I've been here a while. Not as long as some, but probably longer than the majority of you reading this. It will be 8 years in a few weeks! My, how time does fly. I've seen many changes and forks and knives (in backs even!) and witnessed countless tried, failed and true things emerge and evolve.
Recent events have prompted me to reread the whitepaper for Hive several times over the weekend, trying to earnestly find something to support a few whales and their personal mission to tear down what they feel is called 'vote buying'. Back on Steem, there was a major discrepancy about something called 'bidbots', where a user could purchase a whale sized vote to boost their post payout and visibility. Visibility. We'll get to that in a moment and how communities have played their part as they've grown.
invested a lot of his personal funds into Steem to give it the juice to compete with other bidbots. Which, a few weeks later, the bidbot flag wars started because certain parties felt it was 'cheating'. He has since cashed out of Steem and Hive altogether, entrusting me with his keys to support others that are still here - and he is not the only one that has done this. I retain dozens of keys for people in the hope that someday, they'll want to return.I'm not gonna lie (do I ever?), I owned and helped run a few of them. Two were rather small and community focused as profits went back to our curation account but one, ran by @michaeldavid, was quite a bit bigger. He had
Cheating
That word is poorly used here then and now. There is no cheating on a decentralized Blockchain. What does decentralized mean? Look at the screenshot graphic from hive.io. (Oh, by the way, 'controls' is spelled with one 'L', if you need a proofreader, lemme know, think I need one too π.) No single entity or organization controls Hive.
Is this true? Sure it is. Some have a larger stake, and force their opinions on others, but they do not control it. We all do. If you want to change things or give others less power, unvote their witness, stop delegating to them, downvote them, mute them in your communities, there is a lot that can be done. The question is - do you have the audacity to do it?
After reading the whitepaper, I could not find anywhere, not in the terms of service, mission statement, or any part whatsoever, that states a person cannot buy votes. It's not even been considered as part of any major or minor fork. Why?
It goes against the freedoms that a decentralized structure symbolizes and is built upon. Some people may not agree with it, and those people have iron-fisted others into abandoning various services and community foundations. They have even forced countless people to turn their back on Hive completely.
I don't agree at all, with flagging people into oblivion because they pissed you off. It shows lack of maturity. You know exactly who you are. It would be one thing to be a trusted policing force that merely stripped away the rewards granted by your personally frowned upon 'vote buying', but now, one user is cashing in his chips. In total, that will end up being almost 150,000 HIVE that will be sold. SOLD, Not staked. Why?
Was it the automation of it all?
Was it the acceptance of a technology that made things easier?
Weren't they building and committed to Hive?
Weren't they supporting a thriving community?
They were going to stay here for awhile. But, you know, buying votes is such a huge problem here, we had to nip it in the bud. Honestly, to each their own, I have no right to demand what someone else does with the stake they control, just like you, you, you, you or anyone else has no authority over how I use mine.
USER RETENTION
That is the biggest problem here in my personal opinion. Of the 18 thousand or so accounts #LEO onboarded last year, the combined total of HP powered up in those accounts is less than 67% of that 18k. So instead of curating what is likely a lot of good content being overlooked, let's stay busy and push out people that are truly investing their time and real money into this chain. That is brilliant. Real problems like plagiarism and AI laziness for posts seem more important to me. I'll flag those all day when made aware or see them.
But wait, there's more!
As a community builder myself, I've been ever grateful for the tools that have come to light in the evolution of Hive. Auto votes being one of them. This has freed up tons of time for me to help other new users learn Hive and support the ones that are vetted in our community. Since our vote was small, we've also used various tokens and other community services to help out who we can to improve their (here's that word again) visibility.
Yes, I check to see what we're voting on, @thealliance has always been keen on quality over quantity. And, I do that regularly with another community that I run, the #PIMP district. The major problem we all have is visibility. Unless a person knows a few whales, they're likely not going to make much over 10 HIVE a post and if they aren't part of a community with a decent vote trail or heavily tuned in membership? They probably won't make more than 2 HIVE.
The value of a community and their support via delegations from its members or outside help, is immeasurable. Regardless if they are 'buying votes' or what have you. It gives them the visibility and engagement they are seeking. And the engagement - especially positive interaction - is what keeps them here. Intrinsic value of that can not be quantified, but it can be tarnished and destroyed by vindication.
