Thanks for your reply @acidyo - flagging tends to be very anonymous so it's good to see an explanation.
Back in August 2016 I was listening to James Corbett and he was talking about a new platform called Steemit. I joined up that day. The combination of videos by both James Corbett and Jeff Berwick that same week brought in a huge flood of new users to Steemit.
What we tended to share was a history of being censored online, and a hope that Steemit would be different. The main reason I became totally disillusioned with Steemit by 2019 was the rampant censorship. Several of my friends were driven off the platform - all their posts were flagged and their reps taken down to below zero - also they were told in no uncertain terms they were being flagged until they left.
Despite my best efforts they still refuse to have anything to do with Hive, and the outcome of this latest flagging is being watched with interest.
When James Corbett started sharing his posts on Steemit he got some huge payouts - I think his first post got about 5k! He is all over the internet and never really engaged on Steemit - but he was never flagged either and everything he posted paid over 50 for years.
Max Igan is in a similar position - his Youtube channel will not remain for long, and where he goes his followers will also go. He is a marketing opportunity for Hive but it's not really up to him to work for our platform. Hive can be the platform where Max was supported or the one where he was censored. Look at how Bitchute have gained from Youtube censorship over the past three months.
People who are into gaming or cat videos don't have the same history of constant online censorship. We are watching accounts that I can't mention upvoting themselves large amounts for shitposts meanwhile down voting "truthers" for excess rewards. And right now all this could go either way and will be plain for all to see.
Is this picture accurate? I hope it is!
I get that, and again my downvote wasn't much about the content but about interaction. To me a user that is here and active and working on his hive account is worth more than a user who may at some point bring in more users once/if he gets banned off that platform and mainly uses this one as another of the tens of other platforms they share their content on to either earn ad revenue or some other form of monetary reward. Looking at his video descriptions I can't say that this is someone who really understands why a blockchain is censorship resistant and different from the rest and at the same time how different the reward structure is. We don't rely on ad revenue, a front-end might add that as another layer at some point but the rewards are called "pending" for a reason and the "free" downvote pool was added for a reason also. Some may downvote him because they don't like the genre or content or any other reason while others might because they think the rewards would be better somewhere else. The pool sends out the same amount weekly (although decreasing constantly) and the voters direct where they land.
I realize some big stakeholders are not as careful with their votes and do a lot of self-voting on shitposts and there may not be as much pushback there compared to smaller stakeholders but that's just how the ecosystem is. You get certain benefits by having skin in the game because you are also partly the reason the currency has any value to begin with.
Anyway, without sidetracking too much, as you can tell these big voters voting on this account are mainly interested in the genre of this creator as they vote for similar posts. Other stakeholders disagree that this kind of genre should get this size from the reward pool pie and use their downvotes towards it, both the creator of the content and the voters lose out on this. They'll either have to find a better balance in the long run or find more support to negate the downvotes. It's all community driven and as someone who's been working really hard to distribute this pool as wide as possible so the wisdom of the crowd is more effective and has a bigger voice to be able to possibly over-throw a "bad whale" that might singlehandedly be the reason most of the rewards get removed I can tell you that if this content was indeed sought out and appreciated as much there would be a lot more comments about the downvotes and posts talking about the unfairness they are witnessing, etc, or comments in general on his posts that often get trending time due to the autovotes hitting at 5 minutes and being really big along with front-runners maximizing on the curation rewards and it yet lacking a lot of engagement.
So in other words, you can't compare hive with bitchute (not too familiar with them but pretty sure they don't have an inflation based reward pool) or any other centralized platforms that rely on adrevenue which most of the time is the cause to demonetization, banning and censorship. Downvotes are not censorship, yes they may remove some visibility off of trending or the hot list but you'll still see his post in your feed or have to click a button to show the content. The text is forever in the chain unless witnesses are going crazy and hardforking past blocks, funds and accounts out like a certain chain has started doing, cough cough.
