Welcome to the second part of the series called Promising Coins. Last episode, made a brief intro into Obsidian platform. Today I would like to focus on coin, or more exactly token, for news platform called Snip.

Intro

It is said, who controls mass media, can control people. Not directly, but can shape their mind, which might be dangerous. I guess nowadays, we can see around us a lot of news, which are not balanced. Most of them fights not for truth or freedom of the speech, but defends someone interests, it might be interests of some country, interests of some political party or even private person.

For example, I am from Czech republic and brief summary of media in here is like: national TV channel (which is paid by every citizen) lobbying for values of the EU mostly and provide unbalanced info, and one sided view, there are also opinions about some censorship (which I am not able to judge, but Czech people are a little sensitive about that because of history influenced by communism). Then there are some news portals which are accused of providing even lies to support change orientation to the east, which means Russia. Finally there are media which are owned by millionaires, and articles there might be mix of previous above, but mostly defending their owners business activity, which are mostly on the edge of the law. I guess it is the same all around the world, as rumors about Rothschilds and etc.
Just for fun I have to mention great comedian George Carlin, I like him and his stand-up about choice (not my link).

There are very few portals, and for common people they are not easy to find, of independent journalists which would provide just facts, without judging, evaluating or mentoring the reader what is right and what is not. That is what I miss the most, just to find facts and than make my own opinion. And that Snip platform should solve.

Snip

As I understand what I read, snip was already running, but in centralized way and should have a few thousands of users. Their aim is to bring that completely on Ethereum block chain to make it censorship-resitance platform, and it already started. They also want to deal with annoying ads, like pop-ups which are not anything special in my country on news portals.

They would like to provide paid service without ads and with some features, like audio news and maybe some streams. For free, you need to be OK with native ads, which I personally hate, especially on mobile device, where it is very easy to make a miss click, but they are less noisy then others (they made partnership with adEx). That means there will be even space for advertisers, to promote their products or whatever. So, we will not get rid of ads, but it is, I guess, understandable, that they want to have some profit from their product.

Content providers should be journalists, but there will be also option for community members to contribute there. You will be rewarded for your articles and may obtain tips from community members. They have some rules and restriction how to evaluate trash stories against valuable content, so, if someone would like to spam the platform with some trash, it should be ready for that and should provide the valuable content instead of that.

So, what about censorship-resitance platform? Well, as I read whitepaper, except the what was mentioned above, they will check, if your content is original and not copy-pasted story. If it will be so, your article will be stored (in IPFS, as other articles), but it won't be visible on their web site interface. You will need to specify the source to make it valid, which I consider as good option. They also want to split the reward between the author and the original author in some rate.

As a reader, you will have a chance to set filters, what you would like to see (like favorite authors, most up-voted articles, categories, etc). And of course, as it was mentioned, user should have option to choose paid service or free with ads. And if you would like the content, you can give a tip to support the author.

And what about SnipCoin? SnipCoin is aimed be used on that platform only, as tips for authors, as their reward or to get paid version with some features. From that point of view, there is no much space for speculations and it might be even a little crazy to expect big rise of the value, in my opinion. I like the idea of the platform and the idea of having news of fact, or even biased but I would expect there will be clash of biased articles, on one space. It tries to compete with news portals and somehow even with social media, like steemit. It would not be easy, and I am looking forward to watch how it will develop.

Crowdsale should start on 9/29/2017 and you can register your ETH address for that on official site. For more details you can read the wthitepaper, which is available here. What do you think about that, is it good idea? Does it have a chance? Or do you know a better alternative? Thanks for comments :)