But, but, but, we only want to vote on QUALITY posts!
Quality
I don't think I've seen @curangel or @ocdb vote on any posts from communities like the #silvergoldstackers in ages. Why? It goes back to the Steem days, a lot of us bought votes. We understand how money works, I mean, c'mon, we own silver and gold and other precious elements outside of cryptocurrency.
So, since none of the bigger curative efforts wanted to vote on our posts, we created a community, delegated to a community account, and we all support each other through it. How exactly is that vote buying? It's not in my opinion, it's called community support.
But you guys don't post quality!
Oh, that's your reason? You have specific guidelines that you follow for a post to be considered quality enough and deserving of a bloated vote. X amount of words, certain tags bla bla bla. To each their own, which is the point I'm trying to make in this entire post.
Quality is very subjective. For instance, it is not likley that @blocktrades will vote on my post, it doesn't have a codex for some kind of new Hive tool, database improvement suggestion or security upgrade. That's what I see him do. For @azircon to vote on my post, it would likely have to smash out a detailed critique on a new Splinterlands game mechanic. For somebody like @silverstackeruk, I would have to catch his silver interest or talk about support for one of his many token exploits.
For most stakkers, a quality silver post only needs certain things. A shot of the metal itself. Various specs like mintage of a bar, weight, purity and variants (i.e. proof state, an antique finish or maybe colorized). Finally, where we got it or can get it. That's it. That's quality to us. That might be 200 words in a post. Just over the limit of a maxed out tweet.
If I were to want a vote from some kind of (not all) photographic community, I would have to use their tag(s). I would also have to post a decent picture I had personally taken, the time and place and finally, the equipment used. I rarely say where or what I used, but still post in them because I love photography and really wish I was better π. But that's quality to them, they don't care about a story behind it, maybe 50 words is it! They're photographers, not writers.
dHiversity (pronounced: DIE-vuhr-si-tee)
Hive is an amazing place because of its diversity. There are so many different types of peoples and niches here. I see more new tribes popping up every week. I saw one the other day about dumpster diving! One person's trash is another person's treasure. One person's trash is another person's treasure.
One more time.
One person's trash is another person's treasure.
Just let that sink in, I'll come back to it shortly. I wanted to ask @pharesim and @acidyo a question since they will likely not show up to the discussion tomorrow. Since you pay people to delegate to your curative efforts (@curangel and @ocdb), even if they (votes) are done manually, you are still using other people's HP and paying them for it. The question then is, how is that any different from buying a vote?
You're effectively renting others' HP to make your vote bigger and more effective, are you not? Isn't this the same as buying a vote? Instead of buying one large vote from a single entity or organization, you're buying a bunch of little votes to bolster your own and build your own stake to support your own communities. This is how you feel community building should be, right?
So then the obvious logic will follow. If communities start paying people to rent their HP and vote on whatever they want, it is ok, correct? Yes, I'm seriously asking the both of you, what makes what you do different than the other communities that have not been here anywhere near as long and are trying to build something, without long-standing delegations, autovotes and connections to big whales? The process may be slightly different, but the equation is the exact same. Services bought, rendered and applied.
Aaaaand Finally
One person's trash is another person's treasure. To each their own. We all have our own opinions and beliefs. It doesn't make mine or yours any less or more valuable. (Except, of course, in terms of a vote. π€£) It sucks that some people have bigger votes and don't agree with others' opinions, but it is what it is.
It's also a beauty here, we can have differing opinions. I've been flagged countless times and have handed out probably ten times as many as I've gotten. I'm even on a downvote trail to an entrusted watcher of garbage being put on chain to help them (and all of us, really) limit spammy content.
Honestly, I don't care how many votes a person buys. There can be many goals for doing a thing. To prop up a community perhaps? Maybe they need extra money for their sister's operation? Maybe they are trying to get something on trending because they feel it is important and want those trending whale people to see it and take action on it because they know it won't earn enough votes to pass as a proposal?
Either way, I don't really care about buying or selling votes. As @themarkymark said in a recent comment, it's pretty far away from the real issues with Hive. I know some of the coding is going to be antiquated soon and a major fork will be coming. I know real vote farms exist and could be shut down. I know that other things are coming, that will be way faster than Hive currently is and we'll need to adopt it to compete on a scalability level for blockchain tech.
