About Hive Watchers

in GEMS4 years ago

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Hello, I would like to express my thoughts about Hive Watchers. Over the past few weeks, I've been reading and watching the Hive Watchers Discord channels to see what is going on. I think everybody should. Here in hive we are a community and we should support each other in every way. Even if this means criticizing our friends. I would like to share some of my thoughts about the Watchers.

Customer Support

This is by far the weakest point of the Watchers. There is no effective way to inform users and public about what is going on about the blacklisting process. Many of the effected users - including wrongly accused ones - waiting for days to get an answer to their questions. When they get an answer it is usually not pleasant. The way staff approach to people is very rough and rude. I understand that they are working with good intentions and try to keep hive as clean as possible. But this is not the way to do it. You can't just treat everybody like they are notorious criminals. People , even though they made mistakes, deserves to be treated like human beings. You can not treat a new case based on your assumptions on previous one. You need to treat every person with open mind and willingness to help. I think this is where most improvement can be done. The one who speaks to the users should be a calm and kind person who does not allow his own personal opinions interfere the case.

Lack of Information

This is the second big problem about the Watchers. Anybody who spend couple of days reading the appeal channels can say that majority of people are looking for information about their situations. They are often left in the dark and they have no idea what to do. This leads to others problems for them like writing other irrelevant channels to seek help or writing other users to help them. This results the appeal time to be elongated. Hive Watchers comment on posts are informative about the situation but it is not enough to explain everything. In addition to that , because everybody lives in different part of the world, one person can not answer every question or request in the channel. The time difference won't allow this. This leads more people to stay in the dark and feel ignored in the process.

Not enough staff

This is the another issue I find that causing problems. There are not enough staff to handle the cases which grows everyday. Watchers need at least one person for each hemisphere. This way everybody can find a person to talk to. People are searching a human to explain themselves, get information, or at least to be heard. Instead they get banned, ignored. I must say there are certain cases that , sufficient explanation is given to the user many times but they continue to spam the channels.

No Proxy Appeals

This is the only thing that I can not understand why there is a such rule. Everybody should has a right to be defended by somebody. Maybe the person who is accused are not in a mental state to represent themselves, maybe their English language skills are not good enough to express themselves . Maybe their social skills are not that good to talk about in public. Everybody should have a chance to be heard and defend themselves. We are an international community here and language barrier is a true problem when it comes to explain certain things. This rule is not logical and should be abandoned.

What can be done?

Here is my recommendation for improvements.

Proper information about each case to public and users
I cant stress this enough. The information and evidences about a case should be accessible to everybody who are interested. I want to know why a certain user is blacklisted and what are the evidences. How the decision to permanently blacklist a user is made. What criterias are considered. How is the appeal time is determined? What is the rules behind all this process? Who writes the rules?

Better customer service
The person currently handling the cases should be replaced. The attitude towards users are at best rude. There should be a calm and kind person to talk to people even though they are criminals. Judges in courts are the one who speaks calmly and according to rules. They wont allow their emotions interfere the case. There should be a system and rules about relationship between user and Watchers. When you send a ticket to a customer services, you expect them to return to you in a specific time and there are rules to regulate the process. In this case Watchers discord is a mess. Nobody get the help they need.

Who is watching the Watchers?
We are proud of the community in hive and we talk about it every chance we get. Lets use this community to form a body to watch the Watchers. Right now, everybody trusts their judgement and good intentions. But this is not how it should be. What is source of the power of the watchers?

Making a chart the explain the punishments
I see in the channels Watchers can determine a result of the case based on his own opinions in some cases. He changes and bend the rules around his own will. Sometimes he change the punishment of a case to another thing, sometimes adds to the punishment. There should be a chart to determine the punishment of certain act. If a certain act results in permanent blacklist, everybody should know this transparently and every case should receive the equal punishment.

Everything written here is my own opinion. I appreciate the effort that put in to make the Hive a better place. This can be achieved if we better ourselves before we look others. If everybody look in the mirror today, they can be a better judge tomorrow.


For those who are following me for art posts I am sorry this is not one of them. You can watch my latest painting in my youtube channel. And follow me on instagram. I post the finished piece in instagram before I upload it to youtube and post it here.

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There are no proxy appeals for two reasons: 1. because people who have tried to 'defend' others have gotten death threats when they failed and 2. because people who don't have anyone supposedly influential they know would be at a disadvantage. There are no favorites. Everyone is treated equal regardless of how eloquently they sidle up to others. There will never be any favorites. The person who barely speaks English and who just started a few months ago is just as important as the person who attended Steemfests.

