I was reading @jasonliberty's post about downvotes after being tagged in the comments, and left my thoughts about fixing downvotes on the platform. I suggest reading the post yourself, as he put a lot of time and effort explaining his perspective surrounding the issue, but I also wanted to add my comment here so it got more feedback.
For perspective, this comment has been the accumulation of the of the gut feeling that drove me to create @freezepeach, the knowledge I have since gained from years of experience on this platform, and the research I have done about other platforms.
Source
What do you think, is reward pool policing and downvotes given out to punish dissenting views an abuse of power or actually good for the platform as proponents of downvote feature claim, a form of tyranny or free market justice?
From all the information available to me, I am convinced it breaks the gamification of the platform. Social media in general relies on dopamine rewards to keep the users coming back time and time again. Facebook understands this, which is why they have offered many different ways to react to content except a dislike button. This thread on Quora explains some of the psychological and adverse effects such a feature entails, and gives a lot of insight and extra reading to fully understand why such a feature will likely never be implemented. Twitter also has balked at the idea of such a feature, only going as far as adding a "I don't like this tweet" option for users to adjust the home feed algorithms. This is likely the best balance, as there is no direct user feedback discouraging further posting, but allowing the content consumers to express their displeasure.
What do these multi-billion dollar corporations know that we don't? Their entire livelihoods rely on their understanding of the social game theory that sustains the constant content creation on their platforms. We need to all recognize this as a problem, not just affecting a couple of unlucky people who happened to get downvoted, but as something that reverberates throughout to those completely unaffected. The psychological impact of getting $1 in rewards with no downvotes versus having a $10 post downvoted to $1 is massive, and the faster we come to terms with this, the faster we can actually reach solutions.
So what are the solutions? As it is right now, we absolutely cannot get rid of downvotes. Even with everything I said above, it would be disheartening (to say the least) to any honest person trying to earn on this platform when they see the farmers and the spam content making extreme amounts. This leaves us with a few other options:
Marketing strategies. For as long as I can remember, the rewards have always been at the forefront of any elevator pitch when trying to onboard new users. This has to stop completely, Rewards need to be seen as a bonus, as something extra, on top of all that HIVE has to offer.
UI changes. The UIs could stop emphasizing rewards so much, and instead take a cue from the other leading platforms on the web in designing the user experience. This is likely not possible with the types of budgets we're working with, but it is an option nonetheless.
Remove HIVE rewards altogether. This is my favorite option, but with some non-negotiable caveats:
The rewards would need to be moved to layer 2 tokens, each with customizable economics and features to cater to their audience. For instance, maybe a token for people who watch and review movies doesn't need a reverse auction window, while the token for people posting videos does. This allows for many possibilities to exist at once, creating competition and cooperation between ideas for each individual need, something that all the fiddling we do each and every fork can't accomplish.
Removing rewards should lower inflation. Lowering the inflation on the chain is good for all token holders, and this would be a big selling point.
Come up with a reason to have HIVE staked that makes it attractive. RCs aren't going to cut it. As it is right now, 99% of the users don't even need 50 HP to transact as much as they want. Removing HIVE rewards removes the biggest incentive to stake, so either RCs calculations need to be revised, staking rewards need to be significantly higher, a new idea could be added, or a combination of things to make staking something attractive to users and investors alike.
So what do you think? Do you have a different point of view regarding removing rewards? Do you have a unique idea that could incentivize staking if rewards are removed? Do you think I'm a dumbass and want me to shut up? Thanks for reading, and leave your comments below.
My reply, in general, to smooth's comments in the other thread:
You get it.
I downvoted this because as with most if not all complaints about downvotes, I think it was WAY overrewarded (in large part, as often the case here, by autovotes or oblivious votes).
That being said, I do agree with one point, which deserves more exposure and discussion:
With individual communities in charge of rewards they can create their own rules and practices for voting.
I'm actually fine with the downvote on this post, it's just a copy/paste of a comment I made elsewhere with extra context added with the intention of getting a conversation started, and it was a success in that regard. However, the downvotes you made elsewhere look very ideologically targeted, centered on the very demographic that would seek out alternatives to the big platforms out there.
The demographics are fine, and no one is blocked off from posting. That's a core value add of a blockchain platform. But that's not the same as suggesting they should earn arbitrarily large rewards. I'm entitled to have a view on that which might be different from those who upvote.
That's the nature of the economic system we have here: rewards come from upvotes minus downvotes. If you come and sign up for the relatively low censorship (none at the pure blockchain level) then the reward economics unavoidably come along with that.