I can't tell anyone what to do or think, even if they think it is cheating or giving themselves an unfair advantage, but I can display my thoughts here, for everyone to see, with the hope that maybe some will see what I'm talking about and control their own stake. I have learned that, here, one must have slippery shoulders. I've also learned that just as in any part of the world, money speaks the loudest. I don't have much else to say except, REMEMBER TO BE YOU! I always am, and I always will be.
Hive projects I am heavily vested in:
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because I can
So Can WE
Vote Witty and Pollenation
Is Voting WITNESSES difficult?Let me do it for you!
Set me as your PROXY VOTER!
Very well written.
You got me to read every word.
Bravo!
Excellent, thanks sis
!PIMP
Reading every word of this, my first post on your account, @enginewitty, I am simply letting you know that much of what you say here resonates with my own thinking, as one new to publishing on this blockchain.
Which I might charitably describe as some version of a minority opinion, it appears. I say this as it becomes increasingly clear to me, in reading through various posts and comments related to this, that my initial impressions were wrong.
Beyond that, I won't say more, as it doesn't matter. I will now follow your account, as I have chosen to do with a few others, as I experience what unfolds from here, in this supposedly decentralized blockchain. Right. At least I now have a much clearer answer to my wondering this:
P.S. If it helps you to know, I am reading this due to the reblog by @ecoinstant.
Just takes a little learning and finesse. Considering you came by here, means you have taken an interest and I feel you'll do just fine!
Well said my friend, you know i have bene around about as long as you, and the drama on here gets out of hand soemtimes but I am hanging inthere
and manually voted ;)
Appreciate ya Jay, and yes, it can get pretty crazy around here at times. Solutions seem a slight more civil this go round, fingers crossed !PIMP
Fingers crossed indeed ;) thanks for all you do onthe blockchain, I must admit I am slack I just post, some comments and run
I think you probably do more for Hive than most realize :) ...
not so sure about that these days, I need to try and make time to be more active
That sounds like a great plan :) Are you feeling better?
Doesn't look like you need a proofreader to me! (For those who don't know, I am one. Professionally.)
I also see "dHiversity," think what a great name it is, and wonder...π€ Is that gonna be our next awesome community?
Thank you for sticking your neck out to say what many others are thinking. Again. As you so often do. π
!PIMP
Was hoping someone might pick that up, I really like the name. I should probably go see if the account has been taken yet!
!PIMP
Im rather proud of the fact that the Shadow Hunters community just celebrated over 7 years of weekly contests. It has given newbees a stepping stone into Hive, they do not need to be grand writers or photographers and we have done it without a lick of support from any big curation project. The community has pretty decent engagement and wonderful prize sponsors.
Diversity is huge. There should be room on Hive for everyone, and having space for people to learn and grow and get comfortable is a big part of user retention, even if posts into the community do get ignored by the whales!
none of the really good things like this get supported!
We've done OK on our own (with Ecency support!) To be fair, we were offered OCD support years back but made the decision that we wanted to set our own rules.
good plan and yes you have done very well!
10000% agreeing .
Thus I vote ---MANUALLY--- as usual :)
!PIZZA
Your post has been manually reviewed for curation by the Principality of Bastion.
Check the Trail of posts we voted
Principality of Bastion - Our Leit Motiv? Let's Grow Together.
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You may TRAIL this account if you like the curation we do, or join our discord to know more about what we do.
It's a beautiful thing to have a whole nation on your boat! Appreciate ya stopping in π
Let's hope to have tons of citizens, soon :)
!PIZZA
Nothing more for me to add, Very well said! !PIMP !GIFU !DUO
You just got DUO from @dbooster.
They have 1/1 DUO calls left.
Learn all about DUO here.
@enginewitty...
Wes...
Wealth can not be attained through mere acquisition of monetary substance my man. It's the people that make all the difference, the sharing of a thing. Regardless how big or small, experiences and memories are the true riches of the world. Appreciate you Wes.
