Part of the issue is that this is pretty one sided. It's people downvoting posts in our #informationwar or #deepdives that doesn't fit the MSM narrative they have been fed, so they see it and nuke it. Some accounts continually get nuked just for questioning why they were nuked(something bernie used to do and not many countered it).
In the #informationwar and #deepdives community there have been 5 or 6 people that I personally know that had a combined stake of over 250k HP, who powered it down and sold it off this year due to constantly getting downvoted.
Our @informationwar and @deepdives account combined projects so that we have more upvote power in order to counter DVs in our communities, but it isn't always enough.
We have been manually curating for over 4 years and have a solid mission(link in our about section on @informationwar). I am trying to get more delegations to @informationwar so that we can continue to manually curate and get some sort of reward, it's super tough to read for 30 to 60 minutes every day for a part time curator while earning like 4 or 5 Hive from curation rewards/day.
Some of the larger projects have like 5 to 10 people curating and they have huge delegations and followings. Our group has just been puttering along for awhile, and we have an influx of new people posting into our communities that are seeing the censorship can be worse here, your rep can get zeroed and all your posts never show up unless someone already follows you.
I agree with downvoting obvious spam/theft of content and stuff not labeled NSFW that should be, but other than that I don't understand why people focus on "over rewarded" content for only the political realms and not for everything else. I don't see anybody downvoting the 50 to 200 USD posts about travel blogs/food blogs and other stuff that is likely stolen content by content farmers. Most of the posts on trending take almost no thought to make and are just blindly upvoted by whales to get their curation rewards.
Maybe one day the truth community will have a lot more power and be able to better defend ourselves, but seriously, nobody and I mean nobody in the truth community is downvoting these posts on trending and if there's anything that certainly needs to be "adjusted downwards" for being overrewarded its every single post that is in the top 100. We could go on a huge downvoting spree and rile up all our 100+ upvoters in the curation trail to start handing down -50USD downvotes to these posts(which is aboutt what we could do) but we don't do that ever and don't plan on it. Instead we get downvoted without ever having downvoted others first, while those same downvoters give out huge upvotes to pure garbage that can be found on instagram/twitter.
And the second that our group started getting DVers out there, you better believe all the whales would crash down on us ever harder. Posts in #informationwar or #deepdives would never be positive again if we all started downvoting the shitposts the whales are upvoting. It's too one sided.
That's my .02 Hive.
Didn't they make downvoting free? That seems a ripe for abuse.
Yes, but it also removed the cost for policing spam. Before, fighting spam and abuse meant foregoing curation rewards. The people working hardest for blockchain integrity and reward pool abuse correction were effectively hobbled. That was bad, too.
COnsidering myself and others were delegating power to them to offset that often I don't think that was as much a factor. Creating additional accounts for that purpose and then allowing people to delegate power to them worked. Also if they begin to misuse that power the delegations could be removed.
Now they can just abuse without cost.
Yep... Because they decided we needed more downvoting...
Yes
@gringalicious was run off the platform. Just a food blogger who apparently got into a fight with the spam patrol. She did re-post her off-blockchain blog content, and recycled some old posts, so she wasn't squeaky clean, but it became a fight that ruined her effort to return and start fresh.
@krnel @logiczombie @lucylin @frot @dwinblood, and multiple others I don't remember off the top of my head, powered down most of their stake and got rid of it due to downvoting.
I think if you summed up just the ones I named, it would have been over 250k HP if memory serves.
Thankfully they are still posting on the chain though, and we are able to reward them with our @informationwar + @deepdives curationt trail.
I got sick of seeing other people down voted. I never really got hit by a big brigade. I had maybe a handful of my posts brigaded but that's about it. I just got tired of the hypocrisy and seeing it done to others.
If only people understood the real information war is won by evidence and argumentation instead of blanket downvoting. A lot of the stuff in those communities is nonsense, but that's part of freedom of the press. I can see the argument for downvoting falsehood, but as I noted in a prior post (now past payout) about web2.0 social media, our goal here should be discourse even if we're dealing with Brandolini's Law.
A lot of what most people think of as "press" is nonsense propaganda that is pushed by people who have no problem lying about anything and everything.
The "news" and the "press" has always been ideological throughout the history of the written and spoken word. To control information is to control the narrative, whether it is overtly false or not. In the USSR everyone knew the propaganda was bullshit, but they had to tow the party line or get put into a gulag. In the USA and many western societies we are under an illusion that news organizations are truth warriors and try to report stories accurately/fairly/truthfully/factually and without prejudice, we just haven't had our gulags in the USA yet, but it will come eventually. Every empire collapses given enough time.
Nicholas Sandman successfully had CNN settle with him and is currently in the process of getting settlements from all the other major news, who all lied and smeared him as a racist who did something to an Indian man. Even though the entire encounter was on video, the MSM chopped up the video and spread it around for months and they cut it up to fit their narrative of "white person does racist thing" despite him not doing anything racist.
This is one example among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands over the years of outright lies, EVEN WHEN we can look up the truth ourselves and see the entire video of the encounter. Iraq's WMDs that the MSM lied us into war with, etc.
The danger doesn't come from "alt-news" that barely has any views, it comes from "Cathedral", the "orthodoxy", the "religious" who consume MSM propaganda and never challenge it ever. These are hugely centralized power structures of 5 major corporations who control almost exclusively "the news" and what politicians and regular people "trust" and do. The danger is from uncritically believing what Don Lemon on CNN tells you, when he says "maybe Malaysian flight that was lost years ago flew into a black hole", yes he really said that, and he wasn't kidding(go watch him say it).