The nature of the economic system was supposed to entail a voting system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd. Please check the third paragraph of Steem's blue paper. They meant this key fundamental as the "smart" aspect of the token. And that's because if it worked, If Steem could harness the wisdom of the crowd, then the sum of all upvotes and downvotes would equate to a surprisingly near accurate result.
But unfortunately, all we have right now in the way of up and downvotes are just regular. There's nothing special about it that will help us to glean the crowd's intelligence. So I comprehend why you're doing what you're doing, but the function designed to arrive at the final result never worked. Now that you know the wisdom of the crowd does not work here on HIVE, why not just do like a regular marketplace?
If you like an article, upvote it, and if you do not, then why not ignore it? Unless, of course, you're sitting on some genius code fix that can salve the problem a bit. Here is how real crowd wisdom can get assessed. It's impossible to do here, but that doesn't mean we should abandon PoB. We need a new definition. It can be code dependant or independent, or a mixture of both.
But if it doesn't rhyme a bit with the natural markets, people will scoff, whine, and complain. When I see people like @steevc say: "we just got to normalize it." He's missing one colossal factor. If we keep getting new users, you have to keep on normalizing the upside-down HIVE-only behavior. It's a losing battle if we want it to sprout wings, take off, and fly to the moon. I hope our chain can discover what we're missing before the competitors do. If not we'll lose all the advantage.
Real Wisdom of the Crowd.
I'm not sure auto-votes have much 'wisdom'. We get plenty of posts making good rewards that may not really deserve them, but many will be scared to downvote. So normalising downvotes could mean that we can do it without fear when we think rewards need adjusting. Then we need people to not take it as a personal attack. It's all about perception and expectation.
!ENGAGE 20
"We get plenty of posts making good rewards that may not really deserve them,"Hey, @steevc, "deserve" ain't got nothing to do with it. That's my point. If the up and downvotes do not harness the crowd's wisdom, then we're just fooling ourselves when we think we can divine what rewards ought to get removed. In this situation, we have a massive stakeholder/DEV who is targeting a specific community because he disagrees with the content politically.
It doesn't matter how much effort went into a particular post, or how well written, or the fact that it's not a scam, spam, or plagiarism. None of these things seem to matter. And to be quite frank, it puts us in a situation like Facebook and Youtube. You know, the whole cancel/demonetization culture that is driving those folks to HIVE in the first place.
If we do the same thing here at HIVE, then we've lost that special thing that's supposed to make this place a shining jewel to vibrant and lively content creators who have real things to say. We should be capitalizing in the marketplace right now. All we have to do to take advantage of the situation is the exact opposite of what the big social media companies are doing.
By not canceling people for their opinion. Or by not de-earmarking (demonetizing) rewards for what they said. There are a lot of intelligent people those platforms are driving away. Let us not be that guy. Let us not be Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the like by engaging in thought control. Let the ideas flow freely instead of trying to use downvotes as a stick to discourage people.
I watch what you guys do on the chain a lot. Interestingly, one of your go-to arguments is to say: "Join a community and blog there if you don't like getting downvoted and quit trying to take all our precious HIVE." But what if I turned that upside down and said: Why don't you start a downvote community if you guys like downvoting so much?
You can have a downvote token and downvote all the subscribers based on whatever wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey metric by which ya'll are pretending to operate. I think you can gauge the popularity of your actions by seeing if said community thrives and grows. Smooth could be the Simon Cowell, and you could be that gal who had a hit song in the late '80s with the cartoon cats.
Not sure who 'you guys' are. I am speaking as an individual on this. I do work with others on anti-abuse stuff, but that is not related to countering rancho/haejin votes.
Maybe I should stop second-guessing what smooth does, but then I have seen what he has said. People can choose if they believe him.
People are happy to take votes from big accounts who never explain their actions, but not downvotes where reasons are given. All votes are about distributing the rewards, so if someone gets $100 on a post then that's less for everyone else. The system is designed so those with the biggest stake can make the biggest adjustments. It's an imperfect system, but I can't see it radically changing.
People are not being 'cancelled' and even smooth cannot stop them posting. What counts as abuse or is bad for Hive can be a personal opinion what we are allowed to act on. There are no absolutes.
We will be judged by what we do here as our actions are public. If you look you will see that I upvote lots of people and do zero self-votes. I downvote where I think it is appropriate and don't have to justify that to you. Anyone is free to downvote me.
Peace.
ENGAGEtokens.New users are not on auto-voters, while plenty of old users are on large value auto-voters. Some to more of them (I think more than that) are continuously posting low quality and quick posts collecting a lot of value, whilst their contributions don't deserve the value, especially compared to the quality posts of new users (and old users who are not on those large value auto-voters).