@enginewitty...
lmao, I am happy as hell when I get a .001 hp upvote. I try to create content that promotes projects that I enjoy. I am not a writer or photographer, however Hive has the possibility to take a large market share from Meta and X when people get sick of the censorship. I was sad to see that a whole community got killed off due to this "Downvote War", and I hope the hive community will get their shit together and build each other up instead of killing off what others build.
I mean, I get what they are trying to do, it got pretty bad in the 'old days' and the trending pages were cluttered with nonsense and garbage due to the bidbots. Not all of the content was trash, but it did give unnecessary rewards to what would have otherwise been considered a total shitpost. And you are right, here, it is the money that talks and I do believe, a paradigm shift will occur this decade.
Fair enough, I haven't seen all the things yet. It just looks bad to an outsider like me. My goal here is trying to learn and hopefully build stuff, but to know that if you make the wrong person upset it can all get nuked is a bit scary.
I really enjoyed the post I just wanted to say there is no real freedom on Hive unless you are a whale or just well connected to the whales
Another thing the whales don't follow any rules
Here's a small tip πππΎ @tipu curate
It takes a village to raise a kid up right. As Hive, is a collection of many villages, not all of them see things the same way so we have to come together and let all of our voices be heard. Glad you enjoyed the rant π
π― i enjoyed ππ€πΎ
Upvoted π (Mana: 32/42) Liquid rewards.
Very well said, and I wish "everyone" would take the time to read the post in detail. Well done brother!
I know, some people just can't be bothered beyond a few words. !PIMP
Well thats a lot of infomation laided out and i be honest it will give me a lot to think about :)
I love poking brain cells !LOLZ
Well said my brother well said.
Appreciate it my dude.
I need to re-read this post before giving any comments. And probably read above mentioned manifesto too because I don't believe I did that at all !LOLZ
But, before that I need to walk the dogs. Priorities of life ... !INDEED
!BEER
@tipu curate
Life is such a bore! All the good stuff happens online π
You are an inspiration, dude! You put into words what I've wanted to say for a while now!
https://ecency.com/aliveandthriving/@gratefuleveryday/grateful-ironshield-chimes-in
Glad to nurture the writing side of the brain and help you get it out!
Hive is like a small pond that has a few sharks. You can get noticed, but then you may get eaten for whatever reason. I think chasing people away is bad if they could have been good for us. We cannot afford to be too picky. No, I don't want mass vote-buying, but we have to find some sort of balance. We have to be realistic about how small we are and the lack of content that would attract a mass audience. There's plenty here that I have zero interest in, but that's fine as long as I can find stuff I like and support.
Let's keep things friendly and talk out issues rather than going on the attack every time. I've seen enough drama in my time here.
I'm all over the map when it comes to interest. I find that general tags usually carry a smorgasbord of great content and variety. Thanks for reading hombre.
You have asked very good and legitimate questions. I agree with most of the things written in this blog and frankly I feel that this is just a matter of perspective. You can call it vote buying or you can call it a company (project) giving dividend or reward to its investors on staying invested, which I think is completely legal.
It is all in how you look at it! Opinion guides the hand that tells.
well said bro!
#fosho
Agreed 100%.
#truth
You nailed everything, but sadly dey won't listen, just as we had bidbot for upvote one can also be created for downvote to also combat the challenge, it would have solved the problem but no they all went for blood there by suppressing the chain
Often is the scenario.
This is exceptionally well expressed. Thank you very much for standing up to say what quite a lot of people have been thinking. This discussion is very important. Much respect, brother! π π π β¨ π€
Well thank you π
You're very welcome, absolutely! π π π β¨ π€
Vote buying is before my time. From what I read recently it sounded like it was bigger accounts using it to get bigger, until I read your friend's post. It sounds like there's a need for discussions on how to ensure the system is used to genuinely help both the community and those who want to get established. Checks and balances, like those used by certain awesome curation trails β€οΈ
We got you brother, appreciate the support and understanding.
You know I'm always up for figuring out how we can all grow Hive together :) Everyone here wants Hive to thrive, it's just that we all need to talk about it. Bouncing ideas around is a sure way to come up with something better than any one person or group would be able to.
I can probably dig and find it.. but who powered down their 150k stake? I believe I heard about this from Jose Diccus but I couldnβt get the name. I donβt need the tag but just curious. Regardless though, the down vote fiasco is incredibly personal and retaliatory in nature which frustrates me. Take the rewards away of the post in question but donβt add them to the trail of permanent down votes.
