and the thousands of upvotes a week I no longer give when I stopped voting on authors
This is one of the detrimental effects of DV wars that saddens me the most. Because DVs cost the DV'er nothing, yet they cost good-faith curators, sometimes considerably, it drives good-faith curators away from certain accounts, authors, topics, or away from manual curation altogether, as in your case.
Hive was a much better place when you felt free to distribute your upvotes in what you saw as a meaningful way. The value of Hive has diminished as a result of this conflict between you and newsflash, then xeldal. I'm not talking about market cap value. I am talking about the informative-content and decentralized-governance value (via manual curation) that you personally used to willingly provide to the chain (which, quite honestly, was in no way 'worth your time' in monetary terms).
Prior to this DV war, you were consistently adding value to the chain. I have no doubt that you could have been making more (in monetary terms) by just focusing on coding and projects, rather than writing and curating. That's why this is so sad and frustrating to me. Even when you were reaping author and curator rewards, you were 'losing' money, in terms of opportunity costs. But you were willing to do it and the entire chain was better off because of that. With you walking away, your continued efforts at growing the pie are being taken away from all of us.
This is by design. Rewards are supposed to go according to stakeholder consensus. If there is disagreement, then rewards go somewhere else. In cases where the disagreement is consistent, it's a waste of your vote power to continue voting there, because it isn't going to be part of a consensus and get paid. You need to vote elsewhere if you don't want to lose out.
If people could just send rewards unilaterally, without regard to consensus or disagreement, it would just be tipping (which people can also do, without concern over downvotes).
Thanks for the engagement. I truly appreciate it!
Yes, I am all for systems that facilitate consensus and that are at their core community-driven. With that said, when a single whale account can repeatedly nuke posts to zero, just because they personally disagree with the content or dislike the author or with one or more of the curators, it is not 'consensus'; it is merely the weaponization of stake. If the community genuinely prefers a Hobbesian state of nature for the blockchain, then so be it. (And if such is the case and if it becomes clear to me that such is the case, then I will likely do as marky and 'walk away' from day-to-day involvement.)
However, if one prefers a Lockean state of nature, as do I, then some changes are warranted.
As a relative newcomer to Hive (I've been here for a little over two years), I see the ease with which DVs can currently be weaponized as a serious drawback to the future growth and health of the ecosystem.
Greater transparency can and will improve the situation, without the need for any protocol changes, and I am actively working with some well-respected members of this community to accomplish those ends. However, we should also seriously consider potential protocol changes. I will be presenting some ideas in that regard, and hopefully something meaningful will come from the ensuing dialogue.
I get the fact that adequate tools are needed to combat spam and fraud and the like. I also appreciate (and agree with) the importance of consensus with respect to reward pool distribution. My thoughts and concerns (regarding the current system) are threefold:
First, I genuinely fear that the ease with which DVs can be weaponized can and will blow up in our faces if and when Hive gains some of the widespread recognition it deserves.
Second, if under the current anti-abuse system we are unable to maintain the active participation of valuable longstanding contributors, like marky, that should be a wakeup call, imho. (Even if marky is okay with 'walking away', I am not okay with that. Not when I believe we can do better. Not when I believe we can achieve a both/and rather than either/or solution, if we put our minds to it.)
Third, although I am convinced that 'free DVs' have their place and likely 'saved the day' when malicious actions by a few were threatening the continued viability (and thus the very existence) of the blockchain, it is an extremely blunt instrument as currently configured. In light of my first two concerns, I refuse to simply shrug my shoulders and move on. I have been and will remain diligent to explore new ideas, to dialogue and brainstorm with any who care to join me. I have no doubt we can hone the tools at our disposal to provide much more precision with much less collateral damage.
We'll have to agree to disagree. A single whale CAN nuke SOME posts. But they have to prioritize which posts, and that's consensus. The ones they're nuking do not have consensus. The others that necessarily survive with successful payouts are consensus.
Nothing is going to blow up in our face if Hive gains widespread adoption because there will be too many posts and too much engagement for any peculiar preferences of an individual to make a difference. We pay a lot of attention to it now because the whole thing is small so every controversial outcome becomes a big deal.
On every platform on the internet, ever, there a variety of bad outcomes, but they're usually small and not at such a systemic level that it destroys the platform. People's accounts get hacked, get locked for mistaken reasons (and sometimes never unlocked, etc.). There is also blatant copyright infringement (someone posted an entire Disney movie on Twitter in HD the other day and it stayed there for a few days before being removed), impersonation, aggressive disinformation campaigns, etc. Perfection isn't achievable. Same here.
Erm... do you mind to paraphrase that a bit, mate? Please, define WTF is "community" consensus under the premise that you are describing.
If someone chooses to downvote something, it gets less rewards. The more stake downvoting it (whether from one person or multiple), the more stake disagreement there is, and the less rewards it gets.
At the same time, OTHER posts which do NOT get downvotes (or get relatively little stake downvoting, even if some), get more rewards. Those are the ones where the community has broadly agreed to direct rewards.
You can think of a downvote as a sort of veto on payouts. Anyone (or multiple people) can stand up and object, essentially veto that payout, though strength of that veto depends on stake.
Ok, I suppose your premise might be a bit better understood now. But what I find very very weird and highly misleading is the fact that you would have used the word "consensus" in all that malarkey about the downvotes. Since clearly there's not any consensus at all when through an arbitrary downvote you end up snatching and sweeping with the rewards of the authors and all the curators of a post.
The consensus is all the stuff that doesn't get downvoted (or is downvoted less).
Someone can arbitrarily downvote a few things, but they have to choose what to downvote. No one has enough downvotes to blanket everything, or even most (maybe more like 1% in extreme cases).
Consensus can also counter those downvotes if they so chose to. In the end, the votes are a community effort. The real problem is most people won't be bothered to, or even care.
That's just going to be human nature at work and a you problem not a me problem issue. You also have the fact a third party won't fully understand what is going on and won't be easy to make an educated decision on which side to support. They will have to further invest time, which many won't want to.