We've always had these whale wars, flag wars, downvote-happy whales, and at least some communities of folks on Steem/Hive that are very much anti-free speech, and only care about their own stake investments. For a long time, they didn't seem to go so hog wild with their flagging of content...
But now those folks are all bought into the Cult of COVID, and one of the primary tenets of the cult is it's similarity to The Inquisition. For those drinking Bill Gates' kool-aid, the most important thing to do is to attack and attempt to silence all "blasphemers."
They're generally completely unwilling to discuss or defend their beliefs/statements, because to do so would be to allow blasphemy into their own minds, and then they'd risk being canceled or called a "conspiracy theorist" as well.
I think we're getting ever closer to a need for something like Hive, but launched fresh, and truly dedicated to Freedom & Truth - with the proof of Stake end of things turned WAY down, and some basic shared goals/ideas/principles. Been chatting with folks about creating something for quite a while now, but the dev side has yet to appear at all.
It would be nice if the Hive community would come together to take action to either reform Hive or generate a layer 2 token that can overcome these issues, but as others have pointed out, if a layer 2 token explodes then that makes the layer 1 Hive owners wealthier too, which could even result in them then shifting to dominate the layer 2 project. It's a complicated challenge. An ideal solution would be an entirely other blockchain that's specifically oriented to research and truth seeking (aka science). Unfortunately, any DPOS system that promotes truth seeking can be dominated by 'the science industry' if it gets noticed enough - so there's a real hole in the marketplace for an algorithm that overcomes this somehow.
this is hilarious
The following videos illustrate the background to the situation. Justin Sun demonstrates the implementation in the real world of what I am pointing to.
I find This Post, and the the Week'$ worth of META produced HIGHLY productive#
HIVE!Regards
How about content creators like @dbroze put in some effort to bring some value to Hive aside from just cross-posting content and expecting autovotes to continue feeding them rewards? It really isn't a lot of effort to edit your links not to show Steemit but Hive instead so they could at least bring in some traffic to their literally dead posts on Hive. You'd really think it's not too much to ask when they're receiving way more rewards on Hive than most of their other socials combined. If that's not the least thing they can do, aside from learning how Hive works, why it would be better for their followers to be here and be rewarded for their attention and consumption in the form of votes filtering out the comment section then I really don't see a point in them receiving "free" rewards forever and will do my best to protect the reward pool from that.
It doesn't matter how big they are outside of Hive, at some point if they don't adapt to bring some value back we should all adjust the rewards they receive else we're just pissing value in the wind.
I agree that there is a LOT more that content creators could do to promote Hive, especially those that earn their coin in absentia, as it were. This is true for many types of CCs accross the Covid/allElse spectrum and it certainly also includes those that challenge the accepted Covid narrative (Dbroze, Corbettreport, Dollarvigilante etc).
But there are those - like Urasoul, Jasonliberty, who are very present and yet are being heavily downvoted - it seems to me, for holding the basic position of being eloquent and relatively influential/wellknown folk on Hive who challenge the Covid narrative.
There are various reasons given for the d/vs, but, when boiled down (and down and down) to its basic elements, the main one (even if it be the elephant in some room) has to be this position of challenging the Covid narrative!
Again I totally commend you for your seemingly tireless engagement and reasoned discussions.... might you consider contrasting this with the approach of someone like Azircon (who does engage to an extent it must be said) in this very post: where powerFlexing is expressed like a jackboot coming down. I have observed this particular pattern before on various other posts and it is not an approach that seems reasonable, rather one that acts and speaks with awareness of the possession/support of vastly superior forces and thus an assurance of 'victory'.
Whatever your own position on the Covid narrative, I am speaking to you (and exposing myself to Azircon) only coz I know you actually give a fuck about the platform. However, I do not think you can build inclusively by excluding selectively and it also seems that the energy with which a work is undertaken is the energy that resides within it. If this means anything to you, then you will know it is significant.
From my position as someone who sees huge cracks in the Covid narrative and, frankly, wonders why they are not glaringly obvious, it seems that Hive is becoming a version of FB, YT and the rest of the Twittering gang, at least in this regard. It feels like the space in which to express oneself - and report on what one sees as going on (which affects us ALL) is being squeezed.
This squeezing IS going on on the Hive b/c. From what I have seen and read, your individual version of squeezing is free from bullying, free from baiting those with less 'power'. But there is some shit-ugly squeezing going on, at least as experienced by those upon whom the jackboot falls!
.......and, ya know, what if there is a point to that shit about the cracks in the narrative!? - that's potentially a biggie to consider, and therefore, I guess, usually left alone huh?
The extremes look poles apart, yet there is much overlap. We are in this together!
I humbly present you with the above ideas to consider from a perspective on some issues that may well be opposite to your own in terms of opinion, but perhaps somewhat aligned in terms of right action.
You don't need to respond to these mutterings btw :)!
