I got a tweet the other day, pointing to a rather strange article about live coding on what looked like a fake news website designed to optimise search engine results (which I am therefore not linking to). Not only did the article contain a lot of links to the livecoding.tv video streaming website (aimed at software developers sharing their screens, rather than live coding as we know it), it was also written by livecoding.tv themselves. It mentioned me, but halfway through goes from talking about my live coding software TidalCycles, to Jay-Z’s music streaming service TIDAL.
Looking a bit closer and the twitter account which tweeted the link at me looked a bit strange, too.. Lots of links to the afore-mentioned website.
Doing a reverse image search on the image on their profile, and I find out their true identity, via a stock photo website, namely “Young man drinking water in forest, smiling, portrait.”
A handsome chap, that’s for sure. This has made me wonder a bit about the strange feeling I had when I tried out streaming to this website.. There was something off about it, not only the opportunity to make yourself available for ‘private streaming sessions’ which seemed to have been borrowed from a very different business model, but also the people who would drop in to the chat, ask unrelated questions and then disappear. Just how far can these streaming websites go with bots? If in web 3.0 the users are the product, who exactly are we being sold to? Are we streaming to posthuman overlords?
Anyway I deleted my videos from this website a while back, in part due to their worrying treatment of one of their users, and these days I either stream to the friendlier (and free/open source) watchpeoplecode.com, or to youtube live events via my own nginx server (previously).
