I was looking at HiveBuzz earlier this month and realized that, if I participated in one more line, I would complete a full line of bees.
I am still 100% powered up in HIVE. I have purchased HIVE centric products like NFTs, Punks, coin and I created a new account. This has all been hive related stuff.
My account passed the elusive 5000 HP mark and I am 93% of the way to dolphinhood.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for HIVE was stopped dead in its track earlier this month when Spaminator started downvoting the posts in the Review the World Community .
I created the community as a place for web site and business reviews.
I realize that reviews are low quality posts; however, they have an interesting effect on SEO. I am experimenting with a design where I write the first half of the review on a site called Internet Rivers. The second half of the review would be on a Hive Tribe site. This design actually brings traffic into HIVE.
While reviews are low quality content, the structure of the reviews has an SEO component. I created the account @irivers for the reviews. I created the community @hive-173119 so that they are in their own space.
I only use tags that are directly relevant to the reviews.
BTW, if #hivewatchers wanted to have a discussion about the value of reviews. I would welcome the discussion. Yes, reviews are low value posts, but they seem to generate web traffic. This is why some many sites like Amazon, Google, AngiesList and pretty every successful ecommerce site promotes reviews.
BTW: I was also wanting to use @irivers account to work on an interface for local businesses into HIVE.
But lets get back to this post. Being accused of spam destroyed me. The accusation made me feel physically ill.
I started examining the spaminator downvotes. It appears that the account is being used to censor content and to bully unpopular writers.
This is not an uncommon problem. It is not uncommon for miscreants to use devices designed to prevent abuse to abuse others.
Societies create police departments to protect the people. The police can go bad which begs the question: Who will police the police?
HIVE is an experiment in decentralized social media. It is up to the participants in HIVE to help police the platform.
Interestingly the account @antisocialist is one of the biggest proponents of decentralized policing of the platform.
I was a big supporter of steemcleaners and spaminator when @patrice spearheaded the effort. @patrice hasn't written an update for awhile; so I decided to remove my witness vote.
The reason I initially supported @patrice and spaminator is that HIVE is more than just a blockchain. It is an experiment in creating a decentralized community.
There is need for some policing of the forum. For legal reasons HIVE must protect against identity theft and copyright violations.
Since there is a financial aspect to HIVE. It is prudent to protect the platform from scams and abuse.
True spammers and spreaders of disinformation should be countered.
An experiment in decentralized social media must include a community based and decentralized policing effort.
IMHO, spaminator and cheetah were doing a bang up job. There appears to be something out of kilter with these mechanisms at the moment.
We should be using our witness votes and upvotes to promote good conduct. Downvotes help in times of actual abuse.
Accusing people of spam because you don't like their content is extremely bad form.
Anyway, being accused of spam has completely demoralized me.
Cheetah was killed by high prices years ago.
Spaminator is a nuisance until it gets your rewards wiped out.
I would ignore it until then.
Just be sure your content is original and you shouldn't have any problems.
If you haven't asked for an explanation in their discord, you might give that a try.
Running people off the platform is a maximization tactic, for some.
What is spam, I think most people know spam when they see it, however disinformation should never be lumped in with spam in my opinion. Just because some one does not believe in the same thing as someone else, is no reason to down vote it or to call it disinformation.
The definition of spam changes with each platform. For example, tumblr and twitter encouraged the sharing of memes. Twitter doesn't care about cut and paste. So, they would encourage bloggers to tweet the tag line of a blog post ... despite the fact that such cut and paste jobs produce letter by letter copies of an article.
HIVE doesn't seem to be worried about the fact that the tribal sites in the hive-o-sphere created duplicate content. Many of the tribal sites do not use the canonical link. I suspect that some are misusing the canonical link.
To fill their site with graphics Twitter developed the OG standard. When you tweet about a web page, Twitter will display the image from the reference if it uses the OG tag. This activity would be considered a copyright infraction on HIVE.
Academic journals consider commerce related messages to be spam.
Some places accept commerce, but draw the line at any message containing an affiliate link.
Some places reject affiliate links ... but except their own links.
Every platform will have a completely different definition of spam.
Since every platform has a different definition of spam; i think that it is crucial for HiveWatchers to communicate when they start downvoting an author.
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