Auto voters are too lazy to review and adjust their auto votes, and that is the most positive explanation I can give to this.
Back to downvote and scaring new users. In my honest opinion, it is the trending pages and the selected amount of users getting the majority of the rewards that scare new users. In the last 4 to 5 years I have seen so many great content creators come and go because their content was undervalued a lot in comparison to high rewards on low-quality posts.
We need more governance teams, with lots and lots of downvote power. Teams that operate 100% transparent, like Hivewatchers. When taking away the rewards of all crap posts around, we can be confident we'll change the general culture in our community for the good.
I could not disagree with you more, you always focus on rewards when replying to questions about your downvotes. For me, it is more that these downvotes cause a post to be less visible to other users on this platform. That is censorship. Why should whales care if a minnow made more rewards than they should? You got plenty and good for you, the way you come off is that you and other whales are the judge and jury of content on Hive. You know exactly what you are doing by downvoting a post about downvotes, you're poking the beehive.
My solution to accounts who want to play judge and jury of content like this is to create a community-funded counter account although Layer 2 is far more civil and less expensive. An upvote cannot be the answer to downvoting when the value of the vote is not equal. All the counter account would do is counteract a bad downvote to its exact value.
It sounds smug, to say "But that's not the same as suggesting they should earn arbitrarily large rewards. I'm entitled to have a view on that which might be different from those who upvote." You are entitled to your view and to say you couldn't downvote would also be censorship, the smug part is when you say that you don't like when people are making arbitrarily large rewards, but you could post "hi" and make more rewards than a project I worked a month on and every post you do makes large rewards arbitrarily. So if you are doing it what is the problem if a minnow does it?
When a post is made and it reaches a certain value that means that the community has valued this PoB to be worth x amount, yet one account can disagree with the value this content has reached and in doing so they disagree with what the rest of the community valued this content to be. Essentially one vote vetos all the other votes.
If you look at how these large payouts are generated it is almost always the case that the bulk of the rewards comes from one or a few big accounts. Your notion that masses of minnows are all voting for a big reward and then one evil whale comes and takes it all away is not accurate.
Agreed, at the same time you pretend as if your vote is the same as mine or 100 of me for that matter, why should a big account like you care if a small account earned some extra rewards? Why can't you answer that? Again you are hung up on rewards a downvote does not only impact the rewards it impacts who sees this content on Hive, downvoting it can make it less visible so you're hit with the double whammy.
I never once mentioned that a big whale comes in and takes it all way, I said a big whale overrides what the rest of the community aside from the one account downvoting has valued that content to be.
Except that's not true. The rest of the community usually has very little to do with the large rewards. It's usually one or a small number of large accounts doing that. Why do you think it is more legitimate for one large account to suck up a large portion of the reward pool and assign it to one post? That's actually in conflict with a large amount of other smaller reward activity throughout the community (any very large reward takes away from all the smaller ones, since they all come out of the same pool).
There is no coherent reasoning that makes upvotes (which take from other payouts) whether large or small more legitimate than downvotes (which give back to other payouts) whether large or small. It's all just voting.
To be honest I don't even pay attention to whether the account receiving the rewards is large or small, and I don't think it matters. I'm sure it happens both ways. I look at the rewards and whether I think they represent a good use of Hive's reward pool and then express my opinion and prerogative as a stakeholder through voting. When I downvote, the rewards that don't get generated on that post as a result end up going to other posts by other accounts, large and small (but a great many small, in practice).
There is no free lunch on excessive payouts.
...try and reconcile that statement with this reality
The @lucylin account .
hahahahahah.
This comment will age really well across the internet ...(And I will be using it).
Do you not understand the piss poor reputation hive has, because of these behaviors?
Probably not, the hive echo chamber doesn't like to let reality intrude.
I would say 'good luck with your authoritarian, commie/technocratic, project'... but that would be a lie.
THIS is the reality ....
The @lucylin account .
Eventually removing Hive rewards was the reason I was trying to tell you about Leofinance. It has proven that it is possible to build Apps and Communities on Hive that don't have to rely on Hive rewards pool. If we were to remove Hive content rewards today, Leofinance will do just fine, because it has a healthy content rewards system in place. Other tribes/communities like Ctptalk, StemGeeks, ProofOfBrain, etc are following similar model and doing ok as well. So far, Leofinance has been the most successful one. When you get a chance take a look at leofinance.io and all the awesome things @leofinance witness has been doing. Things will get even more interesting when they complete and release Project Blank (soon).
