As you may have heard, Reddit recently announced they've chosen Arbitrum as their scaling solution for their token system that currently only exist on a couple subreddits. Moons for r/cryptocurrencies and Bricks for the Fortnite subreddit.
Image SourceAs someone who has used Reddit quite a lot in the past and of course also Hive I wanted to chime in on some issues that may arise and comparisons between the two. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite neutral on Reddit adopting blockchain tech and tokenizing their subreddits. People may think "oh that's it, Hive is done for" because of this but honestly if it introduces more people to Ethereum it will automatically introduce people to Hive and they'll be able to make their own decision.
A quick history of Moons, they were distributed about a year ago, 50 million at launch airdropped to everyone who has earned post or comment karma on r/cryptocurrencies (I received 5k but haven't been that active there) with 5 million going out every month and that 5 mil decreasing by 2.5% each "cycle" whatever that means from the announcement post but eventually it will max out at 250 million tokens as shown in the graph below:
You're not going to be able to see the text on dark mode, but it looks like it'll be close to max cap by 2035. How that makes any sense is beyond me, as in, why would people stop earning Moons by then, what do people earn afterward? I guess they'll have enough time to figure that out.
To quote the post:
Reddit karma provides a basis for measuring people’s contribution, but the final decision is up to the community.
This is also pretty vague, how is the community supposed to affect it in other ways than with the up and downvote button? I'm guessing they're talking about bans here which will be a ton of fun to find out what that entails.
Alright so let's quickly look at some issues with the very little that's been announced so far.
Reddit is a private company with a private database where there's admins, moderators and users. You hop onto the r/cryptocurrency subreddit, you read the rules and then share something and hit post. Your post goes out and all you gotta do now is wait and see what happens.
If you've ever used Reddit you'll know it's quite "hit and miss", you either post something at the wrong time or it has been reposted already without you really being able to figure out beforehand cause their search function is famously bad, or someone just downvotes you for no apparent reason because most downvoters don't care about the Reddiquette of how the voting system should be used. Most of the time you'll be downvoted.
Now if you're on Hive and have received downvotes, while I understand it may be frustrating and even though most of them may land on content they deem to be overrewarded, I can tell you that getting downvoted to 0 without even having received a lot of upvotes to begin with can be quite frustrating. There is no name attached to them, you can't go strike a conversation and ask them why they downvoted your post nor can you repost it cause most automods are going to flag you as a spammer and quite literally shadowban you from the subreddit. I'm quite sure that shadowbanning was something that got popular starting on Reddit. You could see your own post, wonder why no one was voting it up but at the same time it wasn't even getting downvoted either only to open up the subreddit's "new" section in an incognito window to notice it wasn't showing up at all to everyone else. I don't think I need to tell you the differences between Reddit and Hive in that regard. Even communities that are now able to mute on Hive will still show your post albeit it'll need an extra click for people to view it.
Reddit is big, if you think Steem was big a few years ago during the pump when bid bots were King on the chain, Reddit is like the sun where Steem was an Orange in comparison. What I mean by this is that with that many daily unique users and visitors there are a lot of eyeballs on Reddit, this of course raises the interest of advertisers and now also any person with a referral link.
Have you ever seen those Twitter posts from random people who happen to blow up for one reason or another and they'll add a reply to their tweet with "omg this blew up so please follow me and check out my website/store/something in this link". Yes, people will take any attention they can get to monetize it in one way or another. Reddit makes this possible from the get go and afterwards too. A lot of the trending content on Reddit may be advertisement without us knowing, the best advertisers are those who show you something and you may not even understand what it is they're trying to sell you as it may not be the main attraction of the content or share. Some are less indirect about it and many moderators in many subreddits add the "advertisement" flair on their posts after a while.
Naturally with a private database and money to be made advertising certain products or bringing attention to certain things, there's ways to make money off of that attention. Welcome to the Reddit dark market bid bots.
Apologies for the bid bot era flashbacks these domain names may have given you.
Now we get back to the issues with private databases.
No, you as a curious user or visitor can't check who has been voting up a certain post. No, you as a curious user or visitor can't check what posts those voters usually vote on. No, you as a curious user or visitor can't find out through some analytics that may be built on Hive to give some sort of trust rating based on manual curators or autovotes or potential vote sellers if a post is trending cause people genuinely like it or if someone paid a few bucks to get it there.
I can't find the video right now but there was a post trending on r/videos where OP was admitting he bought votes just for fun and just because he could and that it wasn't even that expensive.
