During the ongoing disagreements on Hive around downvoting and related issues, at least one of the large stakeholders involved was telling people that he disliked seeing posts from, to simply leave Hive. While this clearly goes against the creation of an inclusive culture and social space, it raises other important questions that the Hive community would do well to address as well.
Web 3.0 was born with fanfare and so too was Steem (now Hive) using phrases such as 'code is law', 'trustlessness' and 'decentralised'. These are all interesting and potentially evolutionary concepts for online community based software, but the fine points are not tried and tested, we are the guinea pigs in the experiment of web 3.0 social spaces! We are also the empowered creators, so it behoves us to take time out to reflect, imagine and ask questions about how we need Web 3.0 social systems to function.
Background: Numbers Can Make You Numb. Social Systems Require More Than Just Maths.
During my years as a software developer for pro software companies, it became abundantly obvious to me that the trend I saw at university of coders being overly focused/reliant on mentality and numbers was continuing on into the wider world. I'm sure we are all aware of the idea that it is common for people who are 'very good with numbers' to also not be so 'good' with social skills and empathy. Big businesses recognise this and tend to hire people who are socially adept and empathic for some roles and then completely ignore those skills for roles that require a strong logical focus, such as coding. The space in the middle where logic COULD be used to support (but not contain) really high levels of empathic understanding and wisdom in the more logic oriented workers is typically ignored. I call this 'the gap of heartlessness' and it is the same gap that empowers the wealth gap on our planet, among many other problems.
The culture of a space is created by it's members and either is arrived at by consensus or perhaps involves an interaction of different sub cultures that either work together harmoniously or that may even fight and struggle for dominance. A general community like Hive, which has no real requirements to entry other than having an email/phone and a few dollars, has the potential to be unusually varied and broad in terms of it's culture and the range of types of thinking present. Those who seek to grow Hive and it's market value cannot afford to overlook this point! Any strategy for growing the number of users will fail as long as sub cultures are not respected. In a sense, the domination and intimidation of sub cultures is not really any different to racism or sexism - it's just that it is targeted towards the way people think rather than the way people's bodies are defined.
Optimal Use Of The Hive Author Rewards Pool?
With all this in mind, I want to return to the issues of the ongoing reward pool debate on Layer 1 Hive. The reward pool for post authors is a shared feature of Hive that everyone has access to, regardless of the level of their stake. The system generates inflation and it is awarded to users based on the voting patterns of the community automatically (code is law). As we mostly are aware, this means that Hive token holders will find the value of their tokens decreasing if they don't create content to receive rewards or if demand for Hive doesn't essentially increase in the market. This has led to people 'content farming' and forming 'circle jerks' where stakeholders constantly generate content and upvote each other in order to 'protect their investment' - at the expense of destroying the 'proof of brain' algorithm which has always underpinned Hive and which is intended to help creators to gain exposure for their own greatness, relevance or ingenuity when creating content.
The circle jerking of circular voting of friends has long been frowned upon but is a logical outcome of the design of the network among short term thinkers. It is challenging to focus your time into understanding how to best make decisions to help market and grow such a network as Hive in a way that doesn't override your own needs as an investor. Everyone is always making decisions that lead to trying to find a balance between self interest and not destroying the sentiment/morale in the community space (which ultimately harms self interest too in the long term). In general, the 'watchers' of the community step in and take action to try to stop these things as far as I am aware.
However, there are other even more nefarious ways that stakeholders can use to try to dominate the network for their own personal gain, which arguably should be even more heavily 'policed' (if we are to have policies enforced outside of the code of law at all). One such obvious one is to target highly rewarded accounts and try to get them to leave the network or simply remove their rewards. This has one of the biggest possible 'quick wins' in terms of making more rewards available for the perpetrator and while I haven't calculated the maths of it, the larger stakeholders really can boost their earnings by doing this - provided they have a way to gain rewards from the author rewards pool. Note: just because an account does not make regular posts visibly, does not meant that it isn't using sockpuppet creator accounts that it upvotes covertly (in most cases we won't really know if this is happening).
