There were supposed to be two unique properties of STEEM/HIVE, and this was to make it both "smart" and "social." They were as follows: (a.) harnessing crowd wisdom and (b.) using that to distribute the token. They called this Proof-of-Brain. And unfortunately, because it's a dPoS system, Proof-of-Brain can never happen. You've been trying to force PoB to work all this time by adding downvotes in hopes that you can make the vision reality. I get it. In theory, it was perfect, but the truth is it doesn't and cannot work. You'd have to have one account per person, KYC, equal votes, and no automation or trails to make it work, and nobody wants any of that sheite. All of that said, when a small fraction of stakeholders, you and a small handful, when you can null the will of several hundred stakeholders, that's not going to make PoB work. All it does is disenchant people with the platform. I know you are smart, but I have to ask: When will we let this one go and implement something wiser than the failed PoB mechanism?
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I completely agree. The rise of the bidbots merely expanded on autovoting, and the utter corruption of free speech oligarchical stakeholders wield on Hive is it's death knell.
They will rule over ashes one day.
Thanks!
I think bid bots have mostly been out of the picture since they jiggered with the system and taxed the content creators 25% in favor of giving those funds to content curators. That didn't change the fact that people act in self-interested ways, but it did change how they go about it. I'm hoping the oligarchical stakeholders will see that acting like dictators of what is acceptable is unacceptable in an age of censorship. The best I can do is appeal to their logic, like with the last comment and hope they see why it doesn't work.
Thanks, valued-customer!
They just moved to dlease.
I didn't name it "proof of brain" and the person who did is long gone, after doing a lot of damage before he left.
It's a nice idea, but the reality is that it is a stake-powered reward system. Stakeholders pay the rewards (through inflation), and if you want rewards you need to post things that a consensus of stakeholders (not just individual ones) want to reward.
It's not perfect, but it's what we have, and, perhaps with tweaks but certainly not KYC, is about the best you can do at the base level with a native permissionless blockchain platform.
Second layer tribes, etc. can do things a different way if they like, so there are other ways to socially earn rewards.
Yeah, I don't know who named it, but I think you spoke up in favor of the downvote regularization and had the final word on the GUI change that implemented it. And that was based on how you interpreted either the white or blue paper. Now, if the downvotes somehow magically helped to tap into crowd wisdom, I could see a point to it, but they don't. Anyhow, when one realizes that Proof-of-Brain isn't smart at all, the downvotes, outside of a limited spectrum of use cases, cause more harm to author morale and the platform than they do help. And This is especially the case when one to three actors can null the will of hundreds of stakeholders. It applies whether they are on a voting trail or not because if they are on a voting trail, it's an intentional act to see that rewards go to specific content. Healthy markets function by consumers supporting things they like. Without crowd wisdom and outside a very narrow band of use cases, flags (or downvotes) are on a par with Molotov cocktails getting thrown through plate glass windows. Nothing good comes from it unless you subscribe to the broken window fallacy.
Addendum:
Interesting moments in Steem's history: The GUI was changed to reflect the idea that the whitepaper explicitly condoned downvotes when @smooth said: "Reducing subjectively excessive payouts is a valid reason for downvoting/flagging" However, when the whitepaper speaks to negative voting, it only says that it is possible, it does not say that it is "VALID." Much like in real life: I can kill a man, I can steal his lunch, I can burn his business down to the ground. The law of the concrete jungle allows for all of these things, but it doesn't mean that one should do them. This post is a prime example, it has the goodwill of 388 stakeholders behind it, and all it took was for your will to censor its rewards. Is this the HIVE that you want? Where the guy with the most stake can say: NO REWARDS FOR YOU!
^That can't possibly be the desired atmosphere you want, can it?
Not especially, but I might have referenced it. Most of what I say is based on my own thought process. If I didn't think the white paper made sense I would say so, and have.
Oh it works the same way for upvotes and nobody (mostly) complains. Hundreds of stakeholdres might see something and decide it is crap, and then one or two whales decide to upvote it. In MOST cases being discussed, the bulk of the rewards being offset by downvotes come from a small number of large upvotes too. It's a stake weighted system, both on the upside and downside. The people with the investment (and getting inflated) get to decide where the rewards go and don't go, according to the size of their investment (and cost of being inflated).
One more thing. If smaller stakeholders wanted to have more influence, one way to do that is to start downvoting more. When you don't use your downvotes, you are taking 20% of your influence over where rewards go and throwing it in the trash. The main reason there are only a small number of downvotes in most cases is because they don't.
And what do we do if we want to downvote a large stakeholder (or delegated account) but fear retribution where they start downvoting all our posts to hell just for thinking of downvoting them? I'm not saying you or acid would do that but I can think of 2 or 3 people, probably the ones I'd be more likely to downvote....
That only happens because of too few downvotes. If there are 50 people or 500 people downvoting, they're not going to retaliate against all of them.
Alternately, smaller stakeholders can stick with downvoting smaller stakeholders (when appropriate). Leave it to the larger stakeholders to downvote the other larger stakeholders. But at least by downvoting something you are maximizing your influence instead of throwing away 20% of it.
This isn't that sort of market. You're getting influence over inflation that doesn't come from your own stake, it comes from all stake. You're not a "consumer", you're a participant in shared decision making.
For this to make economic sense it has to also benefit all stake. If the other stakeholders don't agree that what is being paid out benefits them, you can't have unilateral decision making over that shared resource.
You CAN certainly support what you want as a consumer with your own money. That works just like any market and can't be downvoted.
It says more than possible. It also explains why it is needed: For significant cases where rewards do not add (enough) value, while also noting that not every single little instance needs to be stopped (which I agree with).