I get that you were trying to help. There is little staff because this isn't a job most can do and there's a reason for that.

What about setting defined rules that the community can judge your performance against? It seems, based on my perspective, that rules are made up on the fly.

Fair enough reasons to now allow proxy appeals to me.

Too little staff indeed to put in place something too complex.

I'm still waiting for your reply stop playing games and just review my account and take me off your fake blacklist my content is original and you know it (25th may 2020) you need a whole new team

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Might be time for HW to bring in other people to interact with people looking for appeal or have questions.

I think the current members of the team are playing way too many roles. Let the investigators do their work. Let someone else tend the “talking side”.

Overextending the way they are right now only creates stress and resentment when being questioned.

It's a thankless, tedious job to monitor the blockchain for abuse. Maybe a proposal to pay moderators in HIVE would be in order. I haven't really been active since the HIVE fork and the demise of steemflagrewards, but it has always been a grassroots project with only a handful of people trying to do a huge job for no reward except revenge flags and personal attacks.

SFR isn't completely dead. @anthonyadavissii has been taking his time bringing it back.

This year has been crazy for everyone so far.

I have huge respect to the work @hivewatchers do and they are needed in a platform like Hive. I myself tried to defend a friend who just joined the platform a couple of weeks ago and got blacklisted immediately for plagiarism. He did perform plagiarism but a warning would be fair instead of blacklisting, especially for new users.

One more thing I would like to add is that this person I tried defending did write an honest "Apology" post today and the only answer he got was a "X" at his message on the Hivewatchers Discord channel. No instruction or advices about what he has to do to get of the blacklist.

Something must change in the way Hivewatchers operate.
As I stated I higly respect their efforts of keeping Hive clean from trolls and plagiarism but their attitude and replies towards users must definitely change.
Just my 2 cents (actually 10 cents hehehe).
Great post buddy.
Resteemed

I agree, newcomers should be treated like humans that don't know all the state of the art of posting content. Some slack should be given to first offenders if they are willing to do an apology post and appeal their case in respect.

That will unfortunately make these content creator run on another platform and if asked about the Hive network won't give a good recommendation. Where just an explanation with a warning would have made most good intention people improve on the quality of the content they post.

Agreed! I hope something will change soon.

The art of posting content?

Who in their right mind thinks its Ok just to rip-off someone else's work, post it on Hive and expect to get rewarded for doing so?

Real content original creators have no issues.

Who in their right mind thinks everyone knows every rules and every laws of every systems in which they navigate ?

I'm just saying learning is part of the on boarding process and people should be given a second chance and be strongly encouraged to respect basic rules.

But sometime the line isn't that clear, a newcomers can do a great article with is 95% original content and put an image of someone else that isn't free tagged as free for use and they don,t think of citing the source because they don't know about it.

My point is : Please educate newcomers instead of nuking them which could result in them just leaving the BlockChain where they could have learned and improve to become a fully original content creator.

We were all newbies and dump on some subjects at some point in life and will probably continue to be on many subject. Maybe it's crystal clear for you, but I would recommend you put yourself in someone else shoes for whom it's not that clear.


This post was shared and voted inside the discord by the curators team of discovery-it
Join our community! hive-193212
Discovery-it is also a Witness, vote for us here

Oi, unappointed police running wild. Let the community decide with downvotes, not bots written that lack human judgement.

Right now, everybody trusts their judgement and good intentions.

Well, not everybody. I’m active on Hive but only vaguely aware of their existence, and know nothing of their judgement or intentions. It seems that many assume that all are active on Discord, but there are those of us who avoid it like the plague.

Recently I quit most of the discord I joined( I was in 30+ something , now its 7 ) . Discord sometimes do more harm then good.

fantastic post! I once myself had to deal with the watchers and it is was an absolutely terrible experience (I think we spoke to the ssame person there ..). Obviously we need something like this on the chain to fight abuse, but we have to make it clear to the watchers that they are also being watched by the community! No power trips please... Like you said we need transparency.

@tipu curate

Thank you @tobetada , I also appreciate and support the existence of the Watchers and what they are trying to do here. While we try to improve the quality of the Hive, we should try to improve the Watchers as well.

I would be interested in why you feel this is needed on chain. I don't see the value that HiveWatchers brings to the table when spam is limited by a users Resource Credits and the community at large has free downvotes to curate with.

