THE DATA
Since the start of the successful funding of Hivewatchers' proposal in August 2020, we have accepted 18218 reports of which 16843 reports have been accepted as valid abuse which falls within the scope of Hivewatchers' work.
We have helped to return Tens of thousands of Hive Dollars to the reward pool from these abusive posts.
- 7753 reports for Plagiarism
- 205 reports for Identity Theft/Deception
- 1571 reports for Photography/Art/Image Plagiarism
- 1393 reports for Copy & Paste
- 4747 reports for Spam (AI-generated content or Post Recycling)
- 888 reports for Unverified Identity
- 195 reports for the category "Other Abuse"
During this period, we have also verified the identity of 687 users and have given them @hivebuzz verification badges.
The breakdown of downvotes since 1st August 2022:
ADM
- Number of downvotes: 16091
- VP: 244892.91%
Spaminator
- Number of downvotes: 243078
- VP: 54206.94%
THE HIVEWATCHERS
Hivewatchers provide consistent and scope-based anti-abuse services to the Hive ecosystem. Our prime focus is fighting fraud directed at the Hive Ecosystem and its communities.
Fraud includes any form of deliberately misleading activity or deception aimed toward monetization or other malicious goals.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Fraud can be defined as:
1a: DECEIT, TRICKERY
specifically: intentional perversion of truth to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
was accused of credit card fraud
b: an act of deceiving or misrepresenting: TRICK
automobile insurance frauds
2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be: IMPOSTOR
He claimed to be a licensed psychologist, but he turned out to be a fraud.
also: one who defrauds: CHEAT
b: one that is not what it seems or is represented to be
The UFO picture was proved to be a fraud.
Concerning Hive, Fraud refers to any and more of the following:
- Identity theft
- Identity deception
- Plagiarism (text, image, art)
- AI-generated content
- Malicious deception
- Phishing/malware links
- Reward pool abuse
What are Hivewatchers?
The Hivewatchers project first and foremost aims to fight the fraud and the exploitation of the Hive Ecosystem. Users who engage in one of the above activities get a comment on their posts. The comment usually links to the original source of the content they have presented as their own. The comment offers a very succinct educational point.
Users who engage in identity theft or identity deception are immediately added to the ban list (also known as a blacklist). This is because, in identity-related cases, there is always an innocent victim who may have severe personal consequences if the perpetrator isn't stopped.
Users who either refuse to acknowledge that fraud is wrong or continue to carry on with it, eventually get added to the list as well. That time varies depending on multiple factors.
For many users who ask to come to talk to us, it is the only time they get to chat with other Hive members. Often, they have been victimized by those who have scammed or misled them and asked for help. Many stay in touch long after their appeal is up or questions are answered.
The Hivewatchers rely on the community to locate instances of fraud and report them. Community members submit their reports anonymously on our website at http://hivewatchers.com and, should their reports be accepted as valid and correct, receive a small payment of appreciation. We manually check every report to make sure it is within our scope and is accurate. The comments from Hivewatchers are all manually published (although they are templated for consistency).
Background
Hivewatchers were originally Steemcleaners. The project was started in 2016 by @Anyx who, as a PhD student, was troubled by all the plagiarism and fraud he saw on Steem. He created @cheetah, a hands-off similar content bot, and then formed Steemcleaners. Many people have joined in along the way and have spent time in the role of a Steemcleaner. Those of us who are part of Hivewatchers now are not the founding members and cannot speak of the project's full history as some of it is beyond our knowledge.
When the Steem blockchain was lost during the hostile takeover that gave birth to the Hive ecosystem, Hivewatchers was born.
Infrastructure
The Hivewatchers service is more complex and robust than it looks. This section is here for general information and is not related to this proposal.
http://hivewatchers.com is a ruby site hosted alone on a VPS. It has a bridge that allows it to post directly to the Hive chain.
Additional servers and scripts exist for Spaminator but are not related to this proposal.
Risks
You may guess that fighting fraud is not always popular. We have gotten every type of threat and form of harassment. Most users are good people and the educational part of Hivewatchers is perfect for them. However, organized scammers are different. They enter the ecosystem with a clear intent to exploit, scam, deceive, and steal and they create approaches that can rival some corporate business plans to do so. When caught, they fight tooth and nail and resort to everything under the sun. Being a member of Hivewatchers is a thankless and dangerous job.
