This is cool and a good way to allow the community to see who is being downvoted and can step in if they choose. This takes work to find this stuff, and of course, I'm sure a lot of what is being downvoted is rightfully so, but there is always stuff that gets "nuked" where it probably shouldn't have. I'll look into this list and start digging around and seeing if I can help.
I've said for a while Hive still has 2 polarizing issues that often get mixed up and lost in the weeds. There is a downvote problem on Hive. Actually, 2 downvote problems, to be precise. The first people are too overhanded with the downvotes, zeroing outpost repeatedly; even comments can "smother" another user. This is not good behavior if the person being targeted makes "legit" content, trying to get involved in Hive and join the ecosystem via gov token accumulation via earning it. This, in my eyes, can be a form of "censorship" in the fact that a bigger entity can deprive a smaller entity out of "earning" gov token via PoB (can still earn via DAO/witness.) So I don't like that and try to counter it when I see it, admittingly I need to add some more resources in this depo; I used to have an "anti-bully" account with a 500k stake to counter malicious DVs, I may look into this again.
The other problem is there are not nearly enough downvotes. This is mainly because downvotes are public, involve monetary value, and most do not like confrontation. So you have the ones that love confrontation overdoing it and the ones that do not like confrontation underdoing it. I'm not here to judge what should be what and if the payouts were all the same, and I saw a healthy amount of DV to Upvote ratio (like u see on web2 platforms with their like counters), then I would assume the free market is doing its thing. But when I go to post after post on trending and do not see a single downvote, I understand that we have a flaw there that can be improved. I have to automatically assume then that most content is "overvalued" simply because, in a healthy system, you have disagreements you have downvotes. If the ones being overhanded would lighten up, try to avoid nuking something to zero, esp if it has a lot of organic votes. Try to be in line with others, at least that is my advice. And to the ones not downvoting at all, do not be afraid to throw a small DV out there, even if it's a fraction of a penny; it just allows us to get to a place where we can have full curation which involves negative curation IE downvotes. That helps everyone on Hive.
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.
This is a great comment, and definitely addresses that two-sides-of-the-same-coin issue that we face around down-votes.
Between the 4-5 people with millions of stake, more than happy to zero out accounts and hide posts with dozens of real comments... and the thousands of people with not enough stake to matter, or who are still traumatized (mildly joking) from the previous whale wars and flag wars on Steem... it's a mess out there.
The problem here is (from what I've seen in the past), down-voting anything that hasn't already been approved by hivewatchers or steemcleaners is a good way for someone to get on the radar of those DV-Whales, and have their account zero'd out because of it, and/or having the posts & comments of people they support attacked, if they don't have their own content to be downvoted.
I stopped using the DVs on tribesteemup because of that simple fact: I was only downvoting actual shitposts/spam, but because some folks with stake didn't like it (haejin at that point I believe), they zero'd out dozens of posts from as many people, just because tribesteemup had voted on them.
Thanks for the upvote support - much appreciated - let's see how many of the downvoting accounts combine to nullify it. lol.
I have only looked through a small percentage of the 150 posts here, but I can see plenty that don't have an obvious reason for being downvoted to oblivion and where no comment was even provided by the downvoter. This feels akin to Facebook 'randomly' blocking posts or suspending accounts - it's really the worst possible situation for a network that is marketing itself as being an alternative to this stuff. It doesn't really matter if the post is still visible on the blockchain because no-one will see it there unless they look (which they won't). It's abundantly clear that certain entities are using witness rewards and other sources to build power with intent to have a high enough reputation to shut down any account whatsoever. I will update the next report to have more useful information that will help to make the more problematic downvotes more visible.
I think your point about there not being enough downvotes is debatable. Everyone has their own perspective of how they view community and how they view healthy interaction. A lot of people don't want to be the person who puts others down in their moment of glory. Some people are worried about retaliation if they downvote a whale. This is totally understandable, since it is clear that some of them seem to get turned on by downvoting others. The risk to benefit ratio of downvoting a whale's post (or one of their friends), means that few people will feel motivated to do it - and so we have, overall, few downvotes being cast.
Ultimately, proof of brain is about subjective valuation of content and the downvotes weren't originally intended to be used to show 'lack of brain' in the post - they were there for policing reward pool abuse really, afaik. Obviously, people can use Hive - within the code's parameters - in their own way, but we don't really have a shared vision or consensus on best practice in the community.