This, for me, is the most unpleasant aspect to the current 'downvote debate'. While the downvoters choose to present the story that their targets are 'all about the money' and working together to only make posts to try to get as much money as possible (aka a circle jerk), they do everything possible to distract away from the flipside that I have highlighted above. It is arguably likely that users seeking a 'socially acceptable' strategy to maximise their returns may be heavily downvoting in order to remove competition for the rewards pool and to try to boost their own returns in ways that aren't currently frowned upon. Indeed, as long as they and their groups ARE the arbiters of 'correct Hive policy' then they, like the politicians that love to spend your tax money in their OWN ways, can even frame their operation as a 'noble service'!
I am not accusing downvoters of being organised criminal gangs, but it doesn't take much imagination to see how the Mafia operations from the offline world reach into governments and essentially profits along similar lines. So my point here is that it doesn't matter whether you are a downvoter who knows you aren't doing anything nefarious or whether you are an observer who trusts the downvoters - the fact remains that the system is wide open to this kind of attempt to bypass POB and to simply use stake to cream off as much money from the community as possible, while paying zero attention to the real needs of such a potentially diverse social space... and downvoting is just as much a part of that as upvoting is.
To take the view of the heavy downvoters for a moment - assuming they are not of ill intent - it is also valid to say that an inclusive community needs the reward pool to be actively available for a large number of people and it isn't perhaps ideal for groups to consistently receive large payouts, regardless of the quality of their content. This is an interesting point because on the one hand it is correct and on the other hand, the argument of the downvoters that it's their stake and they get to do whatever they want with it, also applies in the favour of those consistently receiving higher rewards. Ultimately, they receive the rewards because stakeholders did what they wanted with their stake and directed the rewards to them. So, these stakeholders are declaring that at the moment, their upvoted content creators are the ones that they subjectively value the most.
Since the valuation of posts is subjective and there is no 'right' or 'wrong' per se, that everyone is meant to agree on - we have to look to other metrics if we are to try to define a best practice that everyone can agree on and to facilitate greater harmony, respect and growth in such communities. I am making a case to say that one of the most important factors is community morale, sentiment and public image in the market place, since these all directly effect Hive's success and it's market value (arguably leading to greater potential gains for stakeholders than could be achieved by micro managing downvotes). More profit can be made from Hodling and from Hive's growth than from a daily battle for the rewards pool.
Remembering that this economic dynamic is part of the justification for the existence of content cops on Hive in the first place, we need to think about ALL of the factors involved in this in order to arrive at best practices and optimised social norms. As long as there is a mechanic that allows downvoters to profit from the squashing of public sentiment on Hive, there will be those who say that this is what is happening. As long as there is the possibility for creators to manipulate upvotes for their own gain then there will be those who say that it is happening. The middle area between these is what emerges as the posts and image that the wider world sees most on Hive.. It's a somewhat messy processes for determining quality and for marketing a product!
My own conclusion to this, taking the position of neutral observer, just as I do when assessing other people's systems professionally, is this:
Hive is both a social community and also an economic/tech system. Focus on both areas are requirements for it to succeed. Failure to nurture either is going to cause systemic problems and stall the token price. It's fine to try to reach community standards that work but it must be done while considering all aspects of the situation and all viewpoints, in order to reach an optimal design/structure that most facilitates growth and most supports inclusivity.
Steem/Hive had a culture from the beginning that emerged based on the law of the code and the sentiment of the community, which involves content being upvoted in ways that take personal preferences into consideration but which also attempt to create a diverse range of content that will interest diverse audiences. This was a sensible strategy to balance personal interest with marketing logic that might grow and expand the network. While some people say that this has been a failed experiment and that the reward pool is a weak point that causes too much tension and loss of investor money - the idea that the network can actually thrive through this model lives on and with tweaks may actually prove successful.
As long as the author reward pool exists as it does, the original vision of using it to reward diverse content still makes sense to me. There are numerous large communities online which are niche and which you or I may have no interest in but which may draw large crowds. For me, Splinterlands is an example since it doesn't interest me personally but obviously does interest many people who are willing to invest/trade. So intelligent content management will take marketing intel and use stake to curate diverse content without seeking to crush certain topics or sub communities (mostly for personal reasons or biases).