Thereβs always the argument βfreedom to do with my stake what I wantβ and down vote all day but itβs such a drain on the things beyond taking away some potential rewards that just pushed people away. We need a culture change with that type of stuff! Iβm just glad this isnβt turning into the Bernie flag wars.. those were insane. Iβm glad the dude moved on lol
The drain is mostly emotional in my experience. Negativity breeds negatively and spreads into doom scrolling. Then, nobody wants to read anymore. Sad.
Hermano mio a la distancia. Cuanto me gustarΓa sentarme contigo y tomar una cerveza frΓa y hablar extensamente sobre este tema. La moneda siempre tiene dos caras y es bueno saber que ambas tienen el mismo valor a pesar de ser diferentes. Estoy escribiendo en espaΓ±ol porque ese es mi lengua, se que usaras un traductor para leer, el lenguaje no es un problema en esta era moderna. Tienes un punto aquΓ muy bueno para considerar. Un gran abrazo.
You have been a stalwart here in true sense, what you write here today not many will dare to. Some where I feel there is so much fear out here.
I fear no words or actions here, nobody should feel like they can't be who they really are!
It's quite simple, if you're not curating for any of the many reasons you and others have stated above and before, you're then curating for an additional interest in direct monetary rewards meaning you're getting more than the 50% return.
I haven't looked at pimp token yet, but if there's any additional rewards on the table curators are now corrupted to want to reward that content and ignore others not offering more.
If you just reward people with a token or send them part or all of the curation rewards you're still just earning the same or up to the same amount as any other stakeholder, but if you get something extra this gives you an advantage which is often derived by the delegation of the authors you upvote.
I didn't read the full post, mostly the part about ocdb and where you tagged me, just thought I'd make that part clear.
That's one of the biggest issues we don't want to incentivize because during the bid bot era most authors who didn't buy votes were ignored and those buying votes only received a portion of the profits making 50-50 more like 20-80 in favor of curators.
I'm sure there's a lot of different issues but this one was big enough for me to start speaking up about it and taking action. Sure it sucks the person downvoted decided to just abandon his community and activity here but what that was his choice and not one I was hoping or aiming for.
Glad you came by! Even if you didn't read it all, I know it's pretty long. You'll be happy to know, I'm creating a whole new mechanism with PIMP and putting curation in the hands of the token holders themselves. #staytuned! Not that our vote is all that big currently, but it will probably be widely adopted by other tokenized communities. Will probably take about a month to complete. We are already testing it and setting up various components.
PIMP does something very similar to OCDB with it's earnings as we send out daily rewards to people with enough tokens staked from our curation efforts on top of votes for delegators and properly tagged tokenized community postings.
Feel free to look at !PIMP and evaluate it. Though, it will be evolving to nod in agreement at other's opinions of what may or may not be considered vote buying. Community protection and all π
I do see your side of the coin, know that. And I'm not kissing your ass here, but I do agree with unfair advantages in certain situations and the bid bots were getting pretty topsy turvy.
On another note, just out of curiosity, what is your opinion on AI produced content?
I don't understand this sentence xD
Define AI produced, if it's fully generated by AI and author just read through with slight changes then should absolutely not be rewarded. If used AI to fix spelling/grammar/readiness and openly mentioned it's okay-ish, although personally I'd prefer to read the raw.
There's a fine-line there, I think there's some people abusing autovotes to generate AI generated content, usually about things that many have already blogged and posted about countless times that the AI know already. There may even be some pretending to just use AI for the grammar/etc as an excuse to just have it generate the full post with very low effort - guess it comes down to how much you wanna believe the person. It's difficult times ahead for curators even without all these schemes people come up with.
Ha! I mean I agree with you that buying a vote renders a slightly unfair advantage so to eliminate any belief that the #PIMP District is selling votes, we will be pivoting to a new curation model as soon as the construction of the code is complete and deployable.
AI has come a long way, and I don't think it should be rewarded either and I probably ticked off a few people I know (and were moderately close to) because I flagged their AI generated/respun comments and some fully-genned posts. Was someone I'd been following a while so I recognized the demeanor had changed in the posts as they got lazy π. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it coming and was looking for an ally in that sense to help with limiting their presence here.