Proposal
Type of Proposal: Hive service, non-tech operational, and labour costs
Technology: Partial OS
Time and Commitment
Hivewatchers is a part-time job at best, a full-time job during peak times. Complex investigations, particularly ones involving multiple victims and accounts, can take days. Helping users can take anywhere from a minute to an hour per person. Assisting another project can take an hour or over a day. Processing reports always takes hours. Maintaining the infrastructure takes time. It all adds up.
There are 3 members:
@guiltyparties
@hivewatcher
@nuttin
Project Maturity
Phase 1: Establishment
The project is 8 and a half years old and this phase has long been completed.
Phase 2: Technical Maturity
The Hivewatchers reporting frontend platform, backend processing platform, list servers, and all supporting technology have already been funded, paid for, and donated by the team.
Phase 3: Evolution and Ongoing Operations
Hivewatchers must continue to operate as normal while completing this phase. Included in this phase (but excluded from the above funding request) are:
Investigation work hours
Liaison hours
Server, script, bot, and site upgrades
Related servers
New Frontend and Backend development
This proposal is to fund the ongoing operations only. All additional task hours or costs will be donated out of pocket by the Hivewatchers team.
If unfunded.
If unfunded, the service may explore alternatives for funding.
We are aware that many organized, malicious scammers are eagerly waiting for Hivewatchers to lose funding. We will never let anything prevent us from stopping an identity thief, among others.
Final Thoughts
Hivewatchers have been around for years in different forms and are always evolving. We appreciate your support, feedback, criticism, and collaboration. Thank you for considering our funding proposal.
SPAMINATOR
Spaminator is an anti-abuse and anti-exploitation project designed to warn the community about abusive accounts.
- 2 domain names (Hivewatchers and Spaminator, keeping them together for the sake of simplicity)
- The servers that host the bots and API
- Maintenance of infrastructure and misc costs such as IP address(es) (including Hivewatchers infrastructure)
NEW FRONTEND AND BACK END
We are currently hiring a skilled developer to create a new Hivewatchers website. The existing site, coded in Ruby, has been plagued by persistent issues leading to frequent downtime, attributed to a variety of errors.
To address these issues comprehensively, a decision has been made to construct an entirely new back-end infrastructure. At the same time, the front end will undergo a complete overhaul to improve user-friendliness and provide an improved user experience.
We plan to incorporate additional APIs into our website, introducing features like Transaction Search and Blacklist Search tools to improve functionality.
Here is a glimpse of new responsive website designs:
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Thank you for all the support from the community that has been given to us throughout all these years.
Approve The Proposal with Hivesigner
Approve The Proposal with PeakD
Addendum
Hivewatchers and Spaminator are both scope-based projects. It is the official policy of both these projects that they are to focus on their respective scopes and not deviate from said scopes.
It is the policy of Hivewatchers and Spaminator that at no time is the account used selectively outside of its scope for personal or political-related ends. All content and subjects are treated equally under the Hivewatchers and Spaminator frameworks and their treatment is further restricted by the technical limitations set as part of the bot algorithms and the front and back-ends.
In extreme cases such as terrorism, murder, child pornography/exploitation, and similar situations of grave consequence will the accounts be used outside of their main scope. Those are extremely rare and in the entire history of these projects, only a couple of times this was required.
The personal opinions of team members are not subject to regulation but may not be uttered on our professional project accounts. Where errors occur, we thank all community members for letting us know and will correct them.
Images by thepeakstudio.
Shame,
@blocktrades
@oflyhigh
@azircon
@josephsavage
@hiro-hive
@bluemist
@anyx
@engrave
X got Community Nodes because they took moderation without centralization serious. Seems you guys didn't and still don't.
Just today I met somebody named Joziah Thayer on X again that got off-boarded by the Hive Watchers, because he's a professional columnist who published on multiple websites. This has to stop or the community size will never recover.
I've largely stayed out of this debate publicly because it is so blatantly one-sided, in favor of the whales, but here's my take:
Hive was hardforked from Steem. Justin Sun tried to take over entirely, and so he was forced out through the fork. For some reason, unbeknownst to anyone, NO ONE IN CHARGE THOUGHT TO SEE IF THERE WERE FURTHER PROBLEMS NEEDING ADDRESSING.
So here we are, years later, Hive is bleeding users. The whales will do nothing to stop it, regardless of how that affects the public's knowledge of the apps to begin with.
The whales and Hive Watchers are directly responsible for all these problems. To deny that is to deny reality. Money ALWAYS corrupts, there are no exceptions. Hive is run by an oligarchy of disconnected people who do not care about what happens. That's what you get when you allow an oligarchy to have power.
