I thought the consensus was clear and there wouldn't be a need for this any more, but here we go again.
The Hive Discord has been buzzing lately, with a bunch of radio shows, podcasts, or whatever to call them. There have been plenty of more or less fruitful discussions, and everything has been very positive and innocent. Until things took a turn when the topic of vote buying schemes came up.
As this topic tends to do, it split people into two camps. Basically, those who use these services themselves, and the rest who feels like that's cheating.
The discussion started with HSBI. While that project has been getting a free pass since forever because they made the scheme spread over the whole userbase and downvoting them would probably result in the biggest voting war ever seen in human history, fronts were clear right away. That led @acidyo to do some digging, and he uncovered more current schemes that never received much attention before.
Today some pieces were put together, and with this one I am fully ready to dust off some old scripts and get back to utilizing @curangel downvote power. But we also learned that we should talk about things, so let's try that first.
These are the transactions buying the votes, using CCD on Hive Engine:
https://he.dtools.dev/@ccceo.voter?symbol=CCD
This is the voting account:
https://peakd.com/@cryptocompany/activities
I don't know what cryptocompany does. I don't know if CCD has other use cases, and what its market looks like. And I don't care.
While I would like to inform all users of the scheme that they should stop using it, that's too much work. Thus I call to @cryptocompany to cease these activities. If not there will be targeted countervotes soon (which will include an explanatory comment).
And anyone else running or participating in a similar scheme, this is your warning too. There is no guarantee a vote will pay out author or curation rewards. If you engage in vote trading, don't expect it to work out forever.
Thanks to @acidyo for investigating the issue. This shows how important it is for the community to stay watchful, to prevent centralization and exploitation of our common rewards pool and promote impactful curation that serves Hive as a whole.
This is incorrect.
HSBI spread because of the 'little people' who were minding our own business and writing posts that no one wanted to read except others in the same small group, who never got any respect for all it did for the chain(s) old and new.
It spread because we didn't mean anything to the whales. We didn't cause a threat and still don't. We also never got any votes. The group was not run by someone with backing from a whale, so it didn't count. There was no secret society wanting to take over the blockchain........ Maybe one person wanted to, but that is not my story to tell.
HSBI is what it is today because a small group of crappy Nonwriters (per day of old standards) took our profits from our one-cent votes and bought other HSBI in hopes that it would give people an incentive to stay and keep writing.
And for a lot it did.
It is a GREAT incentive program to HELP retention on the Blockchain. It never hurt anyone when it started and still doesn't.
#justmy2cents
Retention being key here, it really isn't about the size of the votes, but the fact that some entity, collective or singular, took the time to vote and gave the user attention. We are social creatures and just that little bit of attention got them a little more attention and still does. Which almost directly influences the retention. Well said sis. !PIMP !DUO
The problem is the people complaining about HSBI never got a post(s) that was not seen or never got a vote.
They were great posts. They were great people. A lot of those people are still here today because of those of us that gave out HSBI so those people's posts at least showed someone cared.
Do you have any idea what time it is?
Whelp, I will tell you! It's "I should still be sleeping!" time!!
Anyway. Yes. RETENTION is the key and has always been the key.
and there is more words to write here but Do you have any idea what time it is?
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
You just got DUO from @enginewitty.
They have 1/1 DUO calls left.
Learn all about DUO here.
One thing I feel we need in all of this is more talking before DVing begins. Losing FC from Hive is a shame. I realize it wasn't anyone's intention to bully him off, but that was the end result. He had some issues that caused him to take things too personally, react too quickly, and want to run away from it all. I don't blame anyone who not knowing about that, but I do feel it could have been avoided by more peaceful discussion with him in Discord. Moving on, I hope we can keep this episode in mind and try to discuss things before firing a shot. Diplomacy is usually harder: it's slower and both sides have to compromise to some degree, which steps on everyones' ego, but the results are usually much more productive than fighting.
I was going to type something, then I read what you said.
Can't say it any better.
The largest of these account for about $7/day in author rewards. I am not a fan of them, and I agree it goes against our stance since we got rid of bid bots, but hardly our biggest problem. Not even sure it is a blip on the radar.
now he is, but he hoped for a different end result going through his older posts.Completely agree. On my list, retention is a big one. Especially users like @freecompliments that were building and staking and weren't just offloading all the HIVE. Well,
There are all sorts of schemes going on and it can debatable if they count as abuse. If someone is trying to promote their project then they may want to give out some votes to supporters. Big projects have done that for years. We should not penalise smaller ones or their redfish fans without good reason. We have enough issues with people leaving and have to find the right balance.