I think you're WAY overrewarding yourself in curation on Tim's hbd.funder's daily blockchain spam. I might not be the brightest bulb in the box of crayons, but I reckon that a majority of people on HIVE ask themselves:
"Does it even real, and if so, how much?" And if they don't ask that question, they just did, and now they're wondering: "Is he in my head, is he reading my mind, are my thoughts even my own, does his internal trading patterns match or exploit hbd.funder's goals?"All fair questions to ask, I'm sure. I'd like to know exactly how this project works and is it something that @haejin can safely upvote? Haejin and @ranchorelaxo like curation rewards too. Perhaps you should share, good Sirs.Now that I've turned those two onto it, I hope its' a legit project, this, as opposed to a carbon credit-like scheme where people get bank as they angrily shake their rainmaker sticks at the gods. You don't have an educational link where I could read up on it, do you? I hope you don't mind that I invited those two. It does seem like a good cause. I'm sure they'll upvote it regularly for you. And I guess, if you don't like it, you'll probably downvote those comments for being WAY overrewarded, just a thought.
"The answer to 1984 is 1776."
The @hbd.funder posts (which is not run by me) have lots of information and links in the posts themselves.
Fair enough, it wasn't my intention to imply that you are he. I know you are not Tim. I was just wondering if all the laudable efforts are making a dent in the stated goal? You do vibe with the project, right? You're not just doing that curation/reward sniping thing, are you? Thanks for the tip on where I can find more information!
It has purchased and stashed away in the DHF over 5 million HIVE, while adding over a million HBD to circulation, earning a profit of around 1.5 million USD for DHF, and while continually erasing Hive inflation (making Hive temporarily net deflationary while still paying rewards) and reducing the circulating supply of Hive below that of Steem (previously Hive had inflated more).
The purchased HIVE probably helps support the price of HIVE and the sold HBD probably helps get HBD closer to the peg, but neither is really provable as price action always has many factors (the quantity of added buying and locking away of HIVE Is provable though). I think that's a dent, but you make your own decision.
Again, I'm not math smart per se, but I noticed that on your @teamsmooth-mm account, that you're steadily buying up HBD. HBD's current price is $1.61. That said, how does all that buy pressure help to reduce the value of HBD down to a dollar? It almost seems counterintuitive to the goal of a dollar peg. However, it does seem that you are buying up HIVE on the @hbdstabilizer account, so that part shouldn't apply upward market pressure to the HBD. I mean, maybe what and how you buy crypto on your team account is none of my business, and that's fine if that's the case. I'm just trying to suss it out and figure out if I'm on Team Edward or Team Jacob. Are you a good vampire or a bad werewolf? Before you answer that, you should know that I have a thing for bad werewolves. So no more of that sexy numbers talk, like you did up there 👆, not unless you really meme it!
The teamsmooth-mm account is a market maker that buys and sells in equal quantity. It just serves to add liquidity to the market. It isn't a net buyer or seller.
you use your downvotes to maximize your own profit . . .game theory . . . I called this before the hardfork exactly as it is today.
Yeah you have it all figured out /s
downvoted for a petty downvote on someone stating a differing opinion.
You don't change minds by silencing discussion
Okay so naked retaliation, since what you downvoted had no rewards at all. That's super smart in this instance, or something.
Well actually it did, and still does. But that wasn't the point anyway.
It does now because I hit it with a small self-upvote (which I normally never do) after the downvote to keep it from getting buried. Anyway, such is life.
Well, the downvote was better than typing "I frown in your general direction." :) I think we will both be okay
Tyrant mindsets are not interested in changing anything, they just want submission.
Silencing discussion enables the tyrants continued power. (it doesn't make their penises any bigger though...bless.)
All these Free Market principles around here! :)
lolololol - Stalin would be envious of this place...
The free market of the penis!
I lean to this option as well, since I don't see a bright future for HIVE and its token value when we continue to distribute HIVE for social media activities. The reason to hold HIVE is something that needs to be revisited. What can we do to progress in that direction?
I think we need to normalise downvotes as part of curation. It would help if some of the big accounts got downvoted more. Some of them can dash off a quick post and get $100 before anyone even reads it. That is largely down to automated voting that ignores quality. I know some may think they deserve rewards for part service, but right now a better distribution would boost morale amongst small accounts. It's better to follow a curation trail that you trust.
I have talked to several people who got downvotes from smooth. In just about every case they were still left with substantial rewards until they started complaining with some nasty allegations made against him. Whales have feelings too ;)
We cannot do much about rogues like rancho/haejin, but some feel it is worth it to reduce the impact he has.
I'm not so sure about totally changing how things work. People can already get lots of other tokens that may be less affected by the downvotes they get.
