockchain), DTube (built on Steem blockchain), and PeakD (built on HIVE blockchain). These interviews added to our understanding of the ‘blockchain dreams’ (Swartz, 2017) among crypto enthusiasts but did not generate sufficiently systematic creator accounts that could be treated as cases for analysis. The interviews were conducted via different videoconferencing and voice call applications during autumn 2021 and winter 2022, and lasted from 32 to 96 min. Interviews were transcribed and later coded and analyzed on NVivo. In addition to these interviews, we drew on secondary materials such as newspaper articles, observational notes from visits to the platforms and their Discord and subreddits, white papers, and pre-existing interview sessions with the founders and developers of these platforms. This work contributed to the contextualization of our interviews.
To make sense of transcripts, we coded them in two cycles. This comprised the first cycle of initial coding (open coding with particular emphasis on process and in-vivo codes) and the second cycle of focused coding. Reorganizing and collapsing codes and creating categories resulted in the identification of three key themes: governance, community, and career. These became the central pillars guiding the write-up of the findings. In other words, the process of analysis was inductive and inspired by grounded theory. In general, the interviews provided us with insights into the experience of the users of Theta.tv and Odysee, reflecting the multiple interpretations of their actions on, and the functioning of, these platforms. We might also call these accounts ‘platform imaginaries’ (van Es and Poell, 2020). The informants ranged from 23 to 73 years of age. We have anonymized all interviewees.
Case studies: Theta.tv and Odysee
At the time of our study
Theta blockchain uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism featuring three categories of participants. First, a small number of Enterprise Validators (for instance, Sony, Google, Samsung) stake THETA governance coins, generate blocks, and get rewarded in the network’s operational currency, TFUEL. Second, a few thousand Guardian Nodes also stake THETA, earn TFUEL and oversee block production adding security to the protocol. Third, tens of thousands of Edge Nodes share their bandwidth to relay video streams to others and are also rewarded with TFUEL coins. The involvement of different categories of nodes signals that Theta balances between centralization and decentralization, collaborating with seminal technology, content, and financial partners, consumer brands, as well as the grassroots communities of streamers, developers, and crypto enthusiasts.
While the Theta’s blockchain solution and the video-relay business has rapidly grown bigger than their own streaming platform Theta.tv, it remained their main consumer-facing application at the time of the interviews, exemplifying blockchain affordances. While TFUEL coins were mostly used to pay for the video-relay services on the blockhain level, streamers as well as their viewers on Theta.tv could also earn TFUEL for their labor on the platform. Based on Theta.tv community site, 1 viewers were rewarded for sharing bandwidth and interacting with the platform and established streamers got 25% of all TFUEL earned by their viewers. Creators could also earn from subscriptions and donations. Similar to Twitch, Theta.tv had creator ranks from new, to ‘monetized’, to ‘affiliate’ and ‘partner’ streamers: the higher the rank, the more privileges they received in terms of monetization and rewards, for example, higher percentage of the subscription revenue or ludic tools for audience engagement such as ‘Gift Items’ and ‘Emote slots’ or ‘Badge slots’. During our interview sessions, Theta had also just started a new service titled Theta Drop, their own NFT marketplace. NFT drops and auctions were streamed live, aimed at increasing user engagement. The drops were carried out in collaboration with the network’s partners – both high-rank streamers as well as celebrities such as Katy Perry. According to web analytics firm Similarweb, Theta.tv had on average 485,000 monthly visits to its website in the last quarter of 2022.
Based on Odysee’s help hub, 2 at the time of the interviews, the platform offered several monetization schemes. First, creators could upload their content on the LBRY network and offer it to viewers for free or for a payment. Second, earnings per view: verified creators received LBC coins if other verified users watched their content. Third, ‘tips’ from viewers in LBC or cash. Creators could unlock the tip, but it was worth considering that their crypto earnings were visibly attached to their channel, and users with higher scores performed better in search results and ranking lists across different content categories. Once the tip was unlocked it ceased ‘boosting’ the ‘stake’ of the content or the channel. Lastly, towards the end of 2022, Odysee launched the ‘memberships’ feature which enabled creators to design subscription tiers for fans based on monthly donations.
It is important to note that in March 2021 LBRY Inc. was sued by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for alleged selling of LBC tokens as unregistered securities and the company has been dealing with legal challenges ever since. Nevertheless, according to Similarweb, Odysee attracted 25–29 million monthly visits in 2022.