I've seen this one posting Snaps that did not tell me much about what they do. I can't keep up with everything around here. People need to talk to each other to work it out without fighting.
I don't know how you get to this from the post, which project are you talking about?
I'm talking generally, but looking again I can see you are talking about direct payments to get a vote and that is not on. We went through all that years ago and it was not great.
I have seen some projects, including games, complain that they got attacked and that can discourage people from building on Hive. There are no definitive rules on what is acceptable, but buying votes is generally frowned upon.
In every case, in all situations where financialization occurs, it degrades society. Autovotes, bidbots, curation rewards, circle jerks, botnets of socks concealing self voting, there are innumerable mechanisms to enable profiteering at the expense of actual society. Either Hive will be a social media platform, or it will eventually be subsumed by AI for the purposes of financial aggrandizement, and even that we can only hope will be undertaken by actual people. You here focus on 2nd layer mechanisms, but there is at least one actual bidbot on 1st layer Hive, at least last I checked.
We increasingly face the destruction of society, which is comprised of people alone, beneath a tidal wave of automation. Automation is great. Automate vacuuming carpets, fixing cars, writing code, etc. That's awesome and gives people more wealth and time to socialize. Automate socialization and rapidly deprecate people to AI, which will degrade the conditions in which we live. I have been sounding this alarm for years, long before the advent of ChatGPT and even before bidbots arose on Steem. The more this tech advances, the greater certainty grows that I have been right about automating social interactions all along.
Using tools to manually interact is ok. Increasingly marginally, but it is actual human interaction, even if through an increasing number of barriers that make it less and less palpably human experiences and less distinguishable from masturbatory interactions with objects like machines. Automate such interactions, through bidbots, autovoting, circle jerking and etc, and actually simply masturbate with machines. Thereby comes eventually only grief and destruction for humanity, and the rise of AI only makes this more apparent as time goes on. As always, the lure of a quick buck 'only this once' or 'I can quit whenever I want' presages destruction.
Either find a way to enable governance of Hive and our interactions on the platform to be focused ONLY on actual people and exclude our tools from replacing us, or we will be replaced here. Hive is a leading edge of this potential replacement of people with bots, and what I am observing does not promise a better and more humane world to come from this technology. I see numerous routes to elimination of actual human interactions and their replacement with AI oncoming and in progress on Hive today. When it comes to social interaction, the short fact is use it or lose it. Hive is losing it.
Thanks!
Agree.
Amen.
Abolishing downvotes will surely fix everything
;) 🍿
Taxation is theft.
Bid bots will always disappear and reappear, revamped, with new faces, and new narratives that make it seem like they are not bid bots. When they are.
The stronger the narrative, the larger the legion of fans will be when it comes to taking down the project, after all, who would be against an initiative that only wants to 'help the little ones against the evil whales'.
Some may even accuse me of being a 'captain of the woods' (for those who are not very familiar with the subject, it was the black man who had privileges and obeyed the white man to capture or deliver rebellious slaves). Which I would easily refute by showing the few rewards I have earned for years, even after almost 8 years at Hive.
However, this bid bot practice has always been contained, hunted down and eliminated. After all, it makes no sense for a content appreciation platform to have paid content to receive. Or does it?
Since we are in a decentralized community, at some point the bid bot could and I believe was 'allowed', not legally, but there was a blind eye to certain projects, until it was noticed that ANY content was being voted on.
If my memory serves me right, Helios and UpMe started by burning tokens from their communities in exchange for votes, but the vote was not guaranteed (which in part did not classify them as bid bots), but over time they voted on any content in exchange for the burning of tokens, keeping some users increasing their rewards and especially the project holders, who were the largest holders of the tokens that would be bought to be burned.
Projects that actually seek a token burn, or an accumulation of tokens, or anything like that, does not mean that they are bid bots, but conditioning these actions by an exchange of votes does make them bid bot projects.
I will give as an example the community in which I am one of the leaders, HiveBR. We curate content that has its text in Portuguese, after all, we want to expand our language within Hive.
