I've been so swamped with debugging my own properties the past 3 weeks that has sort of came first. What you own and operate comes first, so I feel bad I have not put out my procedural proposal yet.
We're supposed to embrace and innovate with the technology, it is supposed to be decentralized and there are a lot of efforts to centralize and @guiltyparties is absolutely doing this along with others. Hivewatchers is a PR and legal fiasco waiting to happen. Someone will abuse their power, it will eventually get in the hands of activists on Twitter and it goes straight to mainstream media outlets to degrade crypto. That's the real risk.
Decentralization and policing on the technology and tribal side is the only way we're going to get there. Much like there is local, state, and federal policing... there needs to be scope of control on each level.
Farming as abuse is something dictated by the oligopoly, not the community at large, in the individual tribes or technology creators or even as dictated by the Hive Terms of Service.
Hivewatchers can be reformed in a way to prevent criminal activities from taking place on the platform, we know what they are but they have to be defined in an SOP and that is to be their limited scope.
Where is Hivewatchers current SOP? There's none.
Tribe owners and community members know their subject matter best and can patrol their communities better as they have tribal interests. They can spot the plagiarism that they don't like, they can kick thin content creators to the curb, and if they want to keep things more exclusive - they can. Don't like a particular tribe/technology, cool... create your own. @Aggroed has resources that can you get on the right path. (I know I need to get around to creating a particular project using Hive-Engine and I don't want the cartel trying to kneecap it.)
OCD was one of the BIGGEST MISTAKES within Hive. It is not politically correct to say to admit this, but it is true. It is a centralization of content, it is content accepted by those wielding power. You better kiss the feet of those in power because they have the ability to make or break you here. Otherwise, you better be writing about how "Crypto is the future and here's why..." every day to karma farm. So for all the decentralization talk, if you support OCD, you're not for decentralization.
I saw the comment from @apshamilton about the dustings, which is interesting and my observation is that a dusting results in less engagement because the content is deemed as spam/dangerous by the community because of the massive amount of trust put into @spaminator and Hivewatchers. Upvote bots whether we like them or not play a massive role in dictating our attention to content created, they don't upvote when a piece of content is "dusted."
If you think Spaminator is an issue, they also have the ultimate cancelling bot in their disposal ("a-d-m", but remove the dashes and put an @ in front)... they can wipe out small/medium HP users with EASE. Might as well cash out and create a new account if that hits you.
There's a better way here. Maybe we have to stop distributing HIVE directly and force everything into tribes and side-chain tokens that can be exchanged so that there is more control on a niched level?