Findings
Through the analysis of the interviews, we found three interrelated thematic dimensions through which creator experiences and creator imaginaries of these platforms can be understood: governance, community, and career.
Governance
Blockchain companies (Theta Labs, LBRY Inc.) and their subsidiary dApps (Theta.tv, Odysee) can be likened to Web2 platform companies (e.g., Meta) and their subsidiary platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram) for their modular structure. However, unlike the core proprietary Web2 infrastructures, both Theta and LBRY are open-source protocols hosting public blockchains, meaning that everyone can contribute to their development by building applications on them. For understanding the politics of a communication infrastructure, scholars have distinguished between regulation of and by (Web 2.0) platforms (Gillespie, 2018) as well as governance of and by blockchain infrastructure (De Filippi and Loveluck, 2016). With respect to ‘governance of’, our interviews showed that some creators questioned how decentralized the blockchain base-layer infrastructures actually were and discussed the power relations affecting it. While explaining the functions of different nodes in the network, one Theta creator said: Those enterprise validator nodes are like bosses of the network. [---] They have a lot of THETA tokens staked on them, and they can work a lot of blocks – I have no idea how it’s called. But they are the end bosses of network. They are like CEO, CTO, CFO, COO of a corporation. So, they make the ultimate decisions.
With this, the user recognized that it was the large institutional stakeholders who shaped and controlled the network. One of the interviewed Theta creators had staked enough THETA to become a Guardian node, others were mostly indifferent to participating in the protocol level of governance. In the case of LBRY that did not have native governance tokens, an eminent user referred to LBRY Foundation that was ‘built around a board, various councils and creator groups’, – an arms-length body which is a common solution in the governance of crypto-economies (Davidson and Potts, 2022). However, nothing depended on the foundation, he claimed, as it was instead the commercial entity LBRY Inc. with paid developers that had control over the core protocol. But the tech-minded creators also recognized that if the major stakeholders would so decide, they could ‘fork away’ from the network, diverge from the constitutional consensus, undermining the centrality of LBRY Inc. Thus, there was a sense of a power (im)balance underlying the claims of decentralization among the users of both platforms.
In terms of ‘regulation by’ platforms, firstly, both dApps were characterized by relatively open and immediate communications channels between the founders, system administrators, and lead users/creators, some of whom also engaged in the management and marketing of the platforms. This was valued positively by most of the interviewees, especially compared to lack of human communication they had experienced from the (missing) staff of YouTube or Twitch. For instance, Theta.tv employed user administrators but also recruited non-paid ‘ambassadors’ who represented Theta.tv in specific regions, countries, and language communities. Volunteering ambassadors made up a kind of network within the network that integrated it, linking different layers and sub-communities, establishing trust in a blockchain-based system that is otherwise understood as ‘trustless’ (Davidson and Potts, 2022; De Filippi and Loveluck, 2016).
Secondly, while setting up a channel on Odysee was simple, especially for its ‘YouTube sync’ feature that allowed mirroring all YouTube content automatically to Odysee, the right to stream on Theta.tv was controlled, and the control was moderately centralized – the power to give out stream keys stayed with admins, partners, and affiliates. According to one ambassador, established streamers on Twitch would need to just fill out a form to be reviewed for being able to obtain a key. Beginners would need to get the attention of decision makers in other ways, two of which were established by the platform. First, there was a format called Theta Tryouts, where new creators could upload existing recorded videos to a specific section of the website that was then assessed by the community. The second option was to livestream using the EdgeNode application once the ‘Tryout’ was announced by the admins. One creator described the ‘Tryout’ as follows: People are going to, like, gather around on the one channel. It’s mostly an event channel, right, and admins are like searching those Edge Node streams. [---] Admins are asking, ‘do you think we should give him the key, because he’s a cool guy and stuff?’, and people vote in the chat whether that person should get the key or not – that’s another cool way, because community gets involved, and, you know, mostly people always vote ‘yes’. So, people get their key left and right. So, it’s fun, because everybody is happy.
This illustrates the community-based regulative rituals on the platform. While becoming a ‘monetized streamer’, one must have acquired 300 followers and 200 watch hours, it was not entirely clear to the interviewees how the ‘partner’ status could be achieved because ‘filling out the stats’ alone would not guarantee partnership. Therefore, despite the relative openness of Theta Labs’ business strategies as communicated in white papers and AMA sessions, the interviews still indicated that there was quite a lot of perceived ‘invisible politics’ (De Filippi and Loveluck, 2016) affecting the security of independent creators.