Who can stop this? Admins, they're the only ones with access to logs and activity on their private database. Not even moderators can figure out, meaning those who are in charge of distributing Moons tokens to people based on activity or shadow/ban you can't even find out if any foul play has occurred for certain Moons farming. Now of course Moons is only on the Rinkeby testnet and the prices are still fairly low as the tokens are on one xdai exchange on said testnet, but give it some time, a mainnet migration and a few real dex's and ex's and value and you will start seeing people do a lot of things to get those Moons. As you've seen people who used to abuse bid bots on Steem as much as they could because it was still generating them some profit, people are going to do the same on Reddit but with less transparency.
Some questions that arise from my side are. What happens to your Moon distribution if you get banned before the month is over?
Imagine you're a popular user, your flair shows you have a lot of moons, a lot of followers on Reddit and you generally are well known to often land some upvotes just because people remember you and often agree with what you share or comment. One day you say something wrong, get spam reported for something controversial and a Reddit moderator or admin who may not be having a great day and doesn't want to bother double checking what occurred bans your Reddit account. Sure you may still have your Moons you've earned before that, even if you still get the next distribution but what about the earning potential you'll now miss out?
It brings us back to a lot of the centralized problems that people speak day in and out about that occur on Twitch and other places where people are mishandled and get banned in biased ways and lose out on their ways of making a living they've worked hard to accomplish. Imagine if a witness on Hive hates you that much that he'd just ban your account and you won't be earning any post/comment rewards but not even curation cause that doesn't exist there.
Reddit will be like the centralized exchanges that everyone keeps warning users about. Exchanges hold people's coins, the same coins that were initially created to avoid having to trust others with your money. Now you'll have to trust others not to shadow/ban you.
I'm not even going to get into the whole immutability, freedom of speech and censorship resistance cause that's obviously not something a company is going to care about at all, even less a Chinese conglomerate such as Tencent being invested in it.
Anyway, will be interesting to see what happens. I'm going to be trying my best to build communities and onboard some early birds before Reddit drives more attention to crypto and those users find out what they've been missing out on here on Hive.
Maybe we should create our own token in our r/hivenetwork subreddit? :P
Would be awesome to get a good presence on Reddit honestly. I've ran into major issues trying to promote any of my hive links within crypto communities and trying to navigate that as best as possible as there's a HUGE crypto community there.
The vault aspect on Reddit is still new to me and not sure how to transfer out of what kind of value these tokens will have. What would be really cool though is if some how CUBFinance or another hive type project could tap into the tokenomics of Reddit with their own token on the community and some how interact that with DEFI swapping between Hive/Ethereum. (I believe Hive still needs the ability to process smart contracts though)
In any case huge possibilities for growth even if it's a bit of a centralized platform. No reason to not tap into it.
This is actually genius. We can tokenize it on hive and make it so that posts go on both reddit and hive.
Yeah was thinking a community and bots on each side would duplicate what's happening there and here. Then some sort of accounts that tally who the reddit users are without linked hive accounts to store any rewards they may earn on the subreddit but voted here until they decide to create an account with reddit signup authentication to claim their rewards. :)
In most of the big subreddits there are a few dozen downvoting bots. Really the only way to get around that for what I used to do when I had a gaming youtube channel was have a few dozen accounts I had to use to upvote stuff. I did a lot of stuff like 4 years ago and was pretty involved in the gaming community, the downvote bots are horrible.
I expect it to be worse once more rewards and stuff like this start happening, they don't ban those downvote bots either, they have been running for years and still run today.
Those bots seem to be all people talk about in r/cryptocurrency now so they seem to already have started to exist a lot more even though the Moons token is barely worth anything.
Yup, give it some time and a few people will come up with some insane scripts.
There are some really great scripts for botting on Runescape and the game is getting more and more bots on it every year. There's bots on there that cannot be detected at all. I used to run bots on alt names on Runescape to make some extra gold and stuff for my main account, I had 3 to 4 bots running almost 24/7 lol. The bots that some people make are insanely good, they respond to everything you say realistically, they understand the entirety of the game. There are even bots now that are so good at PvP you can't beat them, the bots automatically switch gear/weapons mid fight, switch prayers/drink potions at the right time to avoid dying, etc. It's pretty messed up how good bots can get. Only a matter of time until someone starts making some crazy good bots and farms tons of Moons by just having hundreds or thousands of bots commenting and upvoting themselves.
A simple search will aldready show you what people are doing on Reddit. Throw some value behind the votes and you'll have shit we can't even fathom here yet.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=reddit+upvote+bot
yup yup
This is a very interesting summary of the inner workings of reddit and the many hidden tactics that are at play. It really drives home some of the key usps hive has as a content and social platform.
Why do you think people accept the status quo?
What is still so much more attractive to the masses about such an exploitative platform? Is a free, transparent, open and decentralised platform enough to turn the dial?