Also, it kind of matters that the original system had superlinear rewards. You needed to get a LOT of stake voting in order to get significant rewards. A small amount of staking trying to vote where others don't agree would accomplish nothing (tiny or no payout). That had good and bad elements. When we eliminated, downvoting became more important, not less, because individual upvotes were then able to pay out significantly without any sort of stake consensus.
Right. I think you are speaking to consensus-of-stake. The problem with that is there's no merit, nor rhyme, or reason behind it. There is no wisdom behind it, not when one can null the will of the many. When you abuse the downvote function as you did on this post, all your doing is battling other stakeholders for no good reason. It's a major turn-off for any would-be investors, and it's damn near impossible to rewire people to think that it's well and good. Those kinds of mind tricks only work on the weak-minded. Additionally, the optics from a PR standpoint are terrible. When you have chain dictators who police content why bother opting in when Twatter, Fakespace, and Bootube can give you the same unbellyfeel that you get here. Hell, when fakespace gets their Diem rolled out, what'll be the difference? You can get demonetized over there for your opinions or demonetized here. And over there, there might be a bigger audience.
Fakespace with Diem won't reward you for posting, at least not to anywhere near the degree that happens here. That's the difference. You want stakeholders to pay you, stakeholders are going to decide if and when doing so is useful to stakeholders, both large and small ones, but mostly (for BOTH up and down votes) large.
No one is policing content either. It's rewards. Post whatever you like, as long as it isn't child porn or whatever where the UIs block it. If you get no rewards, then you don't. You still get to post.
Before the downvotes, the only legit reason for flagging was spam, scams, plagiarism, and improperly labeled NSFW or the type of illegal content you mentioned above. That's until you made your proposal in the previously mentioned GitHub issue #215. That brought us to the shit show we have now, where we have a minority of stakeholders who dictate reward censorship on legit content like this post. I'd encourage you to watch the 'Community' episode called 'App Development and Condiments' S05E08. The 'Black Mirror' episode 'Nosedive' S03E01, and 'The Orville' episode 'Majority Rule' S01E07. These will give you an idea about the kind of dystopic hellscape we have here at HIVE because of this willy-nilly opinion-oriented downvoting. Sure it's all fine and dandy for you now, but you may not always be one of the major stakeholders on the block. You're one of the ones setting the standard. And the stakeholders who demonetize politically oriented content because they disagree, that's the same as all the other social media companies. Any interested money power in the age of hyperinflation can buy enough controlling stake in HIVE and run it right off a cliff without the aid of the exchanges. And if that happens, they'll have no obligation to list us in another split. Anyways, if HIVE is going to be a bastion of free speech, censoring rewards on posts that demonstrate the user writing them has a brain is not the way to go.
No, that's not right. The downvotes were always about rewards. The "flag" thing and listed types of abuse thing was added in the UI by the former owner of the web site, with no community discussion and frankly no useful thought process. The actual inventor of the blockchain was against it.
My 'proposal' was to revert that insane idea, it wasn't anything new. It certainly didn't "bring us" to anything, because these issues were always there, and motivated the entire debate even back then.
Nobody is "demonetizing" you in the same sense as centralized platforms. That is ad revenue, which you are free to continue to accept (by putting ads in your posts), and sure enough the blockchain gives you an open permissionless way to receive that revenue which no one is going to block. If you want to be paid by stakeholder inflation, that's something ELSE, which doesn't exist on centralized platforms, and stakeholders necessarily are going to be "voting on paying it", not just "paying it by voting".
In case you don't believe me, you can go look here at the site in 2016. Downvote button right there. Only later was the dumb "flag abuse" idea pushed out.
I think here you are leaving the space where you are objectively trying to achieve something that cannot be objectified. The vocal criticism of those who complain about downvotes is a value that can be called the value of "conflict in existence".
If you were a cool rational being here, you could probably readily agree that the presence of conflict makes a great value contribution in the social space of communication. I usually compartmentalise my subjective judgement of what I consider not worthy of approval in such postings (complaining, bruised egos etc.). I can abstain from any vote, but simply comment.
But I see the overriding potential of such postings precisely in the fact that, as a rule, the engagement of the comments that then start are quite passable: To see conflicting views being debated with each other. This form of engagement can hardly be found anywhere else. I think that can be readily admitted.
Now, one can say pejoratively that no one needs such a thing when it comes to advancing the cause and would probably meet with approval, but just not totally. Those who open the barrel and criticise loudly may not be totally right, but they are not totally wrong either. On another level, however, I would argue that the obviousness of conflict in the public sphere deserves as much of a presence as the obviousness of non-conflict, triviality and superficiality.
I would find it a nice surprise to see such gouged by the usual downvoters, just as it would be surprising to see the usual upvoters criticise it.
However, as long as one pretends that there are two firm fronts and neither individual is willing to admit that he is nevertheless on both fronts, the demand for proof of the other's probity is rather hypocritical insofar as one's own probity cannot be clearly proven. Since neither can be proven nor not proven, the impulses to try to do so nevertheless have a rather paradoxical character. My interpretation of "What is of value?" would consider the naming of this paradox as valuable.
I didn't entirely understand that, but I do agree that in cold rational terms, conflict can have value to social media. Many people would consider that a problem, but it is what it is.
Thank you, I find this is a great insight. Conflict has in my eyes potential in many directions. It can be used for hardening the fronts, it can be used to communicate on a different level, it can be seen as an asset, very particular for us humans.
Maybe you remember a quote from Starwars where Darth Vader denies the very fact of having a conflict.
While it's obvious, that there is, for us viewers :)
I don't remember that line. I'll watch for it if I see the film again,