A final dimension of regulation by platform that had greatly shaped creator experiences pertained to content moderation policies. The modularity of blockchain platforms had introduced a two-layered understanding on content moderation and curation that was accepted as an appropriate solution to the problem of ‘censorship’ in Web2.0 by the users of both services. First, the lower, blockchain levels – LBRY in the case of Odysee and Theta EdgeCast in the case of Theta.tv – were universally understood as moderation-free. The fact that this was exploited by contentious creators was well known among the users of both protocols, as one creator expressed: I know that means that sometimes on the EdgeCast, there is ugly content and there is hateful stuff and there’s like stuff that really nobody wants to see. But in terms of really embracing freedom of speech, I think it’s almost necessary to have that platform for people to be able to say those things – even though some of those things we might consider to be horrible things, I feel like to have true, objective freedom of speech, there has to be a platform for that stuff to be said somewhere.
Interviewees also saw the need for a second layer – that is, the more centralized apps where content moderation, community guidelines, and terms of service (ToS) were executed systematically, including punishments ranging from warnings to removals and bans. Relatedly, the creators welcomed the idea of many platforms representing different value systems linked to the same blockchain. For instance: What makes Odysee different from YouTube in this regard is that Odysee is using LBRY – hence, if they go overboard with censorship and piss too many people off, like YouTube seems to be doing for about five years now, increasingly so, then people have an alternative. People can use different portals to access content that Odysee doesn’t want them to access.
While our interviewed Theta.tv creators were generally more content than Odysee creators with the content moderation they had experienced, both types of creators underscored that moderation did not happen automatically. Instead, it was conducted manually – either based on authors’ tagging of content or, if the tags misrepresented content, by layered community-based monitoring and reporting. Interviewees also underscored the responsibility of the creators themselves to police over their channels and communities and tools to aid that were offered on both platforms.
Community
Odysee was often referred to as a natural alternative to YouTube, its ‘backup’ or ‘clone’ because of the above-mentioned YouTube sync feature that seemed to be the main motivation to join the platform for many interviewees. One of the respondents described its content catalog as ‘everything from cooking channels all the way to conspiracy theories, and everything in-between’. ‘There are almost no Odysee-exclusive content creators’, another said. As emphasized as their criticism of YouTube (‘prison’, ‘cancer’, ‘painful’, ‘irrational’) was the Odysee users’ talk about ‘freedom of speech’, resonating with libertarian ideologies often associated with both cryptocurrencies (De Filippi and Loveluck, 2016; Swartz, 2017) as well as the early Web (Turner, 2006). Importantly, while Odysee users tended to view YouTube negatively based on ‘censorship’, Theta.tv users were more upset about the ‘mean stuff’, – ‘toxic’ or ‘angry’ people on YouTube and Twitch. The process of acquiring a stream key on Theta.tv had made the entrance to the platform feel more exclusive and secure than similar platforms. What we found was that a so-called ‘rhetoric of community’ (Turner, 2006: 157) ran throughout the interviews with the creators on Theta.tv that portrayed different aspects of the social atmosphere of this platform.
Firstly, the ambassadors saw themselves as the social ‘layer of governance’ and the ‘faces’ of Theta who were central to the social organization around national identities and thereby to the diffusion of the platform. As one of our interviewees illustrated: So, you know, having somebody that’s able to translate or actually speak the language natively – I think it’s fantastic. Same with the French community, same with the German community… And it just expands from there and diversifies.
This strategic international and multicultural approach, framed via ambassadors and coupled with the ‘liveness’ of the platform, had made the creators recognize that regardless of their time zone, there was always a potential audience for their content on Theta.tv. As one creator noted: I used to stream about from 8 o’clock Eastern [Time], and you get a different wave of people. So, you get people from Europe, and then it crosses over; you get the East Coast, and then, you actually later get the West Coast, New Zealand, Australia and stuff like that. It all depends on the time of the day that you stream. It’s pretty awesome.
Theta.tv had facilitated both new interpersonal relationships and the maintenance of the existing ones. While gameplay has been viewed as a major genre of SME, especially on Twitch, interviewed Theta creators tended to treat any particular game as a portal to social interactivity rather than valuable in its own right. As one of them said: ‘People don’t interact on Twitch. That’s actually just a bunch of people making noise’. Besides gaming, crypto, IRL, VR, art, music, and cooking streams were said to be found on Theta. So, actually, I watch friends who play games, but to be honest, I don’t watch for the content – I watch for the streamer, because I know him, because I like him.
