Brighteon exclusive video: Tarl Warwick explains the alt tech ecosystem better than anyone, and he’s building a massive audience where he won’t be banned

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Right up front, I’ll warn you that this rising Brighteon star utters some profanity from time to time and has a channel name that might trigger some people: “Styxhexenhammer666.” His real name is Tarl Warwick, and he’s building a rapidly expanding audience on Brighteon.com while expertly navigating the new “alt tech ecosystem” that exists outside the walled gates of Big Tech. See his channel at this link.

He recently posted an exclusive video to Brighteon.com — see it here — and I’m highlighting his video because regardless of what reactions people might have to his name or his clothing style, this man eloquently and intelligently explains the “alt tech” ecosystem in ways that few others can even grasp.

He currently has 742 subscribers following his channel on Brighteon, and the number is growing rapidly. The “subscribe” feature was only introduced a couple of months ago, so there hasn’t been much time yet for people to build large followings, but many channels are rising quickly as word about Brighteon.com spreads.

“I’ve become known as a Youtuber, and yet Youtube is the only site significantly suppressing me,” says Tarl. “Now YouTube is almost secondary because they refuse to take me seriously and allow me to prosper on a site that I spent more than a decade actually building content on. It’s rather sad.”

If we don’t support free speech on “edge topics,” then we don’t support it at all

As the founder of Brighteon.com, I wanted to highlight Tarl’s video for a couple of important reasons related to free speech, censorship and the public square of rational arguments.

“Styxhexenhammer666” has been subjected to censorship on many platforms, often for the most absurd reasons invoked by the tyrannical tech giants who banned me, too. (In fact, it was YouTube’s full de-platforming of yours truly that resulted in the creation of Brighteon.com.)

Some people don’t like the way he looks, or the “666” in his username, or his use of profanity, or even some of the subjects he covers. Yet if you can get past the surface properties and just listen to what he’s saying in this video, he very clearly lays out a highly informative description of the geography of the alt tech ecosystem in a way that’s incredibly easy to follow. Don’t judge this book by its cover.

Tarl is obviously highly intelligent and has thought deeply about the importance of free speech, alternative tech platforms and the very structure of shared human knowledge in our modern era. He doesn’t fit into any convenient category of person, either. On his website, TarlWarwick.net, he writes about medicinal herbs, gardening and the occult. He dresses in a way that some people might associate with a heavy metal death band or something, yet his voice comes across as highly intellectual and well considered.

Watch his exclusive Brighteon video here:

Brighteon was built to protect the speech of people who fall outside the norms of mainstream “woke” speech, which is the tiny sliver of the Overton Window now remaining for those who populate YouTube, where all speech must conform to very strict rules of “progressive obedience.” Yet as that Overton Window shrinks, more and more voices are being jettisoned from YouTube, including so-called “fringe” voices, or conspiracy theorists / analysts, or even homeopaths, vaccine skeptics, alt science investigators and the like.

Anything that isn’t considered advertiser friendly is labeled an “edge topic” by YouTube, and YouTube has now basically declared war on its own users by announcing that channels which aren’t “commercially viable” — which basically means they can’t be used to sell tampons, beer and prescription drugs — are no longer welcomed on the site.

YouTube, in effect, has just become a grand prostitute for the corporate sleazebags that now dominate the tech giants. And people who don’t fit into the box of rabid commercialization and materialism aren’t welcomed on YouTube any longer.

So intelligent people are looking for alternatives, and Brighteon is one of the platforms that welcomes the speech of people who have the personal courage to explore beyond the boundaries of mainstream idiots. Brighteon.com is a platform for people who dare to think for themselves, or who dare to challenge the self-destructive establishment that’s run by the arrogant, delusional “controllers” who think they alone have the right to dictate what you’re allowed to read, speak or share.

Tarl recognizes both the importance and the potential of Brighteon, which is why he began marketing his channel there. And he’s succeeding because he has been using his YouTube platform to tell people to migrate to Brighteon.com.

In doing this, Tarl is trailblazing a highly effective marketing strategy for building an audience on an alternative platform: Use your remaining influence on mainstream platforms to build your audience on alternative platforms before you get fully banned on the original platforms. Tarl then uses his video audience to plug his books, which are his main source of income. And he’s built quite a following with that simple, effective strategy.

Plus, he’s just fascinating to listen to.

Once you’ve got an audience on Brighteon.com, you have that audience forever, and there’s no shadowbanning at play, either. No spooky surveillance of your viewers, either, and you won’t be kicked off just because your views don’t conform to some twisted definition of “commercialism” that drives the tech giants, who are solely interested in profits and power rather than uplifting humanity with knowledge and wisdom.

Answering some of Tarl’s questions

In his video, linked above, Tarl says he’s not sure which video platform is going to succeed long term. He has a larger following on Bitchute, but is currently building his audience rapidly on Brighteon.com.