Hive is not web3. That term needs to be completely abandoned. It's merely a buzzword used in hype marketing. Hive is Web 2.5. Hive should STRIVE to improve, but without any support from the whales, that's never going to happen. Hive has zero attention in the mainstream Crypto Twitter-sphere. Considering Twitter is all that's left for promoting blockchain, that's really bad, and unless it is addressed, Hive will continue to bleed users and become a dead chain just like Steem.
Hive's loyal users have given their all, for what? A measly little amount of incentive?
It's all a bad joke at this point. I have several friends who were Hive OGs, who came over after the hard-fork, and because of the Hive-watchers and their abusive down-voting, they were completely cut off from the ability to earn anything for all their effort.
If the people at the top actually cared, they'd address this. But they won't, we all know they won't because power leads to complacency and arrogance. The $HIVE token has a liquidity problem outside of Hive. No one wants it, and Binance remains one of the few places to buy some. HBD is not used outside of Hive, it has no utility outside of Hive. Without cross-chain utility, Hive will not survive the coming storm, period.
You cannot segregate people based on the way the Hive-watchers treat minnows. There's no point in posting anything if your work is going to get shadow-banned or worse, your reputation score (social credit score on Hive) gets smashed to 0 or negative, like Lahsee.
That is very interesting to read, because some ETH whales said exactly that to me. That idea that Hive "Reputation" can be diminished is super scary Social Credit Score stuff they don't want engage with.
I personally hold a slightly more balanced view on that. Social Ranking is very innate to the humane experience and it is not categorically bad to copy the human experience towards the digital world, even if it is cruel and unfair sometimes.
My concern is that, it amounts to a Social Credit Score, and the fact that you just said that there are people who don't want to even engage on that, says a lot. People don't want to admit that it's the same thing, just on a different platform :/
We have to keep up the good fight. We have to keep the community alive around the core values and just push forward. Friends become enemies and enemies become friends. I've seen some things in life. Speak the truth, never back down, aim upwards and keep pushing forward.
I completely agree with your sentiments, but wanted to correct this misapprehension. Money NEVER corrupts. The corrupt seek it out. Anyone that gives the appearance of having been corrupted by power/money has slithered into position to extract money or power from that position.
Absolute power does not corrupt anyone, despite the aphorism. The absolutely corrupt do anything it takes to gain power, and that's the facts.
Fair point. I wrote this while really angry, so my perspective was not accurately portrayed. When I had a lot of money, I ALWAYS used it to help other people survive and pay for basic human needs
It is our superpower, as people that create society, to care for one another. I reckon those are our real prayers.
I have known about this for a while but I just see a much bigger issue coming and its time to stop the hopium and cut my risk out totally before I cant anymore if HIVE becomes illiquid which would be very easy to happen if certain events take place this whole thing would just collapse and I feel like whales are using this time to harvest cash and exit while ppl are kept in the dark about the real condition of the chain. Might be wrong but i would feel way more comfortable if my investment is lowered to the single thousands rather than in the 6 figures or as much as i can pull out reasonably.
We've lost over 1m users that onboarded, and all the network effects that would have generated since 2017. HW is why. We're down to ~3k actual users - if half of them aren't bots - and shrinking. The problem isn't caused by HW. HW is the solution oligarchs have implemented to prevent Hive from becoming a hot property that would be bought out from under them by legacy capital, which is an unavoidable consequence of being a pure plutocracy.
All it takes to take over Hive is more money. Fat staked oligarchs don't want to lose their ROI and have to get actual jerbs, so they'll crush Hive into ashes until all that's left is a circle jerk they can't monetize anymore, and then they'll worry about getting jerbs. They pay lip service to freeze peach but crush it to keep the user population down and secure their oligarchical status. That's where we're at, and that's how it's going to be.
Thanks!
It's not impossible that they have just changed to controlled demolishing accidentally. Do they want all their holding to go down that Bitshares way? Certainly not, but will it at the current trajectory? Hmmm. There is this dark mass people, violently hating $Hive because they got Freedom promised to them and after arriving here, they got served Hive-Watcher and their insane demands.
Some of the demands:
... and so on ...
and as the cherry on top of the cake:
I see a lot of missed chances and broken hearts with this Bullruns development already. Everyone who sold the dream of great success with buying and holding $Hiver has already been dealing with the backlash. For the steep decline is User, the price has held pretty good. I see that as the Bull Market gains getting eaten up by people off-boarding themselves and their holding.
