I'm wondering why it cost me RC to clear my notifications. That's fucken robbery! It cost me RC to sign in with hivesigner too but all services on Hive are robbing users of something anyway so I accept that.
RC TAX TO CLEAR NOTIFICATIONS THOUGH?
WTF! How is it that coders would make that a thing? Why would clearing a stat on my end need resources and even be an interaction with the chain? Why does the chain need to know or record that I've cleared my notifications and tax my RC?
You are sending a Json text to the blockchain that indicates the last time you checked your notifications. Therefore all interfaces know that you have seen your notifications because the time is past the data provided by the json you submitted to the blockchain. Json operations are said to be one of the cheapest things on the blockchain
also of note this json in particular is not a very many characters.
It's I suppose the cost of having a decentralized system.
I was gonna say something along the lines of those guys, but...
Client-side notifications instead is probably better and I know there are others who would share the same sentiment. It's just one of those things many of us don't think about since we already have more RC than we consume.
As Jarvie nicely explained correctly, because you're making an operation on the chain that is picked up by the API responsible for notifications within the HIVE node software.
When you hit that button, it sends an on chain signal that is picked up an processes by a witness node somewhere, you're causing computing to happen within a node on the network an in order to prevent functions from being abused to negatively effect network performance you need to make it have a cost, else there is not much in regards for protecting the network against bad actors making 1000 accounts all spamming free functions that need processed by whatever current node is processing blocks.
It's a security feature in a sense, and the actual cost of the call is miniscule provided you have more than like 10 HP.
This isn't a Web 3.0 implementation captain.. That refers to the Ethereum based technology, metamask and whatnot. HIVE is graphene based.
As someone who runs a node that HIVE runs on I'm glad it's not a free for all, because as important as user experience is.. If the network itself just was wide open to calls with no cost involved RC wise it would be trivial to DOS / DDOS attack nodes. RC exists simply to make it economically unfeasible to do this easily.. As you can't just spin up a bunch of new malicious accounts with no stake and cause havoc with them. Very thankful for this
If you're honestly in this ecosystem and enraged that your account that is effectively unfunded and free can't do a whole bunch of things due to lack of RC the ways around that are to stake HIVE in Hive Power to unlock a greater mana pool.. or ask someone nicely to delegate you some Hive Power / network bandwidth, which both myself and giftgiver have done at this point so you aren't hitting the limits.
New accounts with new delegation are set up with juuuust enough RC to do a few operations a day in order to not be a weakness or attack vector basically, or rather to make it not feasible time wise to do so.
I do getwhat you're saying though as a deterrent thing.. Because in a sense it is designed to be a deterrent 100%, so you are right. It just shouldn't be one that is felt by users not abusing the system, and that is where the social nature of this network kicks in that a post such as yours will get the community to throw more RC at you.
It ain't perfect, likely needs tweaking, but it serves it's purpose.
Also note, most things that have a client have a corresponding server that the client connects to, depending on what it is you are processing sometimes it's better to have it client or server side.. While doing it client side is totally possible, it might end up making a nightmare for low processing power devices.. Can you imagine an early iphone or ancient laptop trying to index through thousands of post entries and date checking every time you open a page or go to view trending? It would make it completely freeze. :P
I mean, if you view it as being taxed rather than an account mana bar.. Then I guess that's cool.. But RC is more like a mana bar, clearing the notifications is effectively casting a spell. RC like a mana bar fills up, so it doesn't actually "cost" you anything, but rather simply lowers your mana a bit because that is what happens when wizards do spells. :P