I used to sometimes post links to youtube videos on my blogs but they kept getting deleted from youtube - and after 7 days on Hive I can't edit the post - so these days, if in doubt, I upload the video to Bitchute and link to that copy. There are no rewards, but it stays there and plays OK. Other people are using 3Speak or LBRY for the same thing, but Bitchute seems to load faster and work better here in NZ.
What I really hope to see on Hive is an end to the control of content by using flagging - it's not about rewards so much as having a bit of respect for the content curators and not trying to determine who deserves what. Over my time on Steemit I saw just where that leads, as I'm sure you have too, and we know that some of the very accounts doing the flagging are also the ones who repeatedly "raped" the reward pool.
In this case, are we talking about a bad whale or a witness? - this stuff is all totally over my head, but something is not right here.
That's like saying you wish your content on Reddit wouldn't get downvoted but it's okay if that same user goes to trending daily no matter what he submits. Surely you must see a problem with excessive autovotes that possibly no one checks on, right? I'm a bit biased cause I only curate manually but I'm pretty sure the amount of autodownvotes are a tiny percentage compared to autovotes because the former don't pay you anything and the latter does. So no, they aren't getting paid for downvoting and since you mentioned you can't edit post past 7 days I'm assuming you've not been around during some updates (hardforks) and missed out on a lot of changes. I'd recommend checking HF22 out (or maybe it was 21) that added the 25% downvote pool and why there is a need for it because literally no one was using downvotes for disagreement of rewards which meant that once in that position of receiving excessive autovotes content creators could literally post anything and make the rewards all the time while the rest of the platform and ecosystem suffered for it. I understand the respect part and that's why I often at least leave a comment explaining my downvote and I also understand why it is something difficult to grasp for newcomers and older users why there is a need for downvotes to be used and how they get a vote, see their post hit x $ and already count it as money in their pocket which makes it so much harder when they receive downvotes.
I'm no stranger to them either, after the EIP I was using them to disincentivize profitable bid bot vote buying and fighting off some very closed voting rings that only voted on the same authors on a daily basis and they retaliated on my account and my project's for months. It's just something that exists right now and it's fairly new and will be a new feeling for many on the receiving end of their first downvotes for any reason. Of course if the reason is something completely personal or dumb there will be other standing up such as @theycallmedan who showed up to check what's going on to cancel them out, but it's not easy to defend these posts trending daily and making the whole hive.blog frontpage look like r/conspiracy. Again no offense and I don't mind the genre and I may realize that Max's content is less conspiracy-ish than the rest of stuff that gets the same votes from the same bigger accounts but we're more than just that and the small negatives that come with something as experimental with this tech and economy as the newly added downvotes will surely not outweigh the rest of the pros that this technology provides, and one of them is true censorship resistance. While we may not have a truly decentralized video storing solution yet (i know 3speak is working on getting there but maybe bitchute already is (i don't know)) you can rest assured that this text from me and you and anyone on this platform will never be altered.
Oh and yeah, you can edit posts older than 7 days now (that HF change was a long time ago).
Thanks for the tip about editing older posts - I think an ongoing thing here is that most content creators take no notice of hardforks, back end, or any tech stuff (I generally don't myself) - so we have no idea if something changes - I'm coming up to my four year anniversary on using Steemit and then Hive, but I don't know most of this stuff.
And I wouldn't touch reddit with a 10 foot pole!
I love Max Igan's work. I watch his content regularly. Why would anyone downvote anyone unless the person was plagerizing another's work, spamming, phishing, or using the comments to promote their own work or agenda - is a MYSTERY to me. But it seems there are people here on Hive who are paid to downvote or who are here to downvote - and I just do not see how this promotes unity and creativity. Max Igan and other's like him are getting banned on mainstream channels - having them on here creates a vibrant community of FREE SPEECH. But - it still seems to be a hierarchical structure with the higher-ups believing they have the authority to govern others - and that just means that it will end up where steemit has ended up. Until people get that there is NO human authority - we will just end up with tyranny over and over again.