While I don't agree with the ways some challenge the covid narrative or the effects of it that's not the only reason I downvote posts. I removed a downvote from urasoul when I noticed it was downvoted close to 0 on content.
It seems you're assuming I only target covid posts with downvotes, which isn't true. Other than the reason in the initial comment you replied to I also look out for other overrewarded posts of any genre mainly due to autovotes/blind votes like rancho/haejin or other weird ones where certain autovotes keep landing on literally dead silent accounts that only post for the extraction of value alone but not use Hive in any other way.
You saying the covid narrative is being squeezed is easy to counter as it's been a MAJORITY of trending over the past year and a half with so many of these inactive influencers constantly trending with close to 0 interactions or fucks given by neither regular users or those who agree and would maybe like to see them more often. They have the choice to follow and continue to do so but them taking the rewards they've been taking for so long continously is not something I agree with. Doesn't matter if they post about covid, 5g towers or the second coming of christ if it were to happen tomorrow. Eventually it's too much relatively compared to what all other genres/communities are earning from the reward pool and how they use Hive in comparison. Not to mention how bad it makes Hive look to have dead posts with 1-3 views on 3speak on trending constantly due to the same autovotes from the same supporters.
It's weird to me that this is the only time my downvotes are questioned this much from other people, because other times it's mostly the author alone who has something against it (obviously due to rewards). Why aren't you asking me why I've been downvoting certain travel posts or food posts I've initially even voted up myself only to see being overrewarded by the days end on trending.
There might be some purely downvoting these posts for the covid reasons but that doesn't mean everyone is, even so it's their stake or delegated trusted stake and they can do what they want with, if you don't like it then counter them or find more support to (as we're seeing happening to urasoul with newsflash). Will that mean his posts will yet again start to get overrewarded if some of the main downvoters quit? Maybe. Will that mean I'd then start to downvote them again because I don't think they deserve the rewards they're getting depending on each specific post I happen to curate (up or down)? Most likely.
I take your point about being challenged on Covid d/vs but not on food/travel ones. However, in my opinion as one who feels strongly that Humanity is currently being subjected to major psyops which are detrimental to everyone's wellbeing, the issue is of much more importance than food or travel. I mean, the 'covid issue' is itself extremely polarising so it's not surprising IMO that you should rcv a great(er) number of comments questioning your 'squeezing'.
Regarding Covid narrative posts trending on Hive, a few thoughts to offer my perspective:
I also take your point that your d/voting is more balanced and spread out than just on covid posts. I did not actually think it was otherwise with You.
Ok Acidyo, I drop it here: I feel you've listened to what I've expressed and that's good enough for me. I too feel I have understood your position better and should it come to pass (as it well may) that I get a d/v from you I won't sob into my sox :D
I don't disagree with your comment about dbroze.
I am a little puzzled on something though, so Hive went from about 15 cents to aroun $1.38 USD recently, without and huge downvote campaigns being waged on anyone.
So what is it exactly that you think you are doing when you go around downvoting posts you think are 1. Overrewarded or 2. Disagree with?
Do you think you are somehow creating value by doing those two things?
Downvoting spam/plaigiarism/theft/gore and stuff like that, you will get no complaint from me against those things. Just because "downvoted due to disagreement on rewards" was a thing that Steem/Hive put in their "whitepaper/blue paper" doesn't make it a valid thing to do.
In all honesty, there's essentially no point in downvoting overrewarded posts, Hive is decentralized enough. The more downvotes target people for "over rewarded" and for "disagreement on rewards" and for "i don't like your content" the more value you are subtracting from the platform. There really isn't almost anyone on here who even comes close to using sock puppet accounts to upvote themselves and make tons of money from garbage content anymore, is there? Is there even 1 person doing that right now?
The totality of what you think you are doing, and what you actually are achieving is two different things. You think by downvoting urasoul and other posts like it that you are going to somehow get the price of Hive up and that people are going to rally behind your efforts to do so, and you can see the evidence that only 2 people agree with you and the vast majority do not.
So why continue to do this? You are only going to make people pool together more HP against you, to stop supporting your project(lose delegations). It isn't a good look from a PR standpoint what's going on here.
You're making it really easy for urasoul, me, and others like us to get more support I hope you realize.
Mostly 1.
I've been downvoting posts even before the Hive price uptrend, mostly focusing on those that bring close to 0 value to Hive, barely try, etc. You can check my own and ocdb's downvote history somehow probably. Another one has been ranchorelaxo casting 10 daily votes at a whim within a minute on whatever is trending, often landing on the same people constantly who themselves get there by a lot of autovotes and in my opinion the content doesn't deserve the rewards.
I often ignore those who get it the first time, no matter the content, cause that's part of the lottery in pob and other times they may not make as much, but if the votes are constant, auto/blind and on top of that the content is mediocre, farmy (being posted daily just for the autovotes), author never makes an effort to forfeit part of the rewards depending on the content/effort that went into each specific post they make but still end up with the same rewards, then yes I have something against that and will attempt to protect the reward pool from it so everyone else receives those rewards instead.
