Decentralization of tech and social media is the only way for humanity to freely communicate publicly online. Any kind of centralization within the system that runs social media sites will become an attack vector for malicious actors seeking to control or insert biases into the free flow of information. By using and supporting truly decentralized social media, we help to free humanity and to directly support the right to freedom of speech.
The Hive blockchain is easily the most advanced and reliable decentralized blockchain and social network on the internet, yet the majority of people have never even heard of it - why is that?
One of the main reasons why Hive is metaphorically one of the internet's 'best kept secrets' is not that Hive is a secret, but because it is actively suppressed by forces who do not want humanity to find it's voice and to freely expose truth on a global scale. The takeover and suppression of Steem by Justin Sun that led to the creation of Hive several years ago, was an example of this in action.
How Free Should Speech Be?
Any attempt to shut down free speech is a form of crime against humanity. It doesn't matter whether you personally are convinced that what is being said is 'dangerous' or not, attempts to stifle free speech are always dangerous since communication is part of how we meet our needs.
Even if a person is freely sharing the recipe to make nuclear weapons, which might seem to be the most dangerous words a person could speak - by trying to shut them down, we declare ourselves 'fit' to silence such people and you are participating in a hoarding of information and power for yourself. In this example, the censor is actually hoarding the most dangerous weapons on Earth, which gives them an ultimate form of power over others - so who is really the threat here? The liberator of information or the hoarder of that same information?
No-one can objectively prove themselves to be fit to hold power over others since for any given moment where overpowering has taken place, there is no way to know if the outcome would have been better another way. We cannot live the same moment twice. People can claim that they are right to hold power over others and they usually do this by smearing the reputation of others in some way and this is another reason why free speech is so necessary - everyone needs to be heard in their responses to such claims.
So the only way to stand a chance of allowing a healthy balance of power is to ensure that all voices are heard, all people are acknowledged and this requires that we can freely share information. This means that free speech is one of the absolutely most fundamental requirements for human survival since survival requires us to each have enough power to survive.
If Your Social Media Site Isn't Truly Decentralized Then You Aren't Free
There is no question that Web 2.0 social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are heavily preventing free speech, they have said so in their own leaked documents for years - they have planned to do so for a long time. Their 'argument' (to themselves) is that 'people can't be trusted with free speech' - this is a quote from a leaked Google document. This alone proves clearly why the Hive blockchain and Web 3.0 decentralization are so needed, so powerful and yet so likely to be censored themselves.
It is no surprise that ALL of the 'truth' based social networks that claim to allow free speech, have since censored and removed certain people from their networks - often including some of the same medical Doctors who had been previously removed from standard Web 2.0 sites (Doctors who were doing little more than sharing their insights and evidence on controversial topics).
ANY centralization within social media sites allows those involved to censor people, period.
Is Hive Really Decentralized? What About Blurt?
It's true that Hive enables stakeholders to downvote posts and this does cause problems from time to time. However, those problems are much less than the problems caused by the covert and overt manipulation that has taken place on Web 2.0 sites for many years. The saving grace for Web 3.0 sites such as Hive is that the communities can fork the project if they want to and start their own one to escape any bad actors.
Blurt is a project that was forked from Hive, apparently in response to the downvoting that was taking place on Hive. Some Blurt users have thrown mud at Hive, saying that Hive's model doesn't support free speech, but ironically, the fact that Blurt exists is a testimony to the way that Hive DOES support free speech.
The fact that Blurt could be forked from Hive means that the freedom of Hive is so free that you can literally take the whole thing and make your own version without paying anyone. The means of manifesting freedom of speech are freely gifted to the planet by Hive. Blurt does not support downvoting but has yet to truly resolve the issues that downvoting is meant to solve on Hive. It's great to experiment and whichever system works best at scale may be adopted by both systems in the end.
What's Next For Hive and Web 3.0 Social Media?
As many people have pointed out, a next big step for the Hive eco-system is to allow layer 2 communities to more easily be created. We also need to have simple ways for layer 2 communities to be forked, so that if bad actors try to derail them, we can mimic what took place in the founding of Hive (to remove Justin Sun's influence from Hive) and simply move the layer 2 Hive community to a new community account and new layer 2 token - minus the bad actors.
If anything, this feature should be seen as a kind of reflection of the nexus point that led to the creation of Hive initially. Being able to repeat the process of forking on layer 2 should be seen as a celebratory feature of Hive that reminds us of our power and freedom. Not only the freedom to speak freely, but also the freedom of association that allows us to choose who we interact with, entirely for our own reasons.
Easy creation and forking of layer 2 communities may prove to be one of the final key pieces in the creation of the world's first indestructible free speech engine - don't miss your chance to be part of the process!
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So explain to me how you "own" your data if its publicly available for anyone to scrape off the chain? lol what ownership do you have? What rights do you have? How do you delete it? How do you alter it?
If I wanted to I can take your content and replicate it as many times as I want and there's nothing you can do to stop me, in fact, I can just pull the feeds and do with them what I want
Do you think the servers used to hold the data you're not holding yourself are incapable of being shut down? Do you think an ICCAN domain is incapable of being flagged or removed?
Also, if what you did say was true, How does that apply to content that may be deemed unsavory or illegal?
I didn't mention in the post here anything about owning your data, but to respond to your questions here.. 'Ownership' is a pretty meaningless phrase without enforcement and currently the only commonly used form of enforcement is through the court systems offline. In general, Hive isn't sold as a system for enforcing ownership of your own data. Hive is sold as a system where you own your own account, which means that it cannot be shut down or controlled by a central authority or corporation. You have the right to always fork the blockchain and start your own version, so you will never lose your data as long as you are actively participating in the system on a technical enough level.
