RE: DMCA abuse, it's probably within the letter of the law, the law itself is broken.
Bonus question: How does this all deal with twins? What's the miss rate on facial recognition anyway?
Some things provide a social good but also have expenses, this happens to be one of them. Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients and we aren't anywhere near those margins.
EDIT: Twins are still a weak spot for us, but we have a plan to build a model that can tell two twins apart.
Instead of a bunch of happy customers of your service, you are going to see people complain constantly about your product and consider you a "protection racket". You are also going to find yourself in the situation where the people you are helping are claiming you are "in cahoots" with the porn companies, particularly when they realize that they have to keep paying your subscription fee in order to avoid their stuff being posted again and again to different sites.
Some things are just asking for a world of hurt, and you need to really really play up the charity angle here and frankly attempt to fund as much of this as possible off of people who aren't the victims you are trying to protect or from a narrative perspective--which a lot of people don't spend enough time analyzing--you are going to spend the rest of your existence playing defense against your own target market feeling like you are part of their problem.
(My credentials here, with respect to talking about "narratives": I'm a well-known engineer who used to spend a lot of time attempting to correct the story developers would tell around jailbreaking and piracy--in some cases due to the mere word "jailbreaking", which I had not myself chosen as I wasn't there at the beginning--and who later went into politics and has been an elected government official in a dense college community for the past five years.)
As far as $100/mo for creators, they typically have to pay $300-$400/mo for DMCA services that make the creators bring them links. We find the content and provide a self-serve portal which is all that’s needed for most major sites. So we are dramatically cheaper than the current offering.
The $25/mo plan is more or less a reflection of rising costs with everything. We do have to hire data scientist, data engineers, software engineers, design, marketing and infrastructure. It may be easy to build this for a single site but if people knew how long it took a $35k A100 to watch a single minute of video and realize there are millions of minutes of video to watch, $25/mo (cancel whenever from the portal) feels like a pretty good deal. I’m open but you would be surprised at how expensive this is.
In an ideal world, we make enough off creators to offer it for free to victims of NCII. Right now, we are self funded and hundreds of thousands of dollars in so we can’t adhere to the normal SV economics of giving it away for free, even if we want to.
All of this to not lose the point that we really enjoyed your feedback and there is a lot you’ve given us to think about.
> Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients.
Yeah I'm aware, but because that happens doesn't mean it's the most prosocial system we can implement. I think that you're probably doing good on net and I probably shouldn't have been so negative.
I do worry though that inadequate capitalistic solutions to these sorts of problems serve to preserve a bad status quo in the long run and may end up doing more harm than good?