At the same time, it is possible for sub communities to dominate the Hive landscape and this needs to be considered too - there has to be a balance. The current world climate, being in an unprecedented level of loss of human rights/freedoms, is understandably going to cause more people than usual to focus into political/freedom/health topics and so naturally we are going to see more posts that focus on these topics. This, though, should not be taken as evidence that groups who produce this content are scammers or overly dominating the community in problematic ways - it's just a natural result of world events that will likely subside as the world recovers. Ordinarily I would be posting recipes and all kinds of interesting content that isn't so focused on helping humanity survive on a daily basis in the face of a huge corporate/government power grab. Attempting to crush content that addresses the most pertinent topic on Earth is going to generate substantial backlash for valid reasons and many people who don't even normally get involved in the area may concur.
When people are physically threatening others and trying to intimidate them to leave the network, I think we can mostly agree that this is a problem and not good for Hive. Anyone doing this is totally denying human decency and the existing good faith culture that exists between many online and which needs to thrive on Hive for Hive to sustainably grow and compete. Walking into a space occupied by large numbers of people, flashing cash around and telling other people to go along with you or get out - is NEVER going to be a good idea for your own investment, wellbeing or community cohesion - unless the receiver of those words is provably nefarious and problematic. The targets in the recent cases are not proven to be such and there really isn't any evidence at all that they are (none has been provided). Arguably, then, if anyone should leave, it should perhaps be the one going against the principle of inclusivity that strengthens communities and which Steem/Hive was essentially founded on!
For the moment, without drastic changes, such as forking or everyone moving into layer 2 communities, perhaps the best that can be done is to clearly expose, debate and discuss the dynamics involved so that everyone feels good about shared agreements that work for everyone. Despite being triggered and angered, I would like to think that most people are open to reaching middle grounds that are productive. If we can do that then we stand a chance of once again optimising the 'human resources' of Hive's membership towards a common goal of mutual success. If we do not do this then we will continue to shoot ourselves in the feet while blaming others!
Your Comments
What are your thoughts on the broader topics being highlighted here? Hive is a complex system but you are a key part of it - so please speak up and be bold! :)
Witnesses For Free Speech
If you have enjoyed reading this and care to take action to balance and grow both social cohesion, inclusivity and economic growth for Hive, then please take a moment to read through my related posts about Hive witness voting as your vote is very important in shaping the issues and topics we are exploring here today. Please note that my posts are still being zeroed on Hive after several months, mostly regardless of how much engagement they generate, how much time/effort goes into them or how significant their content is. This could happen to you too if you say something that a handful of people don't want to propagate for their own reasons.
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The problem is that we've become complacent, thinking Hive is already as decentralized as it can be or the default "if it works for me in the way I want, then it's not broke" mentality. The fact is; Hive is one of the most decentralized platforms out there, but not decentralized.
There has been little to no discussion lately at all about moving toward a more decentralized environment and that scares me a bit. The reason I haven't gone all-in on Hive is because of the Oligarchy that has formed and it bothers me. I care, whether or not it benefits me.
Through these discussions on this very topic lately I've dropped an idea or two, but have seen few others. I've taken note of your idea to create a tribe to counter downvotes, but not addressing the issue on layer 1 makes it just as much of an issue in every layer 2 tribe created.
It's the witnesses job to help the community come up with new solutions, but almost every one are silent. This makes me feel like meeting the definition of the platform as advertised is not the goal, so why put any real effort in on my part? It definitely affects my motivation.
We have to have these discussions and have them often. The witnesses should be hosting them and keeping them alive, because perfection will never be reached, so constant improvements are necessary. Unfortunately, I've seen very little interaction on these articles. Or at least way less than what should be happening.
Hey Top 20 witnesses, where are you? Do you look at yourselves as our representatives or just those whom secure the network? Where do you stand on censorship, decentralization, the future of the platform? How can we reach our goals; are you even thinking of the future?