It will most likely require more users and we also need to figure out a solution to people just being able to share content/links without it creating rewardpool drama. In the early days of Reddit everyone was talking about Reddit too similar to Hive, that's something that caused me to stay invested here and spend most of my time thinking it will eventually get to the point where Reddit is at today. With public blockchains and everything being transparent there's some other disadvantages but they surely outweigh the disadvantages by a lot and make it more fair for regular users. By the looks of it Reddit won't have a first layer coin either like we do with Hive, they're straight going into 2nd layer tokens which I fail to see why people would want to buy them/speculate on them right now.
I agree with the last part. Let's create our own token over there. I've been a bit active on r/Cryptocurrency and I've earned a massive 800 moons since inception. It's actually worse than you described it. Sometimes, you'll see a post with massive engagement with very few to zero vote. My post once earned over a 100 comments with just 2 upvotes. Is all shitty up there with user downvoting just to prevent you from earning. We can pass a subtle message to then if we can create our own coin on r/hive and even onboard many to the blockchain as a result. I am all in.
Why can't HIVE be the Currency of the r/hivenetwork?
It could be, Hive already has a wrapped version of it on Eth so we'd just have to wait for Reddit to hit Eth mainnet to use whive somehow over there.
wait, what about fortnite?
Haven't heard much of what their token is used for but yea it's called Bricks and I don't know if they're trading anywhere.
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Maybe we should create our own token in our r/hivenetwork subreddit?
Yes we must create over own token
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Maybe for a reason. Reddit is full of real human, natural engagement, while Hive is not. And to avoid misunderstandings, I like Hive, I am using it for more than 4 years (since 2017.05.17), but if anyone looks around, anyone can see that there is a general lack of real human engagement on the Hive blockchain. Nowadays the average number of comments per post is 2-3, and most of those comments are bot comments. And not even the Hardfork 25 (HF25) could change that. Nowadays I often see posts with 4-5 bot comments, but 0 real human comments (and often more than 100 upvotes, and the most of that is probably automated, so the curators do not even see what they curate). Quite disappointing.
Is there any merit to engaging with the content? If I see a nice post but ain't my field of interest, I just think it's nice but wouldn't bother commenting as there isn't much to comment at all. It's just not my interest. Take for instance visual art, looks nice and you get an ah moment for posting, maybe convince yourself to say nice post but it just screams lacking substance in engagement. Some content creators create content that can persuade viewers to be engaged while most can't, this is a skill to make people care about your stuff. Is it really people's fault if they find the content really uninteresting to be commented on? Going on manual curating spree for weeks with a mix of autovoting, I can say there are too few content creators that have the ability to hook an audience and make them involved in a post.
You're really stuck in a loop, huh
Yes. Just like the Hive blockchain itself.
If your whole view on the chain revolves around engagement and the lack thereof, which we've concluded that your constant negativity isn't going to attract you engaging users, and instead you fail to see all the development and growth that's occurring then I'm not going to be the one to change your mind. I would appreciate it if you'd stop coming with that negativity to my posts constantly, though.
Not negativity. Realism. Straight facts. In the recent past I started to write my own Hive posts only for myself, so I do not even expect any engagement under my own Hive posts. I look for it under other people's posts instead, but I very rarely find it.
Maybe your content just isn't just what people would want to be entertained to.
This is not just/only about my content. This is about content in general on the Hive blockchain.
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STOPReddit is absolutely useless in compare of Hive tokenisation for blogging , commenting,discussing.there migration to blockchain is still not helping them as it still control the whole ecosystem and freedom of speech not very transparent. i personally not using that platform.
Bitcloud = trash
Reddit = trash
People talk about WEB3 and don't know we are here?
Makes me bullish. Incredible bullish.
They try to be hive.
If big influencer, special on tech would more talk about splinterlands, web3, censorship, account ownership and co. We would see a move we can't imagine today.
We are on the right path with Hive IMO. A SMT version that can be easy listed on exchanges will be the moon product of hive.
Many people forget, most tokens are erc20 ones. Hive is stand-alone. The market value stand-alone is not that much as I would expect.
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Most of your apologies were accepted by me because of how you tendered it and your point was really straight and convincing. I love it
its not a bad idea to create our own token in our r/hivenetwork, i totally agree with you
https://hive.blog/hive-174578/@aryaman/my-introduction
vote my introduction post..
Hi @acidyo. Is there any chance of recovering Owner Key when it's lost?
I actually lost all my keys and am only left with my Active Key.
Not when it's lost, no. Only way the recovery options work is if someone has copied your key, changed it and then you can prove to your recovery account that you're the real owner with the old key and some other info like signup email or get in contact with them in ways you've contacted them before so he can reset it and give you the new key.
When it's lost then it's lost for good. Better be careful with your active key now if you're not planning on moving onto a new account.
Well it seems I have only that option left. Making another account. Because with Active Key I can't login.
Fortunately I had already logged in to Ecency Android App that is how I am writing now.