This is the Dark Side of #Hive. I've railed against the weaponisation of Downvotes for some years now, but of course, I'm just barking at the wind because there is:
- A. No interest in stopping the practice other than by those affected.
- B. Nobody powerful enough willing to 'rock the boat'.
- C. Too many people with vested interests are unwilling to say anything against the Hive ecosystem.
The worst part is that these so-called "Rules" are arbitrary; they're not written down in long form anywhere, and they're not available for you to agree to when you join, unlike many governed groups and services whereby you have to agree to a CoC (Code of Conduct). I find it strange that Hive promotes itself as Free and Open and cites 𝕏 as being controlling and evil and then promptly starts telling its members what they can post, where they can post, the length they can post and, best of all, make sure nobody, anywhere has EVER seen it before. No tall order in an Internet swamped with content.
I have to say I agree with you regarding Templates. Creating content is time-consuming; people are used to a given format in life, and everyone knows what McDonald's looks like; we can all recognise a discarded wrapper, so creating a weekly or monthly post based on a set layout seems logical to 98% of the planet. Here's a question, though. If templates warrant a downvote for supposedly post recycling or whatever spurious excuse the downvoter uses. Why are signatures not downvoted? I mean, they're templates, aren't they? The content never really changes from post to post, does it?
What I dislike most about downvotes that can wipe out your earnings is the fact that someone, possibly a whale, can take exception to your work and use their power to wipe you out. It's almost playground stuff where the big guy picks on the little guy.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are some real crooks on Hive who use multiple methods to extract from the pool or even other members' accounts, and so there does need to be a way to fight or at least stop these people I'm just not convinced loss of potential rewards is the way to do it.
Self-voters should be taken to the public square and flogged. 😉
Thx for the support, yeah that is really a problem that there are no written rules, every whale has their own rules, which is sort of good, but also leads to arbitrary rules and weaponization of downvotes. One user with a large stake could erase the rewards of entire categories of posts because of personal dislike. This feels unfree and more of web 2.0 to me, not in the spirit of crypto, where there should not be a ruler to censor the votes (tips) other casted to you.