‘Theta has become family’, one creator said. ‘Theta is my home, like, forever’, another creator claimed. Such tone ran through many interviews, echoing the affective nature of early internet cam culture (Taylor, 2018: 31). The interviewees tended to be ‘variety streamers’, not specifically aligned with more or less established genre conventions of SME – a trend that’s reminiscent of the early, loosely organized ‘Broadcast yourself’ YouTube era. As a sign of mutual support among the creators, the feature of ‘raiding’ – sending the audience of one’s channel to another creator’s channel – was highlighted by many interviewees. Unlike on Twitch, which has a similar feature, the creators on Theta.tv claimed to be willing to embrace it more frequently. As one of them said: On Theta, it’s different. Everybody is always raiding somebody at the end of the stream. Everybody is like friendly and helping each other, you know? It’s like… I feel like streamers on Theta are more friendly – more supportive towards each other – than other platforms, I would say. On other platforms, what I’ve noticed – people don’t care about each other; they’re just grinding for themselves, but they don’t care about anybody else, you know? It’s just their own pockets and that’s it.
One user described his social experience as a ‘double community’, distinguishing between the group of streamers ‘behind the curtain’ that had become his friends – regulars – and viewers or newcomers that they all treated as part of the broader Theta collective. First and foremost, chatting during a stream, but also on Discord and Twitter, fueled their engagement – a finding that underscores the continuous importance of text-based communication to Web3 experiences. If I’m watching, to be honest, I’m actually just hanging out in the chat, and… we’re watching, but we’re not really watching, you know? We’re just there to discuss stuff. The biggest support for any streamer anywhere is to watch them and chat with them – join their Discord, so you can engage with them.
Overall, the discourse of ‘community’ on Theta.tv manifested on at least three levels: national communities coordinated by ambassadors (e.g., the French community), personal fan communities associated with one’s personality and channel as a streamer (e.g., ‘my Discord’), and various creator communities of collegial support (e.g., ‘double community’).
Career
One of the questions featured in the interviews was, ‘Could one make a professional career on blockchain-based social media?’ At the time of interviewing, most of the respondents did not consider their engagement with the platform as professional work while still identifying themselves as creators.
It was a common reference among our interviewees that cryptocurrency-based Web3 spaces with automated reward systems tended to attract users who were only interested in ‘free money and free handouts’, as one Odysee creator said. Actually, the income generated by such systems for creators or viewers (e.g., earnings per view, or from watching videos, commenting or following etc.) was insignificant to most interviewees. Some pointed out that it should not be treated as a viable source of revenue but as a company’s strategy to attract more users. Several interviewees also seemed to lack an understanding of the operational model and tokenomics of their blockchain. For example, the fact that the main function of TFUEL was to remunerate streaming relay services – this is how money entered the network – was not clear to all Theta.tv creators. I think there needs to be a lot more transparency… Is it play-to-earn? Is it watch-to-earn? Is it peer-to-peer, you know?... What exactly is earning you what you earn, you know… If you are earning at all.
The creators’ confusion with regard to the economic functioning of the network also featured in their thoughts about advertising on the platforms. Some recognized that flexible ad-revenue schemes should be implemented in the future, especially because they saw that the ‘free handouts’ (automated rewards for activity) were unsustainable. Yet, others were against particular ads that ‘get in the way of content’. These were seen as harming the seamless user experience that distinguished their platform from ‘other platforms’ that, in effect, constituted three-sided marketplaces. This speaks of the realization that community value needs to be created first in order to achieve financial success on blockchain-based platforms.
It is notable, however, that some were satisfied with earning at least a little bit from the very start, and this was seen as a benefit compared to YouTube or Twitch. When you first, like, checked out how YouTube does it – you have to have like a thousand subscribers or something before you can get monetized, and you don’t really see any chance of earning anything. But with LBRY/Odysee, you actually had a little bit of chance to get a little bit… Like, even if it’s just like cents or whatever, you get this, like, happiness feel that it actually can be something.
This illustrates how even small crypto rewards can feed the aspirations of a novice creator. At the same time, the fluctuations in crypto markets and resultant instability in exchange value had added to the precarity of the creator labor market. Many of the discussions in the Theta.tv Reddit forum, also, were focused on these price fluctuations.