But I'm certainly not bearish generally. If the Bitcoin driven Bear Market kicks in again late 2024/ maybe early 2025 the truth will be made visible. The market is always right, without exception.
No, no, no. All kinds of market manipulations cause the market to be utterly deceptive and can even utterly destroy them. Look at fiat. The dollar was sound once, and now it's a joke. The market for dollars is being destroyed, and the world will pay a heavy price for that.
Otherwise, I just don't have the interest you do in currencies. I didn't come to Hive for money. I came to dodge censorship, and I'm still here because I can still dodge censorship here. I'm allowed to, for some reason, and I don't actually know - or spend much time trying to find out - why, but I'm going to take this opportunity to speak forthrightly as I have it.
We are in agreement about the harms of HW, however. I pay that much attention to currencies, at least. Some few of those demands you listed make sense, but the majority of them do not, and are excuses to crush Hive down to an unpalatable investment Big Fi won't swallow. Big Fi hasn't spent the time to learn that Hive could be made into whatever they want it to, and that's fine with me, and with the oligarchy, but most of the folks that came here for tokens disagree and would happily sell out for a moonshot.
I would be unhappy if that happened, because it would inevitably be accompanied by censorship and cancel culture, which would eliminate freeze peach here.
.
Hivewatchers is a kangaroo court that does not follow due process, transparency or basic fairness.
It ignores legitimate criticism and fails to reform.
It pushes legitimate users off Hive with ridiculous definitions of plagarism.
Do not vote for this proposal.
These guys have forced me leave the Hive blockchain now. They downvote my every post, they downvote my every comment, which are always spot on, related to author's posts. I have posted one mushroom story using AI and I have admitted that in their Discord in #appeal, but then they came up with false acusation of me being behind some sort of scheme with some spammer accounts, who for some weird reason sent me all of them together "a real fortune of 5 Hive" or so in last couple of years. After more appeals they blocked me on Discord. @adm, @hivewatchers and @spaminator have been since then STEALING my earned crypto by downvoting on quality posts published on Hive blockchain and that way denounced upvotes from several great members of Hive community. So goodbye Hive, never again.
Hello.
Some of these fake accounts have been found posting plagiarism.
All of these 17 accounts have been transferred to your account, uniquely.
It is very unlikely that 17 accounts have been sending their rewards earned with abuse to your account as a gift.
If you appeal again in Discord, we could give you 30 days/posts appeal.
https://discord.gg/bPhqew3TeE
No, thanks for your kind "offer/proposal". I will soon write a detailed Hive post on this "subject" for the entire Hive community to read about it. I will tag all main accounts here on blockchain. As I don't find my self guilty of any wrong doing in this matter this will be my defence from your false, unjustified acusation and at the same time my last and final Hive blockchain post. Take care @adm, @hiwewatcher, @spaminator, @hivewatchers and others.
I'm getting a Déjà vu here… might be the ten thousands time I read something this.
There are good people in this Layer0, they deserve better.
Liars, even if you would tell the truth this time. You need to go.
ZERO responses, everything kept in Discord again. That alone disqualifies you guys. Just get lost and abolish yourself.
You will not run for cover until L2s have to deal with moderation. You just zero all Hive Coin value and force forks with new stakes to take over. GG.
And the next one, you sick bastards.
Jesus I am seeing something really bad coming this place I am going to be exiting every interest I have here as soon as I can I have a lot of money invested including some actual investments not just some bs tokens so reading this here and basically confirming what I have known for a long time but didn't really listen to my gut been here since steem to and now its time to exit before I lose money. I didn't realize how much secret shit went on here and I'm getting a bad feeling about something else and its time to cut any positions and move my capital which is significant to just BTC and others and make the markets there where there is much more volume and less risk. I may have totally misinterpreted what is happening and it may screw me fuck lol .
In 2020, my post was rejected by a @spaminator for the first time. I guess because I didn't sign one picture (the post was posted on emotions about the attack on Ukraine). He has been following me for three years now and I have not found any explanations/comments. Tell me, what can be done to stop him?
Hello.
Yes, the account was blacklisted then.
You can appeal here:
https://discord.gg/KRvtjJBaNB
Thanks
You don’t even know the definition of plagiarism, you denounce innocent Hiveans, and you downvote and drive away valuable Hiveans. Shame on you!