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.
Yes. I have been here, working my balls off full time, that whole time. I know the history well. So well, that I’m contributing to making these types of discussions nullified. I’m tired of hive being classed as a censoring system, when I do not believe it is at all. Some of The front ends censor, I agree, but the solution to that is to get ones head down and build solutions IMO.
Would you consider trying to change your thinking away from anything to do with the reward pool? Chasing it creates toxicity and negativity. Once one isolates themselves from any involvement in the garnering of attention or monetary incentive by being rewarded from the pool, It changes the paradigm in which one sees hive.
Hive is the perfect censorship resistant system. It’s better than anything out there, by far. It’s not completed yet, that’s for sure. There are various things being built (partly by me and other amazing hiveans) to leverage it’s censorship resistant capabilities. The rewards pool will become a relatively insignificant piece of the hive eco system over time. Due to community driven content regulation policies and content gateways as well as income streams that do not rely on the rewards pool. Hopefully the main blogging platforms will evolve their trending systems over time too. If they do not, ppl will build their own systems and the free market will fill the gaps.
I'm not sure what you are referencing beyond Threespeak, was there something else?
Have you read the SPK network light paper?
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