That's exactly the same as other forms of media and website. Again, Hive isn't sold as being a system that prevents you from doing this.
They can be shut down, but like bit Torrent, mirrors will spring up quickly. Despite a lot of effort and court cases, bit Torrent continues.
The centralised domain system is still used to run bit Torrent sites after years of trying to shut them down. Even if governments started a 'war on hive', Hive could still continue outside of the centralized domain systems. Private DNS networks already exist and so do web 3.0 equivalents.
If you are referring to the idea that your content cannot be deleted on Hive, there are some caveats. The top 20 witnesses can convene and reach consensus to remove posts from the blockchain if they are deemed to be a huge problem. To my knowledge this has never happened on Hive and only happened maybe once on Steem. This would likely only ever happen in cases of child sexual exploitation or extreme material of a similar nature. In general, the people who run the network will not act to devalue the network by removing posts. If they did so, then the big stakeholders could vote them out and if the big stakeholders for some reason agreed with the post removal, then the rest of the community can always fork the network and create a new blockchain that includes the controversial posts.
If they can remove your content they can remove your account so what exactly do you “own”?
Kinda seems like a half baked solution looking for a problem that no one cares about
As already stated, even if the witnesses decided to remove an account (which they never have, with the exception of when Hive was created in order to remove Justin Sun's power) - anyone could fork the blockchain prior to the account being removed, so nothing would be lost, provided people step up to manage the system that they personally value more than Hive.
Lol you realise you're contradicting yourself, they HAVE removed accounts, they HAVE removed stake, its itched in history ensuring that these chains can never be immutable, not that they were but now any moron can see that it's not
Why would I waste resources to fork the chain? because I want to "own" an account? lol I can just spin up my own website then would be less of a hassle and offer basically the same thing
I don't think you understand how decentralization works - it depends on the actions of individuals taking responsibility for the system/network. You seem to want someone else to do everything for you or for perfection to arise magically. The accounts were removed at the inception of the network since the network was created as a direct response to the actions of the operators of the accounts who were removed. There is no perfect system, there is only mitigation of risk and response to challenges that arise.
The forking of decentralized systems is their ultimate defense against corruption, which is what occurred. You are welcome to create something better.
Lol I don’t think YOU the one that understands how it works, dude I run my own servers my own node I think I know what I’m talking about
You’re larping on about a grouped data base run by people that have little to no incentive to disagree with one another so how is that different from a company?
Your overselling the product and trying to embellish it for something it’s proven in the past it’s not
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Most of the users are bots, or the same user with multiple accounts trying to farm as much rewards within the system as possible.
I am not sure you're aware of the certain discord groups the normie hive users aren't privy too, they were exposed during the time of the fork with steem, a lot of unsavory things were said out loud but as is the case in crypto people have the memories of a gold fish, no integrity or are too lazy to ask questions
You don't have to believe me, you're free to scour the chain, twitter screen shots, articles, the info is there it just keeps getting ratio'd by bullshit like Hive fixes this posts to obfuscate the obvious issues that no one wants to admit
Hi, it sounds like you have solid data to show how many Hive users are bots - I'd love to see that if you would share it. I don't really know how many users are bots.
Having been on social media sites and the web since the very beginning, I can assure you that the behavior of people on Hive is no worse and in some ways is better than most other public social sites. Layer 2 communities on Hive have the potential to fix most of the problems you are highlighting, but it will take initiative and strong intentions from individuals and groups to make them work. Again, hive welcomes criticism and challenges critics to do better.
The code to make bots are on GitHub and people also sell bot scripts you can buy to run on your own server or a third party server so as long as you can create an account and sign the keys over to a bot/script it can do whatever you program it to do
Well not really as a “social media” your goal is to reach as many people through as many channels as possible so you need to use public infrastructure to do that
You can have closed networks like sphinx or Zion which are self hosted so you host your own data but these options won’t be popular with the normies not that it’s a bad thing it provides a barrier to keep a lot of nonsense out and only speak with commuted real users quality over quantity
I just see the ecosystem as a way to reach people who are half way in and hopefully I can get them to rethink their biases and reevaluate the marketing talk and consider real sovereignty and privacy tools
Hi, what is the 'best' content is totally subjective and that is part of the point of Hive's design - a consensus is reached among the stakeholders via the voting process as to what is subjectively 'best'. Obviously, this means that large stakeholders can direct the outcome more than small stakeholders, however, at the same time there would be zero money to pay anyone any rewards without the investment from stakeholders. There is no other system that is voluntary that can result in your content getting decent financial rewards from strangers that doesn't involve advertising. When advertisers get involved the biases are increased far more than occurs on Hive - the list of content topics that will never receive a penny from Youtube ads, for example, is very long.
From what I can tell, the big stakeholders on Hive are mostly people who have been here since the beginning of Steem and who have amassed tokens through investment of time, creation of projects and generally (subjectively) helping the project. As with the offline world, the chances are that there are some thieves, scammers and other bad actors who are among the big stakeholders too. This is a problem with virtually all economic systems - the banks and governments being arguably orders of magnitude more corrupt than anything on Hive is ever likely to be.
From my perspective, the shadiness of Hive is reflective of the shadiness of the rest of the world, but at least Hive overcomes some of the biggest problems of Web 2.0 sites. Hive is also open source, so if you can improve on it then you are always welcome to fork and do just that. Hive welcomes criticism and challenges critics to do better.