First of all: I am glad you are taking that time; as mentioned before, communication has been tried repeatedly by me and many others, and if there were answers they were often pretty offhand, usually not answering the question, and if so then often with arguments that on closer inspection did not hold true. So yeah, thanks!
On the topic: I am not concerned about downvotes themselves; I actually think it is a great concept, it's only that people coming from a world full of likes and void of criticism might need to learn how to handle it.
I am concerned about the way power is being wielded by a few, and having quite an impact on the many.
In my opinion (and most probably in the opinions of quite some critics of your downvotes) censorship is suppression of information by exercising power; manipulating the flow of information to create a 'narrative' that is more in line with a certain taste, a bias or some agenda. Call it censorship or not, but that's what most of this is about. In Hive's case this is done by a few who 'staked' their way to power, and they do have a proportionally huge impact. This is not about community-based guidelines or some consensus, this is not your private feed, this are heavy handed actions by you and a few others. You kind of rule Hive, and I do like a good ruler. But some activities really surprise me, as they do not make sense to me.
You are right, RT hasn't been 'censored' yet (only suppressed to some extend), but the effort is obvious. It was quite telling when a few months ago that account was bombed into oblivion from a reputation of 70+ by what looked much like a concerted effort or at least an interesting dynamic. Whoever posts from that account is astoundingly resiliant; maybe they aren't in it for the rewards, nor the fun, but to simply share/spread information. I don't care much about RT, but it's an ok addition to the spectrum.
Many others didn't take too well to being harassed with out of proportion dvs and left, and among them were world reknown artists and journalists. If you would have appreciated Hive (like I did) as an 'alternative' platform that also provides art/culture/information... from the other side of the coin, you would have noticed that as quite a loss of potential, esp. provided that wider adoption is something being aimed at. Which I don't see, and is one of the things not making sense to me.
And in light of that I also ask myself: To what extend 'de-centralized' is still the appropriate adjective for Hive? I see it on the blockchain-level being a distributed ledger, but to what extend is it true for the distribution of influence? Obviously zero. So maybe that slogan should be changed? Actually it would suffice if with power came responsibility ;)
Curious to read your thoughts on that
thanks
k
I wasn't responsible for designing Hive's "influence based on staking power", so I don't particularly feel compelled to defend it. It has some obvious weaknesses, but in the end I'm quite certain that Hive is still a much more decentralized solution than existing social media. It's not a trivial thing to fix the influence, because this design decision is baked into Hive at the core.
It is my plan to create a solution to the problems caused by wealth-based influence, but my plan for that will likely take a couple of years in the best case. I mentioned some details about this plan a long time ago in two posts and the ideas behind it have been under development for almost two years now. But even the design isn't yet finished, and we probably won't start coding of the actual software until next year.
As to my voting down of some high-reputation accounts, I do it to fix what I believe is a problem with the existing reputation system: it doesn't allow lower reputation accounts to lower the reputation of higher ones. So in the case of a few accounts that got high reputations from repeated voting by a few high staked accounts in the distant past, those reputations can't be lowered by anyone except an account with a very high reputation. For this reason, sometimes people contact me and ask me to help them downvote temporarily. This doesn't happen often, it's happened in two cases to my recollection: RT and world-travel-pro. There may have been one or two others in the past, but if so I can't recall.
I continue to downvote RT because I truly view them as a source of disinformation and I don't mind it being known.
To answer your final question, Hive is decentralized as a source of information.
But as to distribution of influence, its core design is staked-based influence, not democratic-based influence. This doesn't mean the system isn't decentralized, but it isn't particularly democratic. Nonetheless, anyone can continue to post whatever they want here, despite the opposition of "whale" token holders. The same cannot be said of centralized social media platforms.
Stake-based influence was probably an easy choice for Hive's design, because it matched the goal of the original coders to create a token that gave people influence by purchasing it, giving the token a tangible source of value, and equally important from a design perspective, it doesn't require the software to distinguish who are real people and who are bots.
Good to read that there is some plan to reduce influence of staked power; as the implementation naturally will take a long time, it would be even better if you already followed the idea with your personal DV-policy. I'll say it once (again) and then leave you to it:
(personally I can't fathom why you would do that in case of Hivewatchers).
If the few in power would respect those two points, Hive might be a much nicer place.
So the general drift I got out of this conversation:
You obviously play the long game, no quick 'mass adoption' or significantly expanding of the userbase. You rather take the time that it takes to work on a more fair and solid structure. If that's what it is, I am all for it, and even though I am kind of fading out of Hive, this makes me curious enough to check in again in a few years.
Thanks again for taking the time and shedding some light into that corner of Hive. I might direct some of the critical crowd to this comments as I think it quite a rare gem!