Dear Brighteon

By Gavin McCall, Independent Researcher (Gulf Breeze, FL)

A Story About User Friendliness In A Not-So-Friendly Social Media Landscape

We have recently taken up arms joining a mass exodus occurring from socialist media, mainly, user-generated content sites like the big tech, big data nightmare hydra that is the Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.  The main interest in using these platforms to do anything, because most of what is done online is rather pointless anyway,

is to disseminate music, share lessons, share journals of our daily life...and now all of these digital institutions, seductive to the masses, like mystical binary sirens, drawn to their doom, are trapping people that, in most part, don't realize they are being separated from their friends, not united with them.  Whatever is happening in the political scene today shouldn't be drawing lines between friends and causing divisions, but it has and still is.  Since the recent banning of many huge content generators, ones that could not be bought or controlled by big tech or big data, they have retreated to other services or abandoned the world wide web altogether.  What is the purpose of using all this stuff if you're just going to be erased?  The whole point of the Internet is to find the thing you are searching for with relative ease.  The opposite is occurring now with these big tech companies like Google, after acquiring most of the search traffic online, using it to filter the results in a way where it is not easy to find the things you are looking for. As if!

The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Is Bright?

Brighteon.com is a website created and maintained by the Health Ranger (naturalnews.com), Mike Adams.  He's a cool guy, offering his talents and hard work by providing a place for content generators, people that make videos, can share them without censorship.  There are guidelines on any website that allows content to be uploaded...but on Brighteon, there is the promise of freedom of speech and expression.  There are some challenges to adding content to Brighteon.  For instance, you have to first become a user and to do that you must request an invitation.  If you are accepted, every video you upload or comment you make on a video, has to be verified by someone at Brighteon.  This, of course, is what anybody does on a reputable social media website.  In good taste, you have to monitor what is being added to your site.  You can't hide behind the "Safe Harbor" label with everything.  With due diligence, and restoration of honor in customer service, the providers of the service of Brighteon are doing just that.. providing an organic and fluid experience for us new users and allowing us to have a dialogue with them in order to provide feedback to enhance the website and the experience.  After all, Brighteon realizes that they need users to upload content, and those users are pretty easy to make happy.  I think Brighteon, pardon the pun, has a bright future.  So I am writing this article and taking these few minutes out of my day to provide some feedback of my own.

The Pros and Cons of Using Brighteon

I'm not writing this article to bitch, but I'm just giving credit where it is due.  Brighteon is a great free website on the world wide web.  There is no real catch.  However, there are some things you should realize before you think you can just jump on Brighteon and upload massive amounts of videos.  Populating Brighteon with content is a selective process...and you'll realize why.

These are the pros:

• No censorship
• Great user support
• Back-end clarity (easy to use dashboard)
• RSS feeds (awesome!)
• Only need 20 or more views for video to appear on the Popular Videos page

Here are some cons:

• Newbies start with 10 videos only.
  (* To get more videos you must get a total of 500 hits)
• Not very many views

Now if you think about it, what's the risk of joining a community of video content generators that are trying to post their most popular videos to attract hits to Brighteon in order to satisfy the advertisers?

With a website like Brighteon, with so much potential, and so new, we have to be careful not to kid ourselves.  We may not be able to start a revolution on Brighteon, but we kinda are, with all of the new content rolling in from content providers that are looking for an alternative to the mainstream socialist media commies.  There is a plus side to not having as many views at the start.  Whatever views you do get, you can trust, were earned. And if you delete videos, your hits don't go away.  They stay, and accumulate, so you can get the credit you deserve for attracting views to Brighteon.  Mike Adams, creator of Brighteon, even stated in one of his videos, that he wants people to have their own advertisements in their videos, etc., because it is in the best interest of Brighteon of course.

From what I've seen so far, Brighteon appears to run a six second advertisement in front of some videos.  That's not very much.  In theory, your video could have several minutes of advertisements and so, you can tell, Brighteon is not motivated by greed.

I think it is worth a try to give Brighteon a hand and submit quality content for them to attract hits to our videos and satisfy the needs of their advertisers.  Also, there are more direct ways to support Brighteon, as their online store https://www.brighteonstore.com and they have a donate button on their main page.

Feature Requests and Bug Fixes

I have faith that the crew developing Brighteon will use feedback from their users constructively.  A lot of us folk that are smart enough to find Brighteon for ourselves have experience in developing websites.  We understand what it takes to have a team of dedicated people working on a website with so many users.  I believe and trust Brighteon to do their best and don't expect them to possibly do everything we want but I can see them trying to.  

Here are some feature requests for Brighteon:

• Watch Later Playlist - quick and easy, click-it and move on...later find your click generated playlist in the playlist section of your dashboard.
• Public Favorite Playlist - this is also a quick and easy, click it and forget it, feature where you let us put Brighteon videos we like on our own playlists we can share with other Brighteon users.  This helps generate views, in my experience with other websites, that allow such feature, like YouTube.
• Uploaded Image Thumbnail Caching - I noticed while browsing the playlists on Brighteon that the images for each channel take widely varying times to load.  I think this is because Brighteon is not caching/thumbnailing uploaded pictures, which I would recommend on the back-end (the user virtually does not notice this is happening) which should speed up download times and help with traffic on the website.
• Autoplay - Please...please, please, add an auto-play feature to your site! You can have automatically generated playlists that can autoplay, like when I want to watch all 100 pages of your most Popular Videos.  Or how about watching the Editor Pick's back to back without having to click on them manually?  This would be a great feature.

This is just what I could find from browsing today.  I know I will think of more features and requests to ask of Brighteon.  I've noticed some bugs here or there.  For instance, not every video that gets uploaded is put on the queue list for review right away.  I've noticed other users experiencing this in real time.  I'm not sure if this is a bug or just a limitation or what.  I think Brighteon is aware of this and maybe trying to fix it.

Thank you, Brighteon!

I've enjoyed my user experience since I've been accepted onto Brighteon as a video provider.  The videos I post will be fair use and my own productions.  Wherever possible, I will give credit where it is due.  Brighteon has my respect, thus far, and I hope to help their platform grow.

Your friend, Gavin "The Elf" McCall, Forever's End