Keeping the HBR token from our community defines a maximum that you can earn in terms of % of votes, but it does not mean that you will win the vote. You can be the largest holder of HBR in Hive, having 99% of the tokens. Even so, if your content is not of good quality, one of the curators can vote with 1% of your publication, if he or she decides that it is what your content deserves.
Another user who uses the tag, but does not create content in Portuguese, can receive an incentive vote, as I have done many times, seeing publications in which the content was entirely in English, using the hivebr tag, and I would give a 5% vote (symbolic) and leave a comment asking the person whenever they use the hivebr tag to also include the content in Portuguese, since it was a tag from the Brazilian community.
Anyway, bidbots are a topic that will always be on the table. It was already in 2017 when I arrived. So projects that had bad practices were eliminated and they were left without them for a while, until after a while they came back with a new narrative, but the same practices.
It is important to remain vigilant and avoid bad practices. Congratulations to everyone who is fighting this.
[@PowerPaul:] Thank you for the info. I disabled the final "send order" button and gather my thoughts. No problem. I will use a relaxed Sunday to make something better out of it.
Hive a great Sunday & make the best out of it!
👍
Hi Paul - you remember I was asking you about this some weeks ago if this could not be problematic - i did not tell anyone anything given you told me all is fine even with HW or so. I was a bit careful as you might remember on that offer - but keep on doing the other stuff, seems you are a community guy so good luck!
How about schemes that are less obvious, such as communities receiving benefactor rewards from posters in return for votes such as olio de balena or membership schemes that return upvotes to its members' regardless of post quality, such as SSG.
Do other incentives such as HBD cashback schemes and large votes for using distriator count as buying votes? Or those rewards given for using the product rather than just supporting it.
As for HSBI, is it really that much different than auto voting from a human?
It appears there needs to be distinct definitions drawn up on what is acceptable and then absolute consistency in application without prejudice regardless of the account's size.
Happily, the .concencous is that vote buying is wrong but there are some dubious back scratching schemes going on that fly just below the radar.
I would love to see more action taken against all of them, but my personal power and time are limited. I also had issues in the past being blackmailed with full fledged campaigns to remove my witness votes, so I'm reluctant to act at all.
IMO, distriator is an edge case. @starkerz is trying to boost HBD adoption, so there's at least some genuine intent to spread Hive. It's not scalable long term, so we'll have to see what comes out of it, but I wouldn't spend resources on throwing stones their way as long as it doesn't get too much. Maybe someone should do some math how much is spent and who gets the rewards in the end, but I'm not that guy.
Yes, because you paid them for the votes.
Also, the project is holding several hundred thousand HP as their own by now, and all they had to do for it was set up a voting bot (I know they do more to mitigate the worst abuse, but it essentially boils down to that). The users who paid them do not have this power any more, and the votes will not go to people not involved in the scheme.
There can't be absolute consistency, as everyone's resources are limited and most don't even care. Also the schemes all differ in several aspects and have to be investigated and judged individually, as I laid out with distriator.
I will focus on cryptocompany for now, because that's the most blatant one we've seen so far. How it goes from here depends on the reaction of them, all the other schemes, and what further investigations uncover.
All @balaenoptera’s stake is powered down and given away on a weekly basis to those who participate in the #untobisunto contest. We already had a talk with @hivewatchers as well about this, having the beneficiaries or not doesn’t change voting at all.
And as I said in a post, since there is no profit for anybody in this initiative, I have no problem sending all the stake to @null and shutting the contest down.
Tagging @libertycrypto27 as the other member controlling @balaenoptera’s keys.
@pharesim
All the non Italian speaking users who were/are adding the 3% + beneficiary are getting votes. Nothing to do with contests!
The beneficiary is by default, people can also remove it, like here for example and nothing changes in voting habits.
Maybe try to understand or ask how it works first.
OK. Whatever you say, you're correct.
This is absolutely untrue and verifiable by doing less superficial research than you did and which I showed you in the comment in which I tagged you
There seems to be many utilizing hive curation to artificially inflate token scarcity/burn mechanism at the cost of curation, it also seems like many are aware of what they're doing as their recent activity has shifted somewhat compared to what it was a few days ago before downvotes occurred. Which is good but it'd be better if it was more permanent.
I say this all the time, the only thing of value people have to offer here is curation rewards in regards to 90% of Hive Engine projects.
And so it begins again
:)
Just waiting for that anti-downvote-clan appearing, rallying towards total abolishment of downvoting and blaming everyone who is not in agreement with their idiocy.