!PIZZA
Not really about feelings, but I do believe that 'complaint about getting downvoted and not earning enough' posts are even less worthy than most others of being rewarded.
As I've said, they were still earning well and had been for some time in many cases. But we are all human (I assume). I'm still amazed that I can earn anything here, but then I just had someone saying they fancy downvoting my comments. So be it.
If you know of a way to effectively market that, I think that could be a welcome change. Education could be a part of this, but I don't think it can fully overcome the essential gamification that's at the core of what makes social media successful.
Just downvote more. Everyone who does it encourages others to do so as well. Ignore the complaints and "outrage" that more often than not is just self serving.
I'm not convinced this is a good idea at all. In fact, I think this is a terrible idea. The carrot and the stick only work if they are in balance, and multibillion dollar corporations have ignored user pleas for years to add a dislike button for a reason. To ignore this is to be willfully ignorant.
They don't give away rewards based on votes. It's a completely different problem space.
As you say, removing rewards would be one solution, which makes it more like those multibillion dollar platforms, for better or worse.
Agreed, and as I also said, removing downvotes is not an option. However, one must view the downvote as a stick, a punitive measure to correct some behavior, and this becomes especially true the larger ones' stake becomes. There is a psychological effect at play here, one that a simple explanation, or even a reversal of the downvote, doesn't correct. I have ran @freezepeach for over 3 years now, and even when we were able to completely neutralize downvotes on posts, people still left. It's not about the rewards, it's about the dopamine, or perhaps some other value derived from the interactions.
Getting a dislike on facebook or youtube is whatever, getting a dislike on here having rewards removed can be very unnerving.
Dopamine hits are what attract people to something typically, if a bunch of people are being downvoted they aren't going to want to be here, whether the downvote is justified or not. It's a psychological issue that doesn't build confidence in the way this system is setup.
I still think limiting posts to a maximum of 50 USD would be a great start. There's almost no reason why any post should make more than that.
I actually think there is very, very little on here that is worth even close to 50. Most days nothing.
To be worth that, content on the internet has to attract a very significant amount of search traffic, monetize in some manner, contribute meaningfully to increasing the value of the Hive brand, or document some important work (development, marketing, etc.) for Hive, not just some not-terrible pictures posted to a blog, or rehashed conspiracy theories that have been going around for months or longer.
If no one else will pay you even close to that much to post to your blog (and they won't), that should be a clue we're overpaying too.
If there were a cap it should likely be lower, but since there are occasional legitimate exceptions, better to recognize that autovotes and various forms of vote buying are often pushing rewards way out of line with actual value-add and make more use of downvotes.
I don't have all the answers and I suck at marketing. I have tried to talk some people down from their state of outrage. We cannot afford to lose those who could add value. The gamification is different here as we have rewards. For some people a few bucks make a big difference. There's also the issue that a lot of people don't dare downvote for fear of retribution. A whale can wipe them out on a whim, but I would hope they can be better than that. I've always said it's like the wild west. Some of us can be vigilantes if we want.
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.I don't do downvoting but if I did I'd downvote a bunch of your other comments because I strongly disagree with you about this and pretty much everything else you post.
Would that be cool with you?
Do what you think is good for Hive. You have the freedom.
Ever had the living snot downvoted out of your posts repeatedly?
I had the freedom to start using a new account!
Meanwhile about 90% of my friends on Steemit just quit...
That's right, it's always about the freedom of those with the largest stake that can influence everyone or downgrade/diminish their own freedom. They fail to see how decentralisation should be a mechanism for bringing people together, rather than tearing them apart.
@r0nd0n! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @steevc.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza
Lowering inflation is bad for token holders.
DeFi has made it clear that high inflation is the killer dapp.
Inflation only devalues the stake of liquid assets that aren't powered up.
For everyone who's powered up they control far more inflation than they lose to dilution.
It is the liquid token holders that inflation is bad for: IE exchanges.
Operative words: As it is right now.
We run this bitch on 56k modem speeds. 22Kb/Sec
The blocks are going to fill up instantly with the smallest level of demand.
When it really comes down to it we don't need to change a damn thing.
This entire problem can be solved with non-consensus solutions.
My idea to fix downvotes and toxic flag-wars is an idea called @witchunt.
This would be a curation bot controlled with a unique reputation system.
Basically it will stop big accounts from going ham and doing whatever the fuck they want.
If whales cast toxic upvotes they will be neutralized until they place nice again.
Christ I need to work on my database more.
brb :D
If I understand this post correctly, because miners get BTC inflation, then the investors are happy therefore inflation is good? I've never been of the camp that all inflation is bad, but I do think that we could benefit from cutting it some.