@patrickulrish Its not just about spam. Plagiarism, ID theft and other seriously harmful actions are taking place everyday. Downvotes are free, yes but not everybody can use them without fear of getting downvoted back from those people who has hundreds of accounts. And not everybody have enough time to investigate those posts everyday. Most of the users in Hive are content creators. They are spending their time on creating content. Fighting with abuse is a hard job that not everybody can do. But everybody should be careful of what content they are voting. There are bigger issues about mass abuse. I believe what Hive Watchers doing is necessary but needs improvements.

The problem is they don't specialize in those fields nor maintain different lists to my knowledge. That means I have to judge their list at it's lowest denominator of abuse reasoning and thus I judge it by their attacks on "spam". That being said even that determination is becoming very questionable based on events like this one where they simply didn't like the effort a user was placing.

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That subjectiveness is the most fertile breeding ground for tyranny I've seen on this chain. The community gives them trust to fight actual abuse and they're terrorising users for posting pictures that have near no rewards. Where are they on whales with self described shitposts? This group remains silent and does nothing. If they are attacking small content creators but leaving big "low effort" posts alone then are they really doing anything to help the band of small users?

The ID theft lists are maintained on a separate list based on input from more than HiveWatchers is my understanding. If I am off base here I would love to know what HiveWatchers contributes to these lists. I'd also love to see some for of their documentation as you described for what this group considers spam and abuse. I've requested that multiple times in their Discord with no response.

Most importantly I hope condenser operators are recognizing the poor judgement of groups like HiveWatchers and makes these kinds of blacklist opt-in by end users. There's no reason I should be forced to be influenced by one small subgroup of user's interpretation of what is supposed to be on a censorship resistant chain. Instead allow blacklist markets to form and users can follow lists that actually do the things you described above instead of going after people like you'll see in any number of their appeals channel.

How did you manage to get off the blacklist

well, it did take some time. But I had to convince them that the spamming I did was actually to test the system. I wrote a post about it in which I addressed the issue. But like @ruen pointed out, it's hard to find a person who will listen to you. Often you are being treated as a criminal who doesn't have any rights; this is the thing we have to improve. But obviously the question is how? Who wants to spend their time with this job? It's not very fulfilling, that's for sure

Thanks for replying 🤝 and I agree we do need something like hivewatchers but it needs to be run by some more professional people who actually give people a chance instead of just putting that ridiculous bot on people's posts that just spams away the same comment over and over again

excellent observations
most likely we need to create a new proposal

!discovery 30

Purely going off this with no other information at all, it sounds like they need more front facing staff.

Great post @ruen. Hope the question that The blacklisted ppl have from Hive Watchers will answered soon and solved the things that need to be solved! We have to know how our Hive journey will continiou !

Hope they change their mind on your ban, seems to me like a newcomers mistake without bad intention in your case. Good luck

@orlandumike Thank you for your words appriciated :) i need comment like that to keep me in motivation to continiou in Hive community

@orlandumike Thank you for your words appriciated :) i need comment like that to keep me in motivation to continiou in Hive community

Maybe it's easier to create a new account, but they could also flag you for that if you keep both active at the same time.

I'm sorry for you, in my opinion, you did a bad beginner mistake (not clever to copy paste more than half of your content from another source without citing it) that should made you warned and on a temporary watch list, but not blacklisted forever.

In my beginning I made few mistakes in my first posts :

  • I used few images that weren't free without sourcing them
    • A member of the french community told me it's not ok and I change to Pexels and Pixabay with sourcing the images
  • copy paste my whole article from my own posts on WordPress
    • Cheetah warned me, I was not in agreement since it was my content and I wanted it to be more readable on many social networks, but I decided to respect Steem watch dogs warning at the time to continue on the blockChain, but it was my choice.

So with a human respectful warning, I quickly correct my behavior and improved the quality of my publication here and elsewhere too which is positive and made me contribute to Steem and Hive since the beginning of 2018 and I actively try to recruit few people to join and help the newcomers in the french communities while sharing my Steem and Hive publications on many related social network trying to bring more traffic and user to the BlockChain.

I feel that with a so rude welcoming, you will either quit or be less motivated.
If your doing gaming Videos here 2 alternatives :

  • DLive : Mostly gaming video community that spanned from Steem a while ago and now have it's own cryptocurrency and ecosystem
  • LBRY : Peer2Peer decentralized video or memes platform that should resist censure with it's own rewards in cryptocurrencies with a gamification system to earn a little free LBC while joining the platform

Good luck with the case and your channels

@orlandumike thank you for the info my friend :) The i was unbanned from blacklisted tho i believe tomoorow the ? will leave also :)

Yes I seen the discussion on Discord, some people put some sense into them.