There's tons of reasons why autovotes aren't good, have a bad effect on both the authors who become farmy/lazy/push themselves to post for those guaranteed votes and others who aren't on those lists and rely on manual votes or smaller ones with more effort/activity and often times better content. One way to disincentivize them is to reduce their returns a little, bear in mind I say a little cause I'm not a fan of zero'ing post rewards on content and when I say content I don't mean posts like this one we're commenting in right now that has a bunch of quotes and revolve around previous downvotes.
Good autovotes are those who spend time to adjust the vote strength, remove and add new authors to it frequently and do a little more effort to make sure it's fair compared to everyone else. There's some that do it well, many that don't because they either don't care or just enjoy earning passively too much. The linear curve has made it easier for autovoters to not care, especially those who were interested in maximizing returns, so one of the few ways to combat that and attempt to get them to do better is by downvotes. It's not always about the author alone.
Why not? Say price of Hive goes to $10, do you expect people to make $1k-$5k per post? Let maximizers and lazy autovoters just keep at it when there's a lot more users that have joined and are earning close to nothing? Or would you attempt to make it a little bit more fair, pressure the autovoters to distribute their votes a bit more and give the authors fairer rewards than the unrealistic sustainability we witnessed back in 2018 with $10+ sbd prices or the still ongoing problem you can quickly notice on the corrupted chain where it's the same 10 people trending constantly, making thousands per garbage posts while the rest are being sold or abused.
Downvoting for disagreement of rewards is perfectly valid. You complaining about it doesn't change that fact that it helps distribution, something I've worked on the past 5 years. If we had had downvote mana during the Haejin times we would've had a much better distribution today with way more dolphins and orca's that decided to continue staying staked and ride this journey. I don't want to see something like that again and this whole stigma of downvotes as if all downvotes are bad, it's ridiculous in my opinion.
Haejin and Rancho are totally different than most DV scenarios that are happening lately. They were doing 10 posts a day of nonsense TA which is all bunk analysis. TA is tarot card reading.
Also, almost every post made on LeoFinance is also trash and I dont think I've ever seen their stuff downvoted, their community has a lot of haejin minded people posting number go up nonsense.
A few bad actors always upvoting themselves and selling it eventually they dilute themselves and the problem solves itself without downvoting, though its slower.
Steem covered this fallacy of "everyone earns" in their white paper, stating that most people will join here hoping to earn and it's not possible and that they are hopelessly wasting their time on something that wont happen.
Same thing happens on any platform.
All the people flocking to onlyfans wont earn almost anything ever, or new streamers signing up to twitch almost none will make more than 100 bucks ever. Systems always reward the first and the most skilled who are in early, extremely rare for a new comer to be able to earn. It's just not how this system is setup nor others.
Increasing inflation by a higher amount would change that, hives inflation needs to be 10xed or 20xed. The bandaid is dving when what we need is higher inflation to fix everything
How do they dilute themselves without downvotes?
Your onlyfans/twitch comparisons aren't good. We have thousands of accounts being able to reward anyone they want with votes, tips, subscriptions (recurring payments), etc. On those other platforms they all just flock to where the majority is, the big influencers earn most of the rewards, there's no incentive to go look for smaller ones. You're literally making my point more valid that those who earn too much should receive some downvotes so everyone else makes more, thanks.
If an account sells any of their earnings they have less overall power in terms of the % owned.
If you have 1mil hp, earn 100k hp in a year, sell 50k in the year, you have less % of the overall hp now. The only way to not lose % is to keep powered up.
Over time everyone who sells gets diluted slowly.
In year 5 you might have .5% of total hp and selling some now in year 6 you have .485% of total hp. In year 10 you might have .42%
The inflation is too slow to correct for the initial distribution, so the inflation being higher could fix that problem, while also keeping the price low so that people dont make too much on over voted posts
Ah, thought you were talking about selling votes off-chain. It'd only be the author diluting himself in that case while the voter earngs more, content wouldn't be fairly rewarded in terms of pob and that's another reason why downvotes are needed.
I'm not so much of a fan of the branding but then 'hive' isn't great either. I'll check it out when I get a chance, thanks.
Funny, blurt was used as an example of a runaway milking platform, and that's the first I'd heard of it. You can keep the hive self-tending to curb milking abuses and just get a better feed with a front-end that filters out people whose downvote/upvote you don't respect. Shouldn't be too hard to code, directing every link to peak.d or ecency. I'd imagine it would be helpful to add this feature to those projects, if they value the user experience.
Nah, let's keep throwing dust votes on all posts to mimimize the risk of downvotes on what ctime would actually like to upvote to maximize returns instead. Who wants to build something when you can just bitch about stuff while constantly only thinking about your own ass?