And to your other points about inflation, I have one question to ask. Is there an upper limit? Can you have a billion percent inflation and this still holds true?
This is true, and it could very well become enough on its own to sustain a reason to have a lot of HIVE powered up. I am not familiar enough with how RC's scale to comment further on this, but it would be good to know. The only experience I've personally seen is when @animalcontrol et al was spamming non-stop at a record pace, and I never heard about minnows having issues with their RC's then. Considering I moderate the largest new user Discord server, that would have came up at least once.
I would be interested in hearing more about this. HMU on discord if you don't want to make it public yet.
It happens regularly even now.
I meant aside from literal 0 HP or dust accounts. I still see new users of @nftshowroom having this problem all the time, but that's because they have no HP. Once you have about 20 HP, a normal user will never run into problems.
Yes that's true but 20 HP = about 12 USD, which is a non-trivial cost of entry for a new user of a social platform.
Yes it works fine... except for the poor saps that weren't controlling the inflation.
If my one coin turns into a billion coins... I still have a billion coins.
I'll actually have more than 1 billion because I'll have siphoned value from the liquid holders.
I'll do a post on it tomorrow.
Will be good to get it down on-chain.
The problem with a billion percent inflation is that it makes unstaked tokens unusable. Everything freezes in place and likely dies. There is a balance.
Yes, it's all on the spectrum
A billion percent inflation is perhaps a bit too high, I agree.
Cub has 1000% right now.
It's worth it.
DeFi will prove it at the peak of this mega-run.
Of course then the bear-market comes for them... yikes.
2022 so many tears RIP.
great posts to read when you come back from vacation :)
i wanted to say that Removing Hive rewards will kill hive if done before we have 500.000+ (arbitrary number that i just made up) active users and RC are in heavy demand and can earn hive holders some profit. Because why would i have 20k of Hive when i can have 1k and do everything. And not that i am delusional that my 20k can make a difference to governance or proposal voting. Killing curating distribution will just centralize it.
Well, that's why I said with caveats. There needs to be other things in place before HIVE rewards can be removed. And I think rewards should always be a part of things, just not HIVE. LEO is paving the way to this understanding for others, and I'm sure more will follow.
Interesting post! This idea feels a bit out of my league, but I'll wager a guess. It seems to me that removing the rewards pool takes the carrot away from the witnesses leaving little to no incentive to keep the chain afloat. Even if the witnesses kept receiving the rewards; Who will want to buy their HIVE and why? I think the HIVE would likely drop in value, and that again leaves no incentive to keep it puttering along like the overly-zealous one-legged man in an ass-kicking competition that HIVE is. In all seriousness, though, perhaps HIVE stems from a social psychology experiment in behavioralism that analyzes the effects of dopamine hits in contrast with cortisol hits.
GPT-3 + chain data + Skinnerism + optimization = the hellscape of your choosing. Take your pick: 1984 or Brave New World? Perhaps a bit of both? Whatever the deal is, you can bet your keister that some form of general AI has already gobbled up and collated all the data from the various chains. And this means when they roll it out on the world stage, we will both love and hate it just enough so that we cannot escape our marionette strings. You can bet your bottom dollar that many will come to love their servitude. Those who do not will either get feared into it or exterminated because ideas like freedom are infectious AF and have plagued the ruling class since the beginning of time.
Great post! I look forward to reading all the comments!
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude." ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.The future of HIVE if we keep opinion flagging. Yeah, laugh it up chuckleheads in your private rooms and "special" servers. Bill Gates downvotes his own first. Just look around you. HE. ALREADY. IS.
Witnesses are not paid from the reward pool, they're paid from inflation that's allocated specifically to signing blocks. Removing rewards from the first layer and rewarding people with second layer tokens does change incentives though, and would make staking and attracting new users different.
Great Work
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A middle ground between removing rewards and the status quo that I've thought about would be a two level system where Hive stakeholders vote to allocate Hive rewards (inflation) to communities and then those communities get to allocate them as they see fit in terms of content voting rules, 2nd layer tokens backed by Hive, DeFi yield farming schemes, or whatever, etc. Of course, that would require a bit of rearchitecting and development at the blockchain level, but I don't think it would necessarily be all that much.
I quite like the Hive-Engine tokens that we've got right now for rewarding content too. Your Hive downvote doesn't affect any of the "XYZCoin" they earn there as long as you don't hold that token yourself. If BT's idea of modular hivemind is what I think of it in my head(allowing many custom things like tokens to be run with ease on layer 2), we can see a lot more of it coming around and people can still use Hive but focus on the 2nd layer tokens they care about, and Hive becomes an additional thing that they potentially earn, which they can convert to the token they want.