Do your best to do only original content, reference links and use only your image or free images (ex : Pexels or PixaBay).

But having your vidéos on many platform may also be a good idea if you find a way to automate it.

DTube can be linked to your Hive account and give you crypto too.

Although I'm not aware of the rules for posting the same video everywhere concerning HiveWatchers, maybe you should ask before this time ;)

Some thinks it doesn't bring value, but I personally think decentralizing your videos and income steams on many social networks is better, although it takes time.

On my side, I post first on Hive, then I share the PeakD.com links on Twitter, Minds, VK and Facebook groups. For images I repost original images on Facebook so the 360 view can works and I want to separate my personal life with photography from my politic views shared on Hive so I try not to have links of Hive from my Facebook personal profile available to everyone or new friends.

If I was doing videos, I would probably be on LBRY and maybe also on BitChute, DLive, DTube and YouTube if it helps me spread the information.

I went to Greece for a month in my World Tour, really like the cyclade island, especially Koufonissia and many good restaurants and thinks to see in Athena.

Wow.. Just when I was about to do a post like this, I saw your post.. Frankly speaking @blocktrades should take a look at all this..

On a personal front, I felt more victimised because I was part of steem and steemfest.. It was more like when I accepted my mistake and asked what needs to be done, all I was given was "This isn't steem.. Don't try using your reputation".. I still don't know what reputation was I trying to use??

In the meantime someone tried to scam me on #discord using @theycallmedan's ID.. when I posted about this, I was blocked on Discord.. Which made me realise that these guys are just playing up with whoever has come from steem and have a personal vendetta against them and want a REVENGE..

I then had the discord ban removed when I shared screenshots of everything on one of my post comments by @guiltyparties.. The concerned assured that necessary would be done but nothing till now..

I was later informed that, no one can do any mistake and strong action will be taken against them.. But if a person tries to "misquote" and try to create unnecessary tension, no action will be taken against them as that time no one is checking HIVE.. Only if you genuinely forget to add a source for the first time in so many years of blogging, people are checking HIVE..

Oh yeah, I know my account will be taken down soon because I'm using resources like tagging @blocktrades, @anyx etc..

But I have lost my hopes on HIVE.. and I just post because that's my only source of income during this pandemic situation..

But who really bothers?? These guys are still not going to look at this matter nor post..

By the comments I realised, all that needed to be done was a appeal post I guess.. But this could have been told directly than behaving rude and simply dragging issues and creating unrest..

Sorry for my outburst here..

Also these guys just ask us to appeal on discord.. And if we dare to do it, they behave absolutely rudely and just keep talking about "Steem".. That's their only response 😂

Great post, I kinda feel the same and was doing the same "watching" as you were doing.

Your analogy with the judge is a good one, people should be treated as human with decency and without rudeness especially after being down voted, put on a blacklist which is quite stressful if your intention weren't bad.

Permanent ban for newcomers mistakes (even if it's an illegal act in some countries) isn't what will make Hive become a top platform on the Internet.

Anyhow, their work is a good addition to the blockchain, but as you mentioned a more human and less totalitarian attitude especially towards first offender would improve a lot their service and create less stress and frustrations in my opinion.

Yes, there is indeed a big problem with Hivewatchers. For me, there are 2 negative points with Hivewatcher:
1- Hivewatcher is just a simple Hiver who has decided to proclaim himself "Police" of the platform". By their qualities as developers, they manage to have a power over us. By having the power to blacklist hivers, to apply large downvotes, they take possession of the platform's ideology, which is against the concept of ​​the decentralization.
2- I would also like to put my finger on the fact that Hivewatcher allows itself to do exactly what they themselves forbid to us! They copy and paste, they always use the same image in their post, they get importants rewards from upvotes of inactive accounts, in short, they don't follow their own rules!

Thanks for this post. I've been blacklisted for making a honest mistake on another account and they blacklisted this account for no reason I tried to appeal my case and got blocked on the discord channel I've documented everything let's connect on Instagram my account name is @kgakakillerg something really needs to be done about watchers they have no idea what they are doing and should not really have the power to blacklist anyone they spam people's posts with the same comment over and over again telling lies it's not a good look 👀

Thank you for bringing this to surface.

Good luck to you and your twin sister too!

Hope the situation for you and your twin sister get resolved.

Permanent ban would probably make Hive lost 2 good photograph content creators or lower your motivation...