Brighteon has a limit on the number of videos you can post based on the total channel views you’ve accumulated so far. It’s a feature that’s unique to Brighteon, and it allowed us to achieve financial sustainability by discouraging people who would post 500 videos while having just two viewers, for example. Tarl correctly points out that this structure may make it more difficult for brand new channels to succeed on the platform, since they need a certain number of video views to “unlock” the ability to post new videos.

However, we’ve recently overhauled this system and now grant all new users the ability to post 50 videos with no requirement of video views. We’ve also drastically lowered the number of views required to unlock more videos. See the current “video unlocking” chart at this link.

For example, you can now unlock the ability to post 500 videos by achieving just 5,000 views across your entire channel. So we’ve made it easier than ever to unlock more video capacity for all users.

Interestingly, before these limits were in place, we literally had some users who were archiving all their hundreds of videos on the platform, even when such videos had very little interest to anyone else. We’ve had users post hundreds of videos of them just driving around different streets in their car, like “Here’s a video of my driving down Pecan street,” and “Here’s a video of my driving down Main street,” and so on. I kid you not.

In those cases, Brighteon was fronting the costs for all the video storage — which is obviously incurred each month for all the stored videos — even as there were near-zero views for such videos for the simple reason that nobody wants to watch you driving down all the different streets in your local town.

So we had to create a mechanism that would introduce some economics into the decisions of which videos content creators decided to post. When video upload slots are unlimited, they have zero value to the user, but when slots are limited, suddenly there is an economic decision taking place where users ask themselves, “Which video is going to get more views here?” Once we implemented this rule, the quality of the videos being uploaded immediately and dramatically improved.

Brighteon vs. censorship

On the question of censorship, let me be clear that someone like Tarl will never be banned from Brighteon. He’s exactly the kind of intelligent content creator we should all welcome, even if we don’t always concur with everything he’s stating. He’s thoughtful, intelligent and well-reasoned. He brings an audience that’s also thoughtful and intelligent, and he’s not afraid to state what he believes without resorting to self censorship which is what YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are trying to train people to invoke in their own lives (i.e. turn everyone into their own speech Nazi or thought police).

Yes, Brighteon does censor certain things like porn, animal cruelty, stalking videos, etc. There are some basic rules, but they are universally applied, and we don’t ban people just because we don’t agree with their ideas on politics, religion, etc. We even welcome Flat Earth videos, even as I have publicly countered Flat Earth theorists in my own articles. Yet I welcome their videos for the simple reason that every person deserves to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Elizabeth Warren gets to talk about her ideas, even when all of them are bad. So why shouldn’t people with good ideas — even if they are unpopular — be able to express those ideas, too?

Another important point in all this is that Brighteon was previously forced to engage in “pass-through” censorship of videos related to the New Zealand shooting. We were literally threatened with being complete de-platformed by our upstream infrastructure providers! So we invested another few hundred thousand dollars and built our own infrastructure for video storage and playback, thereby insulating our videos from the control of the Amazons and Microsofts of the world.

Right now, we are mostly insulated from upstream infrastructure, but not fully insulated. We use Cloudflare, for example, to deliver video streams. If Cloudflare ever decides to completely ban free speech videos, then we could be disrupted. So far, they’ve been fine with the fact that we have our own moderation in place, and we take our own steps to ban illegal videos such as videos that might demonstrate how to build suicide vests or similar nonsense.

My message to Tarl Warwick and people who have been banned everywhere else because they hold dissenting views

In conclusion, my message to Tarl Warwick and other dissenting voices is that you are welcomed on Brighteon.com, and we are investing more money and resources into building out Brighteon to be an even better platform in 2020.

Right now, for example, we’re working on live streaming capabilities, which will be publicly available sometime in the next 2-3 months. We’re also building better video analytics, and if Apple and Google would stop banning us, we would also release a mobile app. (Apple and Google have both become techno-fascist organizations now that outright ban all apps that might expose users to dissenting content on almost any topic.)

A new search function is also coming to Brighteon, which will greatly improve the quality of search results. And recently, we launched a “premium video” feature that allows owners of documentaries and other premium content to sell their videos through Brighteon.com. End users purchase the videos and then have unlimited, lifetime viewing of those videos in their Brighteon.com library.

Many more features are coming in 2020, so keep posting videos and building your audience on this free speech platform. Brighteon is here to stay, and we were even awarded the “Brighteon” trademark recently by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

On top of all that, we don’t make Brighteon complicated with cryptocurrency systems, or complex memberships, etc. And we don’t interrupt your videos with video ads, either, which is something that YouTube does all the time.

Thank you for your support so far as we build the internet’s best platform for free speech. We’re working on ways to make it even better in 2020 and beyond. If you want to have a platform where you won’t be banned or shadowbanned, help spread the word about Brighteon and get off YouTube and Facebook, because you aren’t being given a fair shake there, obviously.

Join now and start posting your own videos at Brighteon.com.

Just don’t post videos of yourself driving around random streets for no reason, or you won’t get much of a following. (lol)