That actually sounds like an interesting angle, and I would definitely prefer to seeing dev going towards that than more fiddling with the base HIVE tokenomics.
Other than the outsized influence (>1000mv) of some of the accounts, I think the rewards are working just fine, or will be once hf25 goes live.
We have tried the most favored authors path, most of them cashed out and left, better we let the crowd decide who gets the rewards, if you ask me.
The only issue I have with the "free" downvotes is that some people with high hive staked use it often for someone they don't like or agree with. The article quality is fine and everything but yet it gets a downvote because they feel they don't like you. It's legit stupid and it's more damaging then the feeling of your random downvote. I know it doesn't happen often but it happens and there needs to be some type of measure against that as well.
Fully agree though that gaming and spamming the system is a very real possibility if you take the free downvote system away. Double edge sword type deal but honestly to me that really shows the character of a person behind the account.
RC is always kind of an issue. When someone new joins out of a non delegation onboarding it leaves them wondering and not understanding why they can't post, cant post often or they can't comment. You only need about 10-20 hive to really have enough but as someone brand new to Hive that would mean $5 - $10 I have to pay just to interact with the platform. A major hurdle for onboarding. Hurdle 2 for onboarding it's actually not easy for most people to get their hands on hive. Limited exchanges, limited swaps and no Fiat conversion that I know of. Perhaps a front end swap right here on hive that blocktrades has but making it more prominent and accepting more crypto coins could be a helpful option on this front.
Removal of rewards however I think would kill the platform as there really are not many other use cases for Hive right now. Perhaps later down the road when Hive has more use cases such as gaming, swapping, other front end blogging systems like palnet, leofinance, proofofbrain etc. and more. At that point I see Hive being more of a background token you stake and hold and use to buy things as the main currency but all the tokens under it such as LEO, POB, PAL etc are like the ERC-20 tokens of Ethereum.
I don't have all the answers and I haven't dug into it much simply my views from what I know so far and interacting with Hive/Steem over the last 5 years.
That's why I created @freezepeach, to counteract downvotes. And when it has the voting power, it does exactly that; votes just enough to counter all of the flag's rshares, not a penny more. The problem tho, is the damage is already done. What I think happens is the dopamine fix that people are expecting gets crushed by the downvote, and even if that somehow gets rectified cent-for-cent later. From my interactions, the effect of neutralizing downvotes has been a blessing for some, but not good enough for most. This tells me it's about much more than the rewards.
Agreed, some things need to be put into place before rewards can be removed. But I believe it needs to be a goal to work toward, and people need to start mentally preparing for it now, so when it does occur they're not blindsided by the news.
Currently there is no method of countering a down vote. When/if an account reaches a rep of 10 then that account should not be able to down vote. This solves the issue of petty "I['m going to piss people off" down vote accounts like sunsetjesus. We all saw over on steem how ignoring one tiny account ended up leading to lot and lots and lots of tiny accounts.
Down votes are needed, however there is no method to counter a down vote un-like the ability to counter an up vote. There is no need for a down voter to worry if they can not be down voted or effected by counter down votes.
If the rewards are removed then what reason for creating content? What makes Hive different than Twitter or Facebook, or youtube?
If/when a down vote is issued, and if people disagree with the down vote, then the down vote needs to be able to be down voted. As an example your post has a large down vote, some people disagree with said down vote. It is supposedly the people that decide what a post is valued at, yet we have only a one way voting system. If the down vote was able to be down voted, then the value portion of the anti-down vote would then be added back into the value previously voted for. 10 people down vote smooth's down vote for a total value of 8 dollars/hive, that amount on day 7 is added back to the post value. The people have spoken up and down and settled the value where it the community agrees.
Technically, an upvote can counter a downvote. Not sure if you mean something else though.
I'm talking about HIVE rewards, and moving the rewards to the second layer. LEO is paving the way for this, and it can be focused much better for the community its rewarding.
You are describing the voting mechanism as it currently is. People can upvote to counter smooth's downvote, and have done so. I don't think this post is worth $80, and I'm not mad because I got downvoted, but if people find value in it, they can upvote to assign more rewards to counter the downvote.
I will try to make it simple. With the exception of disagreement on rewards all down votes apply to the author. They have full control over what they post. What they have no control over is the amount of rewards that are voted for on their post.
Simple Idea. A post on day 7 would have received 100 on rewards. 50% going to the author and 50% to the curators. Authors share would have been 50. The post get down voted for 30. In the system I propose the curators at the top would lose curation rewards. Lets pretend the top three curators all voted at 10. They would receive no rewards and be eligible for no rewards from that post. The remaining curators would still receive a curation reward based on 20 since that is what is left.
