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
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 4/12)
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.
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