The following is my subjective experience and is meant to give my take on the Hot or Not app. I have no inside knowledge and I have not been in contact with the developers. I may miss things or get some things wrong, so I would say to do your own research. Also if I get anything wrong, let me know so i can correct it.
I have been following this Hot or Not/GoBazzinga app for a while and its never added up for me. The idea is to take on TikTok/short form video content platforms but in a decentralized way. Hot or Not seems to take the approach of using tokenomics to support content creators and use predictions to get the best videos to go viral while rewarding the curators/betters of the video along with the creator of the video. All this done on a platform that is owned and controlled by the users (pure decentralization). That sounds great but there seems to be a few issues in my mind.
Monetization - Where is the money coming from?
According to their FAQ, the money will be coming from consuming users directly:
The current app is the alpha version which does not contain the Hot or Not monetization system. This will be added to the platform in the coming months, in accordance with GoBazzinga’s Dfinity grant milestones. The platform will contain an in-app game called “Hot or Not”. Users can stake their COYN tokens on any video, on either “Hot” or “Not” outcomes, depending on their thoughts on the viral capacity of the video. If the user stakes their token on the side of the majority, they win and earn double their tokens back. If the user stakes their tokens on the minority side, they lose all the tokens staked on that particular video. Hot or Not also monetises content creation without relying on advertisers, by giving 10% of all tokens staked to the creator of the video, regardless of the outcome.
I see a lot of ‘staking’ terminology being thrown around in the blockchain space, but I rarely see it being used in a sustainable way, except at protocol levels. This is literally just betting money on videos, where the content creator will get a cut. Even if we ignore any bad effects of young people betting money on videos they think will go viral, I am not aware of anyone wanting to do that.
When you go onto the app you get a little bit of tokens for free so there is no friction and a new user can start betting. Where are those tokens coming from? My guess is there is inflation/user onboarding costs to grow the application. This is not a sustainable model and would devalue any tokens you bought or invested in. Is that going to change? What happens when tokens are given to users that just log in once and arent spending them?
My biggest problem with this model is I dont see where the value is coming from. The only use for the tokens is to bet on the virality of videos. So that means it relies purely on user demand to define what the value of the tokens are and it assumes that people want to BUY them. As far as I can tell, no one has to buy any to use the service, just if they want to bet and have blown through the initial tokens that were gifted. How many people are demanding to bet on videos with real money? Even if the site was popular and there was good content, are people going make their income by scrolling through videos and betting money if its going to go viral? Maybe, but that is a very untested theory.
TikTok/Algorithms
The power of something like tiktok is the algorithm which figures out what YOU want, not what everyone else likes. No two tiktok feeds are the same because no two people are the same. Just having a video platform that allows for short term content, not only has been done, but has been done many times and failed. The only ‘magic sauce’ that I see in this app is the betting, and mentioned above that is a gamble (pun INTENDED) even if the content is good and there is a user base.
Incentives
Tokenomics design should be used to align incentives and create a cooperative space. This instead seems like its encouraging people to choose the most clickbait-y/spam videos, rather than ones they actually like. Also this is an absolute global value where a video is liked by the whole world. Good content that is more niche for specific communities would never ‘win’ because they are niche. So this just encourages videos that arent necessarily what you want to see. I personally dont want to see the global ‘trending’ videos, I want to watch the videos that are curated to me.
Moderation/Copyright
There seems to be ZERO moderation on this application. From my experience MORE than HALF of the videos are just women in very little clothing and posing in very provocative manners. Not only that but the users who are posting them seem to just be posting random clickbait they have found vs the content they have created. Either that or the users have a lot of friends they take videos of that are viral in nature. Besides it being a bunch of sexual clickbait/spam, what about copyright. Who owns these videos? Who is taking them down or handling the situation where the rightful owner is not getting compensated? Is this also going to turn into where I can split up a movie into 100 clips and make money off of them just because I uploaded them? Sites like tiktok cant even handle this, its a hard problem, so why would this app be able to.
Content Creators
Where are they? I have yet to find a single video that isnt just a clickbait video that is probably taken from another service. I dont even see any ICP videos on this service, is anyone really even making content for it?
Cloudflare
Everything on the app is stored on-chain, with the exception of the videos and profile pictures, which are hosted on Cloudflare. We are awaiting the storage subnets so that we can later put these things on-chain as well. On this forum, at Long Term R&D: Storage Subnets (proposal), you can read more about the storage subnets. User experience, cost, and simplicity were taken into consideration when choosing Cloudflare over non-ICP on-chain services like IPFS. Our roadmap outlines our goal of becoming entirely on-chain as we are committed to creating a decentralised system where users have complete control over their data and content.
WHAT??? The videos are not on the IC? They are just hosted on cloudflare. Who is paying for that? If this app becomes ‘decentralized’ and the creators leave, who is paying the bill and handling the accounts? None of this makes sense. If you are going to be asking for money from IC ecosystem, at least have the ability to actually be decentralized, otherwise just ask for donations or work with a VC
Video Creation Functionality
This is where I was super shocked. I went to upload a video and I couldnt do ANYTHING with it. I cant even find it. Apparently you cannot delete, edit or even VIEW you videos that you have uploaded it. So if you are looking for a Web3 experience where you ‘own’ or ‘control’ your data, stay away.
From FAQ:
The facility of making edits to a video created within the app is not yet available. This feature will be added in the coming months, including text addition, sounds library, and stickers among other facilities.
Conclusion
The only thing I could see from this app that could make it worth while to invest time or money is if there was some sort of blockchain/web3 traits such as being able to connect with other similar services, being able to build on top of it or have some sort of unique feature that would bring value to content creators/content consumers. But to me all this seems like is a tiktok clone with little to no creators where you can place bets on clickbait videos.
I dont mean to discourage anyone in the IC community from making applications, but when money gets involved things change. If the creators are asking for money, then the application should bring value, but I see none here. This is especially jarring when there has been so much marketing around how big and amazing this application has been. Also when Dfinity has been showing off Hot or Not as a top application in the space, but I know of no one who uses or has any interest in using it.
I personally discourage anyone from jumping into this sale without really looking into the value that this brings to the space. I personally will not be buying any tokens