:) 🍿
Based on the timing of the votes, I seem to have several dozen accounts that autovote my posts. In my experience at least, auto voters seem to mostly fall into one of three categories:
Those who autovote but check in at least semi-regularly to actually read the post, as evidenced by comments.
Those who “set it and forget it.” Occasionally even an extreme version of this. There’s one still-active account that I get small upvotes from that a few years ago I publicly accused (perhaps unkindly, but not inaccurately) of being a blatant liar and cheat.
The dead. Gone onto their reward, but their stake still votes. I think one of the hard forks made witness votes decay over time, maybe that could be done with autovoting too?
@mahdiyari pls!
I'm planning to do a reset but that won't be coming anytime soon as I'm busy with another project right now. Feedback is welcome as I'm too focused on development and less on chain.
Auto-vote expiration is a great idea. HP/RC Delegation expiration might also be worth implementing.
Why HP/RC Delegation expiration? Just generally curious.
For the same reason witness delegations expire: to ensure active users are the ones engaging with the platform. I could be persuaded delegations are different. I'm just suggesting it as a point to discuss if we're out to prevent moochers and manipulation.
Ye, I got that part.
But some people might have left Hive for good and decided to delegate their stake to a project or something.
And that would be a sound argument. However, it could be addressed with a secondary long-term form of delegation, with a revocation on the timeframe of HP powerdown to prevent abuse. I know, extra dev work for something that may not even need to exist.
Thats a really good idea!
I would say that I am in a 4th bracket.
Votes from me is automated, I follow a project trail to support people within that project. Because, I really don't have any time to upvote and read alot, but I do check-in DAILY and I do read comments and upvote comments manual.
Not sure if it makes a difference xD
@cryptocompany, @ccceo.voter
Omg. Thanks for noticing the typo in the arguably most important part!
One of the good things about doing this in public, is that if there is blackmail, we all get to see it. I am pretty sure we don't agree on all the details, but let's start at the top and work down steady, do a dance, and everybody watch.
This is a social chain, Is it so offensive to suggest we put on some theatre?
I appreciate you! For this post! For being clear, taking time, speaking words.
[@PowerPaul:] Thank you for the info. I will disable the button in the next step and will gather my thoughts. Let me see how I deal with the situation & how i progress with that.
I agree that "buy my token, send it to me and I vote you" is the functional equivalent of a bidbot. If we don't like bidbots, here they are. I think some effort should be taken to research and "name names". I feel like there might be 50 of these such schemes.
I can name names :) it's easy.
Let's make a list! If you do onchain, please tag me, or send me the post somehow within the 24 hour upvote window!
LOL. I can make a list.
You know the problem with a list though. No list is perfect. A list is always based on boundary conditions, and in real world, all boundaries are fuzzy.
No need to upvote, but thank you for the gesture.
"you can't tell me what to do" 🤣
I'm stubborn like that, but I do work in open source. I would support a first draft, can be added too, worked on, by others.
The issue is, I think in the fourth dimension. After the most egregious cases of "buy my token, send it to me and I vote you", we are going to find more and more layers of casually more complex "things going on".
I think: details matter.
I would like to start at the top and work our way through, as a community. Loudly and verbosely. Give all the middling egreegers time to think and change their scripts.
Eventually, we will stop (i hope) because: details matter.
I think communication helps.
If you give people an ability to abuse. I can guarantee you they will abuse it. This is true for all mass projects
This is just true for the entire world regardless of whatever system is running it x)
If you start downvoting people again, people will leave hive.
We barely have any users compares to the good days back on steemit.
Focus on something else like actually getting new users
This isnt it pharesim
We have, according to the latest figures I've seen, a max of 138,000 users and a minimum now down to below 5,000. If it IS the lower number, this is SUICIDE for Hive ... we simply cannot afford to keep running off users with Hive this low in price. We will never rebound and the bear will take us to the altcoin ash heap of history!
Hive and Hive-based games are one of my passions and I play and support almost all hive-based games and so I know CCD tokens because I play on Brobang and have accumulated many CCD tokens as game rewards and also because I love to support games I like.
I also used CCD tokens to receive a vote because I thought it was a service accepted on Hive because the vote is not automatic and also arrived a long time after sending the tokens because the cryptocompany read and viewed the posts before voting on them.
