Ultimately I agree with most of what you say this post. It's easy to get lazy as an author and simply expect rewards.
I must admit, I did get pretty annoyed when you removed $100 worth of rewards from my post the other day because it was a 'repost'. All I could think about is how hardly anyone saw the original post, while the new one did quite well, value-wise. It got me contemplating how the will of hundreds could be denied by the will of one powerful voter. I had to wait until I cooled off to think rationally about it, which changed my thinking quite a lot.
So here is my opinion on the matter. Over the years I have seen all kinds of moral reasonings meant to rationalize one philosophy or another on what constitutes a down-votable offense on Hive. (Or what deserves an up-vote for that matter!) No one really agrees 100% on anything of course, but there does seem to be a loose consensus amongst the majority of large stake holders.
And therein lies the heart of the matter. Hive is not, or cannot be a democracy in the traditional sense where one person gets one vote. (Let's ignore the US for now with its electoral college). I am sure that it would destroy the whole project if we ever tried to do that.
Once we understand this, then all of the moral contortions can be swiftly thrown out of the window. There doesn't need to be any explanation, because by controlling a large enough stake one automatically becomes the arbiter of morality in this nation.
This are only two things that really need to be understood about Hive rewards by the average user:
Your only guaranteed returns on Hive are those of your Hive Power APR
2 - Post rewards can be nullified at any time without justification by a large enough stakeholder - no moral explanations required.
I know this may seem cynical, but it really isn't meant to be. In fact, I am actually glad that my post got wiped to zero! If I had not felt the sting, I wouldn't have fully integrated these insights.
So if one wants to be prosperous on Hive, the most important things to understand are the collective values of the largest stakeholders. Luckily these don't change too much, too often.
This isn't really true, if others find it wrong there are definitely consequences or repercussions of the person doing the downvoting unless the only thing they do is downvote and having nothing "to lose". There are very few of those around and I hardly doubt active, if you don't count the usual drama ones that attempt to retaliate on something they feel has been wronged upon them.
For instance rather than just countering the post with a larger upvote than the downvote cast, they could in turn figure out that maybe it was me who downvoted it (I did but it wasn't me who found the post and reported it) and attempt to hurt me in other ways, many do, for instance if you were one of the irrational ones you would've downvoted this post, removed our witness vote or found other ways to attempt to "retaliate". If others were to agree that it was overdone or foul they'd join in if you'd post about the "wrongdoing" which many often do. As I said in the post there's not much drama happening on chain lately, which is nice but my point is if something were to happen then attention is drawn to it rather quick.
On top of it all it's often quite simple to figure out the reason to certain downvotes even if a reason has not been given. For instance when I noticed newsflash downvoting a lot it didn't take me long to notice that his recent posts had been downvoted by a couple whales so now he was retaliating on autodownvoting anything they voted on. The immutable history of the chain makes it easy to distinguish the reason often times compared to say Reddit where everything is hidden behind centralized databases and you never know who or why got you downvoted.
You are right, though, that these "social consensus'" as I like to call them don't change often and are most of the time pretty obvious when it comes to certain things that are deemed frowned upon. It's true that it's not something everyone will get instantly because our reward mechanism is so much different from the rest but longterm I'm sure most people will get used to what "isn't allowed" and why.
I doubt youtube would care if a popular youtuber reposted content and earned adrevenue on it but it's not like youtube is rewarding him with google shares which not only inflate but could go up or down in value.
No way dude. You are a good guy from what I can tell, and do a lot to contribute to Hive.
One of these days I'll build something useful to give back to Hive. I just have to figure out what that is!
Yeah I didn't expect you to, but those who usually abuse on purpose only care about the rewards so they go full rage mode lol. Rewards and downvotes on hive should be written about and taught in psychology classes how they affect some people.
This is also something that gives hive more perceived value, btw, though I understand your rational between "it didn't earn much back then, so what's the harm" I hope you understand that others will take that and attempt to maximize the mindset which bending the "rules" a bit can cause a spiral long term. The value here is that you can't just earn easy rewards and you shouldn't, over time I hope the downvote, especially well used ones become more popular so most posts had a certain up and downvote ratio where you'd really need to be an excellent curator, possibly even manual rather than auto to get to enjoy max curation returns compared to the rest because what you vote on receives the least amount of downvotes. It's one of the ways we can scale but it requires people to not use downvotes for personal vendettas or things other than what they deem that content/author to be worth it.
Easy earned stake easily ends up on the markets.
fair enough
I think this was a huge factor that drove the value of Steem down even during bull runs. Drove me crazy! Well, that and Steemit dumping all the time.
I simply don't downvote at all for this reason. It's just too stressful! I would basically have to quit Hive if I got involved in flagging content. I have probably downvoted fewer than 6 posts in the 5 years I've been here. Maybe if downvoting were anonymous? Of course that would open another can of worms.
One thing about being downvoted, is that it always feels like a personal attack, even if it was done for the good of the whole platform. But that isn't a problem of the downvoter, it's an issue with the receiver entangled in his/her own ego.
Yeah it's definitely a unique feeling you don't get from anywhere else, lol, I guess could be compared to web2 just shutting down your account and removing income streams. As you say once you take a breather and think about it it gets easier to think rationally.
I was being downvoted for a few months by korean stakeholders with 50m SP for downvoting a shitpost on trending once, now Steemit is just full of that so good riddance there but also explains why we gotta stick to the rules so we don't bring back bid bots, votetrading and other things that give people "easy rewards".
No matter where you are from, if you work harder and put effort into earning Hive, especially from post rewards, you'll think a bit harder if you want to "just sell it at any price" like many did, incl steemit and bid botters back in the day.