The Author then receives the 50 reward points that prior to down votes being calculated they would have received, the 30 points removed go to the null account.
The reason the people can up vote the post after a down vote does nothing to discourage I don't like it, you, or the concept behind the post, in other words people that use the down vote as a retaliatory tool. If an automatic comment is made under the down voters name then the people can decide if the down vote was really warranted. This would probably not be able to be coded, but the people that already voted or down voted on the post would not be able to down vote the down voter, the amount of down votes received would then be added back into the post allowing the curators to receive a little bit more of a reward. It would have no effect on the Authors share of the reward as it was untouched. The down votes in excess of the original down vote would go to the null account.
To move rewards to "layer 2", there needs to be attractive staking options on layer one with HIVE.
Whether that be good interest rate from an actual stable HBD and/or bump up the measly 3% return on staked HIVE, and whatever, is another story. Like you said, RC (and governance) is not worth it for most people.
Something silly I've thought about is the amount of HIVE you staked affect the interest % for your HBD holdings.
Reducing inflation reduces the stake rate that people will want to hold the token. If it is inflating at 8% then people want 3% plus some extra earning potential (we know this because the staking return on HP is not fixed, it depends on willingness to stake). If it were inflating at 1-2% then the latter would also be different.
The staking rate can go up if we move rewards to layer 2 and redirect that 65% or whatever allocated to the reward pool to staking, no?
I tossed in the HP affect your HBD interest % thing as a random thought for added utility of staking HIVE if curation were to go away. Without curation, RC and governance seem like mediocre use cases for staking for the average person.
Sure it could I'm just pointing out that the original suggestion to reduce inflation is also plausible.
Well RCs would be the go-to, and that could actually play a bigger factor than we see now. If the blockchain grows, then RC costs will grow with it. If we have both growth and RC pools are ever implemented, then I'm positive a market will surface for the large stakeholders to rent out RCs and make a passive income with their stake.
That's a lot of ifs, and I don't think it's the only solution, just something to think about.
I guess we shall see...if we ever get there.
Once hf25 is live and the poor tax gone, I'm pretty happy with how things are here.
Other than the 1000mv cap on voting, I don't see much that needs changing.
What's the poor tax?
Every post/vote that didn't make it to 16hive was taxed at up to 50%.
This is why comment votes died.
So, everybody with less than like 250khp had their stake reduced in influence by up to half.
I'm waiting for folks to figure out what 'they' did and get the pitchforks and torches over the two+ years they got away with it.
You can't tell me the math geniuses missed that aspect of it.
wait, so NOW is it "better" or "worse"?
Hf25 fixes this.
A 1000mv, ~15htu, voting limit would do wonders, too, but it has to be adopted voluntarily by the community or sybil attacks just end run it.
If we can get the folks giving out bigger than 15htu votes to stop, it will extend the long tail.
Good points ... But I disagree with the reward of this post and the removal of rewards entirely from posts. 🍿 😊. The reward is why Hive is Hive and Facebook is Facebook...
The reward can be moved to second layer tokens more catered to the communities they serve.
If someone doesn't like the downvote, there's always BLURT for them to move to!
Have fun staying poor.
I quite like the idea that a downvote triggers the necessity to leave a comment justifying that downvote. If someone feels that 'the post doesn't deserve the rewards it's currently getting', then it would be helpful to know why an individual feels this way. It may also act in a way that discourages that downvote if it's simply a reactive action based on personal bias.
That idea has been discussed before, but there's a lot of ways around it, and it doesn't ultimately stop the problem.
If you downvote someone, they should become permanently invisible to you so you can never downvote the same person twice.
Sup Rondon. I fell down a rabbit hole and somehow ended up here. That talk of removing rewards is the same as telling me I'm being kicked to the curb and I can go work somewhere else. It's telling me all this money I kept around in my wallet is useless and I will no longer be able to support the community I've focused on for nearly five years. Even the act of trying to build my following for years is taken away. Pretty much everything I worked for, gone. There are success stories here, too. Far too much focus is placed on the negative. I guess that's normal though right? Drama sells.
Build up all this stake, then not even be able to reward my patrons. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Oh I just go sit in the corner somewhere in another community. Sell all my Hive and buy that shitcoin. Something goes wrong, the community has no safety net. Token crashes, it's done, no main layer to fall back on in order to rebuild or pick up the pieces. Genius. How the hell do you even get a community off the ground without a main layer? Just enter a small community, and take half the members? Are you thinking or no? Take the first rung of the ladder out. Genius. And don't take this tone personally. This can be like watching a monkey fucking a football at times here.
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