With perception management and information control being such a massive 'market' (which is part of why Web 2.0 companies being massively wealthy), it's understandable that people want to leave Web 2.0 behind. It's not so healthy to have web 3.0 products being run behind the scenes by people manoeuvring to place themselves in the position of information gatekeepers simply through the scale of their stake. Essentially, if we are serious about delivering on the promise of Web 3.0, there has to be very close attention paid to preventing centralisation. DPOS with witness voting as it stands, ironically, facilitates centralisation as much as it facilitates decentralisation. Whether or not the outcome is a good one seems to mostly come down to the actions of those with the most stake (which therefore includes the top 20 witnesses).
It's great to see you are engaging in these matters in a serious way that is pointing in the right direction. It's actually sad to me to see literally no other 'whales' even paying attention. The claim made by some of the downvoters is that actually the whales want this downvoting to happen, I can't say if that is true or not. Your plan to set aside funds for downvoting is great to hear - maybe there's a way you can work with @r0nd0n to make that work more practically, without you needing to be a full time content cop yourself!
The reality, though, is that the downvoters have probably close to $10M between them, so I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make, but it's worth a go.
I just can’t understand why the affects you so much. I feel like you have missed the point of where hive is going. This conversation will be null and void in a year from now. Too many things being built that make downvoting for anything else but rewards disagreements useless. If anything I think your issue should be with the main blogging platforms, which unfortunately for them, cannot currently claim they are censorship resistant, at least until they have done further work on their trending algos . Your issue should not be making out like hive is a censorship tool, (which it is not). I think you need a bit of patience maybe until this system matures a bit more. It is not a censorship tool as you describe above. Some of the front ends are censorship tools. That is their issue, it is not hives fault that their trending algos are relatively unsophisticated
A quick fix would be to create a new front end from condenser or ecency and make the trending feed the downvoted content. Ppl could easily view what has been down voted and either upvote it from there or enjoy consuming them content from there directly. If this worked out, down voters who currently think they are downvoting to censor (which they are not) would have the difficult task of not being able to zero rewards in order to keep it off of trending on both the front end i talk about above as well as the major front ends on hive which unfortunately, at present, have stake based censorship in built into their trending feeds.
Some of the major front ends may do well to review this down vote list and have a way to legitimately restore the positions in the trending feeds so that the down voting of the few legit blogs only results in rewards disagreements, but not loss of position on trending prior to the down vote
Hive is fundamentally a blockchain, not a UI. So the most important decisions and structures exist at the blockchain level and probably always will. This means that while it is possible for UIs to adjust their appearance in order to accommodate certain scenarios, it will always be the blockchain that counts more. As I said in our recent chat, since society basically runs on money at this point, whether a creator is interested in money or not, he/she is forced to be because content creation is a constant contest for attention and the more resources people have, the more they can take part in that contest. Excluding money from discussion of the 'censorship' aspect is kind of cherry picking the situation.
The fact remains that the Hive blockchain, by design, allows people to draw attention to themselves via either quality content or just through having the most stake. The aim of those who do this mostly through using stake appears to be simply to make more profit, but they may also hive hidden ideological agenda or even be being paid to act one out covertly. The more that those with stake can dominate those who are the creators, the less the creators will want to be here - which serves the 'stake posters' up to a point as they get even more returns until the token price crashes.
So, essentially, we have a situation where people can get filthy rich (or richer) as a result of limiting the growth of other people - specifically. This is actually how capitalism in general works too, but fans of capitalism rarely admit this. I know first hand that some of the wealthiest people are more interested in stopping the growth of potential competitors than they are actually adding anything of value to the world. The more this problem continues, the more of a shitshow Hive will become, regardless of what UIs do. You can't sweep under the rug that a small number of people are doing whatever they can to absorb as much rewards as possible. Even if the downvoted posts remain visible, the reward pool will still be being reduced away from the will of the community and towards those who are willing to use downvoting as a profit generator.
I am fully open to layer 2 solutions resolving this and that's great - but we aren't there yet. As I said, I am just living in the present moment, responding to what arises.
Just please have some patience before u go on about hive being a censorship tool. It is not. Some of us have our cocks on the block building systems that cater to people like u.