But I agree 100% that upvotes should always be non-guaranteed and non-automatic, so if from your research you saw that all requests were receiving a vote it is only fair that this service be stopped.
I really liked the way you wrote this post explaining why these schemes are not good for Hive
I also really liked cryptocompany's response in your post and in this post because they understood the reasons and immediately stopped the service and are thinking about better alternatives.
I consider this a good example of how a problem can be solved in a nice and positive community:
About HSBI:
This translates to: If you have thousands of HP you can sell votes otherwise not
I think this situation it should be solved like the others
Hive SBI is not selling shares. You curate a target account that you want to support permanently, and it receives Hive SBI upvotes on an ongoing basis. Then you get back your curation rewards, but in the form of votes on your own account. Because it's curation, the APR is approximately the same as just curating from your own account, but there are some advantages in having better control over how much support you're giving. Also, people respond more enthusiastically to "I got you some HSBI" than they do to "I added you to my autovoter." The first they know is permanent, independent of your decisions going forward. The second you could change your mind tomorrow.
And sure, critics will say we could change our minds tomorrow too, but Hive SBI has been running the same way with no change since the origin of Hive (and has been around several years before that on the original chain).
thanks for clarification about the funcioning of Hsbi
I just hope you do a review of accounts that receive permanent voting
Crowdsourced curation is largely effective, and sponsors mostly know it's permanent (there is a partial refund policy, but it's designed to punish abuse).
We also have an abuse-report page in our Discord and we have a vote stream at https://content.hivesbi.com that shows all the Hive SBI voted content and the value of Hive SBI votes so that it's easy for even non-technical users to review our votes and report potential abuse (or decide who deserves even more support).
I totally agree, it's the same. Problem is, HSBI is encouraging users to gift HSBI to others. Because of this, many people hold it who don't even know what it is. They also can't sell their shares to opt out. So there's not really a way to interfere with downvotes without hurting a lot of small completely innocent users.
Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below
Fantastic, your post is earning $125, well deserved ?
The reality is that you and your related have been milking Hive for too long.
Your friend @acidyo and you @pharesim have decided to carry out a cleaning operation on HIVE, fine but are you clean enough for that ? You're annoying the little Hive accounts who use @cryptocompany's service because you can't stand the fact that other people are making money here. An exemple ? Let's see how many HIVE your friend @acidyo withdrawed to this Binance account with his multiple alias:
Common memo 100109215
@acidyo sent 29300 HIVE to bdhivesteem @ocdb sent 3000 HIVE to bdhivesteem @ocd sent 44300 HIVE to bdhivesteem @ocd-witness sent 5600 HIVE to bdhivesteem @strawhat sent 54381.02 HIVE to bdhivesteem (Zingtoken intermediate milker) xchangeout sent 3957.47 HIVE to bdhivesteem (used by @ocd)
This is only one of his multiple external accounts used to withdraw.
And of course all those accounts are circle voting !
Does @hivewatchers agree with this or is he turning a blind eye?
“How do we make Hive a better place” ?
The trouble with downvoting SBI: I have some, but it was sent to me by others, perhaps a spart of a contest on the old chain. I don't even remember. I never bought into the system. I'm sure many, many others are in the same boat. Downvoting people for something they may have never even sought out seems petty at best, and malicious at worst.
I'm not taking a position and regardless of whether your explanation is correct or not: Why don't you talk to @powerpaul or @cryptocompany first?
I'm sure there's a solution and you don't have to publish a blog with these accusations. I don't think it's a great way to deal with others and I have the feeling that this is often the problem on Hive as soon as someone disagrees or is on a different side.
This is not an accusation, I posted proof.
Who cares? Hive value is crashing along with every other crypto markets. No one will use hive at this rate. And if you start your hive whale downvote quest because people decide to use free marjwt forces to buy votes like is their right then no onr will ever use hive
Steem was onky succesful because we had bid bots
Look at hive now without them. No marketcap no p4ice no active users bery boring around here and no one is making as much money as during steem
So what do you do? You circle the wagons and start protecting the diwndeling reward pool to focus on a few dollars of someones own money
Why ecen buy hivepower if someone is gonna just downvote you? Why even vote? Why even use hive? Seems better to just use dlease or tipu and delegate it all and just get liquid hive and send a tip
I havebt sent a real upvote in yeats because of this problem i just send a liquid tip but bareky ever. Hive has been ruined by nit picking by people like you and other whales.