Yeah it's not fun work to try and protect the reward pool, I'm open to lending a hand with voting power if need be but can't spare much time lately unfortunately.
Great to hear about the changes! One simple thing to make life easier for curators and the project is also to just give them posting authority so they can vote on your behalf with your account but logging into it with their keys, thus you don't need to give them the actual posting key which may make things weird if you ever need to remove them from the position.
The beauty of the code being implemented, is they won't need the keys, just enough #PIMP staked π you'll see soon.
Once the AI invasion comes, I'll be knocking on your door.
seems twatter and youtube are already full of them in the comment section at least, guess next step to prove you're real will be to quite literally be connected to your PC so you can constantly verify a person is typing this with biometrics and live vital checks next your username.
But how bad can he be if he has an actual community to abandon? I did watch your video and glazed over a few of the posts about it. One thing I don't recall is how much of the reward pool was being used for this. I do think that the vote amount matters. The question I try to ask though is whether it is authentic human interaction or not. If it is authentic human interaction, I'm starting to wonder if that isn't a better expenditure of the reward pool than quality content.
When people build bonds, they stick. They never really die (well...unless they die in real life). But many of us can lay dormant for years, but we never really leave, because the friendships we made will always pull us back in. If such a bond results in what people call a voting circle, is that so detrimental to Hive, especially if they mostly stake Hive?
Edit: change in wording.
Nah, the phrase circlejerks is often overused, very few vote-trade excessively as far as I can tell, those who do usually do it in an automated fashion so you can easily spot it with tools such as hivetasks.com. What you're referring to there's nothing wrong with that, we all have favorites and as you say as long as rewards don't go too crazy no one's gonna bat an eye if you're constantly just voting the same 5 people every day.
It's a spectrum however, if those same 5 people started posting less and less effort/quality posts, got less and less engagement, you'd think you'd wanna lower your votes to match it, right? Sure they're your friends but at some point if the rewards they are getting get noticible by others and the other requirements aren't up to par with the rewards there's also nothing wrong if curators/stakeholders adjusted the rewards down a bit, right?
That's what downvotes are for, you could also imagine if Hive suddenly magically went up 100x to $20 and stayed there for a while - I shouldn't be rewarded $6000 for a post that's earning me $60 today, right?
Anyway, from my glance the user was not receiving much engagement and a lot of comments were mostly token commands both on their own posts and on others, and like I said, even though purchased votes were only resulting in $5-10 value that's still $500-1000 later, doesn't mean they've been earning them in a fair manner like others work hard to strive towards.
Sure. I agree with downvotes. I do wish the upvote button was a question with a "Do you think this post should earn [more] or [less]" prompt rather than the negative connotation of the downvote. The problem with the downvotes though is when people do things like downvote the person's whole blog instead of the related content or downvote well beyond the initial earnings of the posts. Even this would be fine in my book if it didn't have an implication on "reputation" and if that user and the community in general had some other recourse to account for what could be considered bullying.
I don't dislike your idea of a one button up or down question, and yeah, I'm usually not in favor of zero'ing out posts either but when you think about the posts they've farmed daily through purchased votes with no genuine interaction or consumption for what may have been years, a few days of downvotes zero'ing posts are nothing compared to the amount they've quite practically "stolen" from the rest of the community. One could say maybe the real reason they left is because they know they won't be able to continue earning that same APR now rather than how the downvotes may have affected them. After all my only ask was to stop buying votes and they did it even on posts trying to play victim.
Fair enough.
His automated community posts are still going even though "he's gone".
I want to keep this as productive as possible. I applaud you for working out your thoughts and feelings in words. If we can all do this more (as it seems more and more are doing) I feel confident we can work together to improve HIVE. As I have said on-chain, I do think we were "due" for a shakeup. We had ALL gotten lazy.
I do want to make one thing clear. While hotheaded, @freecompliments did not abandon his community. He left them HSBI, which is a "decentralized user curation program", where we curate users in the fourth dimension, not just single pieces of content. @josephsavage will be talking tomorrow, I believe you are invited. I will not be speaking.
Thank you for keeping it cordial - and as always - Let's Keep Talking!
Thank you