I stopped chasing hive rewards years ago (I really did) I’m simply not interested in them. The earlier we get bloggers and creators away from reliance on the rewards the better. That will be much easier with other monetisation tools being built on hive such as value4value streaming, ad systems and donations systems as well as being able to easily earn in other cryptos such as eth and btc.
U are responding slightly prematurely IMO. If we start to fail at the ability be tools, hold us to account. But don’t say hive is a censorship tool. This is completely disingenuous and undermines the effort, time and money that people such as myself are putting in to build systems that solve problems specifically for ‘controversial’ creators such as you. Hey, come get stuck in and help us build. The time spent on these blogs would be much more affective it used building the tools
How is anyone responding prematurely to a product that has been around for 5 years at this point? I've been here for 4 years and we were getting downvoted back then too.
Like I said, most of these issues will be a mute point in a year from now with the monetisation and community driven censorship tools that are being created atm. These are not being taken into account and so I believe that these points are premature.
We've been hearing various promises and reasons that we should just wait for things to get better, since 2016. At the start of Steem, there were whales using their stake to shut down accounts who annoyed them, creators they disagreed with, etc.
Over the years, there have been waves of high & low, there have been quiet periods and full on flag wars, and all along the way those who challenge the corporate propaganda narrative have been getting downvoted (not for quality, plagiarism, or over-rewarding, but simply for challenging the lies), and that has sky-rocketed since 2020, as more creators and content have been looking for homes that won't censor them like FB, Twatter, etc.
My blog is the perfect example of how they are only down-voting based on their dogmatic ideology - they don't care if I make over $60 a post for my videos, but if I mention the jab or censorship, they 100% DV it, even if it was a much more in-depth research piece, that took me dozens of hours to put together.
I'm not sure what you are referencing beyond Threespeak, was there something else?
I am not saying that 'hive is a censorship tool', I have never said that. If it was then I wouldn't be here at all. All I'm saying is that with the parameters of downvoting set as they are and with the lack of features available to combat malicious downvoting, we have a problem. If I were 'king' of Hive, I would probably do a quick update to switch to only one free downvote per day - but only after doing analysis to predict what that would do. I would also look at doing the kinds of things that you are doing, it all needs to be done.
My psychology is one of hating lies and especially people presenting as if they are 'helping', when in fact they are fully and maliciously exploiting from behind a lie. This kind of thing has gotten more people killed on this planet than anything else (see: pretty much all wars ever). If I put time into helping to build something with the potential to genuinely improve society and maybe save lives in the process, I will obviously take issue with people trying to use it to do the opposite. Silence is both tacit consent and also complicity, so I am not silent.
I am happy to help out where I can with building next gen things on Hive. At present, though, I have debts to pay following my trip to Australia to help my friend there and several big (non hive) projects too. I would need 3 or 4 of me to be able to find more time to do other things in a useful way that doesn't result in mental breakdown. lol. So basically, I have limited time to do anything at all unpaid - I haven't even done the vacuum cleaning. ;)
Maybe your message is being miss construied then. It feels like u are attacking the base layer of hive. U? (and several others) are posting on blurt and the message I’m getting back is that I are there because u are being censored on hive. To be clear, U are not being censored on hive. I may agree that U are being censored on peakd and hive blog and any other platform that only uses the hive upvote balance on content to drive their trending feed. But the over all message here is that ppl are leaving due to censorship and rewards disagreements. The latter, yes, but the former needs to be taken up with the front ends, not hive IMO. alternatively keep building new tools like we are to solve these issues
That's not me, I've never even logged in to Blurt.
Threespeak doesn’t do trending this way. Ura is never censored on threespeak trending front end. When we release our blogging front end we will just give the option to select which type of trending you like
yup
This is certainly the case with many in this list.
what would solve it would be "anon" dvs + a counter that doesn't dilute the counterer at the very least, maybe incentivize negative curation as its arguable just as important as positive curation. anon dvs would require some sort of zero knowledge proofs which could be pretty costly to have developed. not impossible tho.
kindly vote me one time plz
ya i totally forgot about your idea, i have to theory this more. but in essence, you're right. My idea was to at least remove the penalty for reversing a "bad" dv. if it cost money to be good, good luck having people be good. But the idea of incentivizing is pretty wild at first thought, but I don't hate it, It could actually work but cant say for sure yet. gnna jote this in Grammarly so i don't forget.
btw why did ur acct get nuked? has to be a story there