Still, the creators highlighted specific conditions in which these platforms can help to make a living and a couple of creators in Southeastern Europe, for example, claimed to be making ends meet only from streaming on Theta.tv. In such cases, the main revenue came from donations by the small but loyal viewership formed around the creators. Generally, the creators found it relatively easy to get limited visibility owing to the tight-knit community and to earn some money, but to make it big, one could not cast aside YouTube, Twitch, and the rest of the Web2.0 currently empowered by significant network effects. Our interviews, therefore, confirmed that ‘the reality is multiplatform for most creators’ (Cunningham and Craig, 2021: 3) and ‘diversity of revenue streams is essential for success’ (Glatt and Banet-Weiser, 2021: 44).
Nevertheless, the most devoted creators on Theta.tv were committedly climbing the platform’s career ladder with an aim of ultimately achieving the ‘partner’ status and becoming professionals using this platform alone. The work of ‘getting the numbers up’ – fulfilling specific engagement criteria – was sometimes expressed in extreme descriptions of what in a Web2.0 context has been dubbed relational (Baym, 2015) or aspirational (Duffy, 2017) labor. I achieved my partner stats, which was basically having the daily stream time; there’s like engagement – so, people engaging by waving or entering my giveaways or filling out my polls or me giving out crates and gifts fills up an engagement bar; and then people actually chatting… you need people chatting in your chat – it fills up another bar. [---] I was there every day, streaming for like 6-8 h, sometimes 10 h a day, every day. Streaming on camera, so tired, so exhausted. On days when I had food poisoning; on days when I felt sick to my stomach; on days when I was so anxious I just could barely function, I was there streaming, engaging.
This quote illustrates how gamified features and metrics offered by the platform interface stimulated continuous labor of community building as part of career development. But those who had experienced moving up the ranks also credited much of their success to other Theta community members and friends (also other creators, see section on ‘raiding’ above) who had supported them strategically at crucial stages to get ‘them over a threshold’. For the few who had made the highest rank, it was worthwhile financially, as one creator who had been streaming since mid-2019 claimed: Streaming is my main income and I pay the bills with TFuel I earn as a streamer. So yeah, people can build a career.
These streamers also pointed to sponsorships or alternative revenue sources that are specific to blockchain platforms, such as creating NFT collections for a Theta’s marketplace, Theta Drop. This type of cooperation, however, required close relationship with, support and extra benefits from, the platform staff, as evident from the words of the same creator: I have my own Theta Drop. [---]They are really helping out. They [the admins] are engaging with us. They really want to help us because we helped them. I spent so much time promoting and teaching people about Theta network, and they recognize my efforts, and now they’re trying to give something back to me.
In such instances, the professionalizing creator labor lied in reciprocal (relational) social engagement on multiple layers, was it focused on higher earnings, visibility and audience building, or streamer rank. On Theta.tv, these relationships included not only fans or audiences but also other creators and ‘team’ members, forming ‘a system of transactions among individuals in support of mutual empowerment’ (Berdou, 2011: 7), also known as a gift economy, previously found among file sharing and open-source communities.
Discussion
We have shown how some of the creators on Theta.tv and Odysee, disappointed in the various aspects of the Web 2.0 video-sharing platforms, had found seemingly more favorable alternatives to Twitch or YouTube. Especially on Odysee, creators were primarily attracted to the two-layered open-source infrastructure consisting of a decentralized protocol topped by a dApp because these were perceived as relatively more transparent and resistant to unexpected censorship. The fact that their content got registered on blockchains so that it could not be edited or moderated by third parties was valued positively. At the same time, the frontend dApps were expected to feature ToS and apply content moderation policies – non-algorithmic but otherwise – similar to major Web2.0 platforms. Most importantly, perhaps, the majority of them were looking forward to paradigmatic change: whether they were primarily motivated by crypto, political ideologies, or the perceived injustice of platform capitalism, they believed in the eventual success of the new generation of decentralization technologies, seeing themselves as a small part of the transition phase from Web2 to Web3.