You're not going to find almost any "danger" in our communities that you call nonsense.
I have written extensively on the nature of journalism as we know it. Yellow journalism never went away. It just wore a mask of fake neutrality between ww2 and the dawn of the internet.
There is a lot of nonsense in the alternative media, though. Alex Jones has been right about a lot, but wrong about a lot, too. He's just the highest profile example, of course. We need to exercise discernment most when we find ourselves in agreement with someone else's biases and conclusions.
I agree. I stopped listening to AJ and focused more on listening to people like Dave Smith/Tom Woods.
I think I was as high as 26000 Steempower when I began powering down. That was quite a bit back then.
Maybe this comment thread is an appropriate place to point out how there is no rhyme or reasoning to downvotes and they often seem to represent the views of individuals when downvoting on political content specifically or in this case Upvoting what seems to plagiarized Racist memes by two witnesses, one having significant stake and the other arguably the most active with comments. Continued silence by the witnesses on downvotes and silence on witnesses support for racist plagiarized racist memes is tiresome. Downvotes are not being used to protect the rewards pool. BULLSHIT look at trending.
https://peakd.com/someeofficial/@brundlefly/stupid-white-cracker-asses
Most of the trending page is nonsense, upvotes by whales.
Whales were downvoting some stuff in IW/DD that was earning less than 50 USD, now they are currently upvoting posts for 200 to 300 with the price of Hive being 2.40 USD +(not downvoting them, which would align with their supposed "downvoting for being over-rewarded" mantra they chant). It's always ok for them to do what they want, always bad for others to do the same.
Yeah its a problem for sure. In my opinion the greatest problem with this DV thing becomes when racism and threats of violence is totally ok but anti-government content that is directed towards centralized people like gates or harmful untested medical procedures that is purely experimental gotta go? We really do have pro fiat pro government whales, racist witnesses and wanna be cosmic jesters but having our activist celebrity like accounts being fake or inactive doesn't help either.
Silence by witnesses or DV by witnesses that have the support of the community while the community ignores the witnesses actions is pretty concerning and a gross form of governance when the people want a phatty upvote and will be willing to keep their mouth shut for one... kind of like at work.
I am quite surprised to see @theycallmedan and his response to DVs. I always thought he was a counter to the flags but I guess not when you need votes to get a proposal passed and the people that have them are the flaggers allegedly. Now maybe he has been too busy building speak network to notice but the flags are happening in one of threespeaks main communities. I knew of @threespeak way before joining Steem in '17 because they supported a few of my favorite content creator on youztube.
Just weird that the community supports projects by people who are so hostile and seemingly pro fiat the way they down vote the kind of content they do. Its actually quite gross and alarming that such large stake is used to support the oppression of content that goes against centralization and fiat.
There's probably only really a few projects on the chain that are pro decentralization.
Seems like most of the people here and content posted now is just fluff stuff easily found on other social media platforms.
@informationwar has been doing its thing for like 4 years now in our #informationwar tag and #deepdives is going to release a token soon for this kind of thing. We teamed up with @v4vapid to get better support out to all the people who are continually archiving important imformation.
EVEN IF all the posts in IW/DD or similar communities are taken down to 0 rewards, at least the information is still there. I'm a glass half full kinda guy haha! But in all seriousness, we are going to continue to try and grow our support. Hive price going higher will certainly help that, now our upvotes are worth more $ so we can upvote 50 people now and give out the same rewards in $ as we could last month and only do 25 people.
Gotta keep fighting and pushing forward and we aren't going away!
Nice! I love what Leo and POB is doing. Their content is seo optimized it seems and hive blockchain rewards are not included on their front end from what I can tell. Supposedly the one of the main selling points of the speak network was to be able to by pass the DV system and curate content more dynamically but the response left here by Dan on this thread was disheartening and tone deaf I feel.
Glad to see V4vapid more active (or at least not on a autovoter like I suspected initially) and that tokenized solutions are finally happening for the activist/anti-centralization communities like information war and Deepdives.
We all manually curate, but follow eachother upvotes on the hive.vote curation trial of informationwar or deepdives.
Following either one of those helps us reward posts in #informationwar #deepdives #politics #news etc.
I joined forces with him to better reward the communities.
If you like what @informationwar is doing it would be awesome if you delegated some HP to our cause , follow the curation trail on hive.vote or if you like manually upvoting stuff browse through and find stuff you like in our tags/communities :)
We will take all the support we can get, trying to onboard larger names in the social media world also via our reachout on twitter/youtube.
My experience with the activist community recently was extremely disheartening with how I saw the egregious and hostile attacks by witnesses and large stake holders in both deep dives and information while engaging daily on content in the communities not to mention lack of support and attacks from within the community that was reported to the FBI and caused unnecessary police presence in my neighborhood and helicopters over my house for days.
I really got 0 to minimal support from the community with the exception of @kennysgaminglife who has always, when push came to shove, supported these communities and myself. So I can not complain too much. It is just if community members wont support my content and make threats of violence on me while hivewatchers sits by, laughs and DMs me to say stop upvoting comments, we condone threats of violence with our silence but not upvoting comments so watch out.
So I am not excited about these communities on HIVE that should be better supportted in a decentralized crypto space. But plutocracy has soured the experienced.
I will consider delegating HP to your cause but the downvotes and lack of witness support and silence for these hostile attacks in our communities of Truth really impacts my mental health negatively.
Chasing high APRs, curating artists and posting about tokens has helped me better use HIVE.
I didnt spend 5g on Hive power delegation to curate content just to be dissed and ignored by the entire community or have the content I curated flagged to 0 causing unneeded financial stress.