Theres 0 fun here anymore. It will end up like steemit with just third worlders posting food
I care, because I'm holding a lot of Hive, and these schemes work by utilizing the inflation that dilutes my holdings.
I'd rather have only a few people here who care about the community, than thousands of spammers who only want to make a quick profit.
Never heard of CCD, but bidbots was from Steemit time, most of which was scam.
I was saddened when we lost (stopped) the DV power. Never was in favor of that call. I am glad you are reconsidering.
Thankfully there are no downvotes needed in this case.
yes, looks like they have shut down the 'service'.
Okay, mi froggie stand down, and simply posting awareness of reading this post. Thank you for sharing, and looking for and hoping for the best outcome and resolution.
[@PowerPaul:] I already posted a statement in the CryptoCompany Discord; channel "smaller news". A posting on the blog for sure will follow. Don't worry about the content of this posting above. I will create something better for the CryptoCompany community/Hive. We can be happy & look forward to it! Let's be clear: I wouldn't be PowerPaul if I wouldn't act like this or would other bring me, CryptoCompany or our community down. Plus for sure that's not the intention of anybody. For sure @pharesim and @acidyo do the best what we can imagine for our lovely blockchain too - so we all can be happy about to do/act in the best way.
Hive a great day & start into the new week! Look forward to!
Yes. Thank you very much for your time and message. !BBH
you, I prefer to say![@PowerPaul:] Noooo... I just do my "job"... All the thanks belong to
Yes, thanks mi. !LOLZ !PIZZA !BBH
lolztoken.com
When I see food I eat it.
Credit: happyme
$LOLZ on behalf of pepetoken
(6/10)
Farm LOLZ tokens when you Delegate Hive or Hive Tokens.
Click to delegate: 10 - 20 - 50 - 100 HP@cryptocompany, I sent you an
$PIZZA slices delivered:
(2/5) @pepetoken tipped @cryptocompany
Moon is coming
That's a lot to take in
I thought, that was a April fool post :)
It's reasonable
Read it all! Circle jerks is right there, defending!
I would adopt a preventive negative vote. The consensus is clear and known by all.
No less a person than Azircon has noted we are down around 5,000 active users -- are you SURE you want to disturb anything that keeps users interested in posting with Hive around 20 cents? How many more people can we afford to discourage for doing what on a decentralized chain should not be policed?
No less a person than Acidyo has noted that the reason little creators can't be seen is because Haejin, Rancho Relaxo, and Trafalgar basically vote who they want onto the trending page and thus soak up most of the reward pool -- but they can't be confronted or touched. So, instead, Acidyo is finding little groups to punch down on because he doesn't feel he can punch UP ... there's a term for that, and I'll leave to everyone's imagination to fill in the blanks.
I do not know much about CCD ... but I know it doesn't come close to accounting for the problems on Hive any more than Free Compliments does. We know from Dalz's data of July 2024 that if we are EVER going to deal with the inflation and selling of Hive, we have to address how much HBD Stabilizer and the DHF are blowing out the door DAILY. Even considered collectively, little content creators just can't do that kind of damage -- and WE ARE DOWN TO ONLY 5,000 ACTIVE USERS if Azircon and others are to be believed. The Hive Five numbers are 138K -- but what is that compared to the billions on Web 2 that we are trying to get over here? We are hardly competitive! We desperately need people to tell GOOD STORIES about the chain! Do we need ANYONE ELSE going out there talking about how mean-spirited we are here, not even accounting for the fact that no one has told anyone that they can't do certain things before they build something that has people willing to stay here?
That's bullshit. Bidbots have been a problem in the past, and if we don't take care all that's left at one point will be vote buying and exchanging.
We don't need users for users sake. If they're only here to extract as much value as possible, there's no benefit for Hive in having them.
We don't get new users by telling "stories", we would need simpler interfaces and better content discovery for these "billions" to even consider looking at Hive.
There's also no value in having ZERO users, and no one having any reason to buy Hive and push the price back up. he lowest number I've seen for us is 4,779 users. Now, what number of that do you think is expendable with Hive only twice as high as its all time low? That's not what we call a story for altcoin success! If you want to protect your investment, you might want to think about the number of coins not Bitcoin on the altcoin ash heap of history, and understand: that gravity is strong! I don't know enough about bidbots and their history because I ignored that on Steem in the year I was there before coming to Hive, but as a wider crypto investor, I can tell you: this is not a good moment to do anything to push users out at a time at which they will by no means be replaced.