What makes the next imagined iteration of the internet different is the expectation of its dependency on blockchain-based infrastructures and associated crypto-economies that would facilitate fairer value distribution. We conducted our study at a time when crypto markets were enjoying another growth wave, but blockchain-based social media or other types of creator platforms were generally in their infancy. As with all paradigmatic innovations in this stage (Tidd and Bessant, 2009), there was a lot of variation in the market, most startups and platforms created by them were in a state of dynamic change and all very small compared to their Web 2.0 competitors. Accordingly, it should be recognized that we captured only a brief transitory moment in the rapid evolution of studied platforms. As for LBRY Inc., for example, the legal difficulties resulted in a final judgment in July 2023 ruling the company liable for violating US securities laws and leaving the future of LBRY protocol, LBC token, as well as Odysee dApp uncertain as we write. Regarding Theta.tv, our interviews seem to represent the community’s activity near its peak, which then began to diminish gradually. Early September 2023 it was announced on the platform’s community site that Theta.tv will be relaunched ‘to a single-channel platform to showcase Theta Video API and the Theta edge network’ – Theta Labs’ core blockchain businesses. The message also said that the idea of Theta.tv as a competitor of Twitch or YouTube Live had always been a misconception. Based on the community reaction on Discord and Twitter, the announcement seemed to come as a surprise to and caused confusion among a number of streamers, confirming the insecurity expressed by some in the interviews and contrasting with the social atmosphere presented in the findings section.
Such legal uncertainties or unstable business practices in the blockchain space preclude increased creator security in Web3. While decentralized solutions could entail novel revenue sources for the creators and provide them control over their assets and relationships, the frequent fluctuations in network designs and cryptocurrency valuations add additional factors of precarity to their livelihoods. Based on our cases, therefore, Web3 had not yet generated nearly as stable and efficient revenue schemes as the ones offered by data-driven advertising markets of Web2.0. However, we found limited evidence of aspirational ‘crypto creator’ careers based on multi-layered community relationships and intensive relational labor. Few of the interviewed Theta.tv creators serve as examples of this. We suggest that this is an indication of a potential, previously envisioned within institutional economics (Davidson et al., 2016; Ibrus and Rohn 2023). This approach sees distributed ledgers and blockchains as technologies of community or network coordination, enabling novel forms of decentralized and participatory governance, also relative convergence of the concepts of private and public value as well as the convergence of autonomous careers and communal action. Accordingly, a creator’s career on Theta.tv seemed to be largely dependent on negotiations within the holistic understanding of community, experienced through emotionally resonating metaphors like ‘home’ or ‘family’. Cryptocurrency transactions and tokenized collectibles as communicative acts of play and sociality, as well as layered community models had helped to incentivize such sentiments. This was a fleeting sign of a successful convergence between the community and career-building functions.
However, evidence was far from clear regarding the distributed ‘ownership’ of social networks, as, typically, creators did not feel included into the broader decision-making relating to the protocols, neither took up roles as developers or other types of blockchain participants. Moreover, some of the interviewed creators did not fully understand the tokenomics of their blockchains or how these were supposed to create value. Our findings, therefore, are illustrative of the lack of knowledge on how and opportunity to ‘self-infrastructure’, defined by Nabben, (2023) as the ability of users/creators to ‘participate in designing, owning, operating, governing, and/or maintaining their own infrastructure’. While both networks constituted open-source P2P infrastructures with users either running thousands of independent nodes or mining blocks, the protocols, and frontend dApps even more so, were mainly governed by specific firms and their private business strategies. Hence, the broader issues of platform governance and power had not faded in ‘decentralized’ blockchain-based systems but become more complex and layered. From the perspective of creators, the state of decentralization on blockchain-based social media is a matter of (perceived) degree which depends on various parameters – for example, digital ownership, access, transparency, moderation, value transferability, control over relationships and transactions – reflecting both governance of blockchain infrastructure and by platforms built on it.
All in all, while much of the existing creator studies have focused on recognizing and codifying creators’ work on large Web 2.0 platforms, it is also time to start systematically studying the different kinds of experiences, challenges, and opportunities that creators face on quickly evolving Web3 platforms. This is also necessary because platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and even Google have started to experiment with blockchain technologies, potentially reorganizing the lives of creators. Hence, more studies are needed, especially given the limitations of the study’s qualitative approach, including restricted samples resulting in findings that are not easily generalizable to any particular type of blockchain-based social systems. To reach more systematic accounts and meaningful comparative analysis – a shared research agenda – both qualitative and quantitative treatments of Web3-affiliated (proto-)industries are warranted, likewise are their contextualizations within different traditions of media and cultural studies as well as economics.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Three students – Patience Gombe, Çağatay Özcan, and Vineet Jayant Kulkarni – from Tallinn University’s Screen Media and Innovation MA program contributed to this study by conducting interviews and searching materials.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The writing of this article was supported by the Estonian Research Council (grant PRG1641) and by the European Union through its Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (ScreenME-Net; H2020-WIDESPREAD-2018-2020; agreement number 952156).