As a former professional journalist, I will simply inform you that if we are struggling with "content discovery," then we are struggling to have our own stories heard -- good content is also part the story of Hive we want out there. I will also mention: if we only have 4,779 content creators, and we are struggling in content discovery, there is not a long way to go before we are perfectly invisible. There is a reason many organizations that survive and thrive are masters of telling their own stories in a comprehensive way to the world, and there is a reason many organizations that cannot master that one skill fail entirely, even though they might have genius in every other way. We are not far from that point.
What reason do people who buy a 2nd layer token to receive votes on Hive have to buy Hive?
And where am I pushing users out? The bot was shut down, nobody got hurt.
Again, I'm not necessarily talking about the bidbot itself. I'm talking about the collection of initiatives and pushes on Hive to find ways to terrify people who were never told they are doing anything wrong up front, and then have to face waves of DVs that they do not understand. You wrote your post to be scary to folks -- that one person paused his, but you scared plenty more people who are not going to feel they can help themselves in any way without being targeted. You published that big list of names of Hive users that are not going to understand why they are on blast -- and this is crypto, in which anonymity and privacy and being able to live under central control of what you can do with your resources is very important. If we are trying to communicate that Hive is decentralized, free, and safe, every threat of punitive action involving people who are suddenly all on blast with threats of future witch hunting and downvoting reads just like I said it. That's what Hive starts to look like. Everyone isn't going to wait for you to explain -- they are going to RUN.
4,779 users left -- MAYBE. Between folks barely clearing the signup hurdles, not knowing the rules when they come in and falling afoul of Hivewatchers, having Krampus the child-beating demon being made a measure to judge them ... that's Azircon's choice of name for his ratio ... not knowing about the history of bidbots and so being judged by a standard they have no way of even knowing exists ... that sounds like it is not worth the effort.
Meanwhile, you and Acidyo have open wallets too. I've looked in them and found that you both are sending enough Hive to exchanges so that if you backed off by just ten percent, you would have time to take a gentler approach to little accounts who don't account for that much Hive going out the door. Now immediately you will explain that you and he have things to do with all that powering down and exchanging... but I'm a business person. I already know that. But no one without such a background is going to know or care: they will know you are going after them for pennies while clearing thousands of dollars. The story is that the rich on Hive are running a circle jerk that also abuses the little people, and that's the story people who leave are telling, too. Just read all of your comments ... you'll see it. Understand that the narrative on Hive in the world is being affected quite a bit by this perception. So even IF we had 4,779 users telling good stories in the world about Hive, that would already be what we have to work against.
And, no matter what we do, altcoins lose 90 percent of their value in the bear times on average ... so,if there are not an influx of people we can get interested and excited and feeling safe on Hive this year, there will be no way to get them in 2026 when people will be running out of the crypto market as a whole, and when every bad story will be amplified. But let me make this easy: what is your entire whale stack worth, at ten percent of its present value? That's where we're going if we don't get a better narrative out there and sustain it, SOON.
Upvoted for the final paragraph.
likely next month, that will deliver another crippling blow to the ecosystem. Do you want another Bitshares collapse 2.0?@nathen007 He is saying, we can make money after ValuePlan gets funding by shorting hive xD
If the price of Hive continues to fall, the next 250k hbd will be more valuable than the Hive in circulation!
Hope you're well and best to you, fella :-)
I nearly had a heart attack when you said that and I did the math ... my word, you are just about right!
Thank you for that. Now my OCD has kicked in and I will have to go away to find out how low the price would need to go before 250,000HBD reached parity with the current Hive supply. It could be a long night!
I hope you're well and having a productive week—and that you aren't relying too much on Chinese-manufactured products!
I am practicing a quiet, peaceful, non-consumerist life ... the tariffs do not hit me personally that much, but they will destroy all around!
Let me save you some sleep ... it is actually not as bad as we thought. I use CoinGecko to figure out coins in general, and this is Hive's page.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/hive
I had thought of Hive at five cents ... ValuePlan would get a bit over ONE-HUNDREDTH of that, which would be plenty bad enough ... but Hive would have to get to deep sub-penny levels to have its supply be worth less than 250,000 HBD, assuming HBD around $1.