We need more from the ranks and we need to give and demand more from ourselves and them. We are owners, every one of us, so why can't we seem to take ownership, by understanding that it us, collectively who are responsible for the path forward?
I am in the process of converting over $3k in crypto. I want to convert it to Hive, but I'm not sure it's my best move. Who can convince me?
Totally agreed 100%, thanks for your comment. I think the issue does come down partially to what you point to here, that some of those involved have achieved the wealth they want and basically don't have much hunger to achieve any ideological thrust forward, ahead of what has already been created. Perhaps they never had it in the first place. To be fair, the solutions are not always clear and people are busy on projects sometimes, but the amount of money involved definitely leaves space for them to make a bit of time to participate in th community they are meant to represent and even to delegate to others to do so. To remind, each top 20 witness currently receives a rate of about $168,000 annually for their position! This is enough for each of them to hire several staff to take care of these things! lol.
Yeah, there's no excuse and it's equally our own fault for not demanding it.
great post, we have to continue the discussion on this topic. I think that Dan's idea to counter downvotes from "bad actors" could be a logical next step to try and see how this affects the whole dynamic.
I know this is a discussion about the reward pool, but on the other side there is a really cool new idea from @liketu to integrate web2 into web3 by introducting likes something which I pondered about some years ago as well.
While this wouldn't impact the rewards pool directly, it will bring users into the spotlight and thereby making it possible to discover people that could be voted on with users that have a larger stake. This would mitigate the "censorship" aspect and on top of that we would still have the web3 aspect of immutability. I am actually really excited how that will be adopted.
@tipu curate
Thanks! The idea of countervotes for downvotes is interesting, though I suspect a much simpler and possibly more balanced solution is to just reduce the amount of free downvotes that accounts get per day. The level of free downvotes we have currently was just arbitrarily set and has never been adjusted since it was introduced - it's unrealistic to think that such a key parameter in the overall system design would not need adjustment once put into live use.
Adding likes that don't connect to the reward pool is not so interesting to me personally for one main reason: There have been many, many solutions and options for decentralised social networks for years that don't have a reward pool. They are well established and used by millions of people already. Hive is not well placed to compete with them if it does not offer some kind of substantially attractive additional feature set, which the reward pool absolutely provides. It isn't really necessary to introduce this anyway since it is possible to vote with tiny percentages and stakes so that the reward pool is not drained by them - trending algorithms can then be tweaked to work purely by the number of upvotes rather than by taking the weight of the vote into consideration. This is a much simpler solution than offered by Liketu.
good points, but I think they are basically adding a layer of gamification (likes, emojies etc.) I have never voted on a post at 1%, and I doubt many do that as well, it just doesn't feel like it would have an impact. Of course that would be the job of the front ends. But even on peakd where there is the sorting option for most viewed topics it doesn't really work. I think the honey pot so to speak is in an algorythm that combines possibly both - staking power voting and web 2. That is something that hasn't been done before.
Let's see how this plays out. For now I am glad we get to see the Liketu experiment in action.
I agree with you on the downvote part. We should start e.g., by having only 1 free downvote.
Yes, I appreciate that most people don't vote at 1%, but I'm just saying that this would achieve the same kind of result as adding a cumbersome extra layer for voting that duplicates existing functionality, for the most part.
The 3speak network runs a trending algorithm that is as you are describing here, though without the extra layer of 'free' likes. they use view counts and other metrics to replace the amount of stake weighted voting that videos receive. We are probably likely to see more of this as sites look for ways to overcome the reduced quality of trending posts that the circle jerking tends to result in!
Sure, I am all for experiments, there definitely aren't enough - but part of that is due to the cost needed to be used to carry some of them out.
cool, didin't know about that with 3speak
Free upvotes, that can only be used on downvoted posts, sounds about right to me.
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 22/82) Liquid rewards.
I'm still pondering the actual contents of the post, but I admit I clicked it mainly because your cover image reminds me of the terrarium projects I was considering for library programming earlier today while planning my 2022 craft events.
Here's a great example of downvoting that hardly makes any sense.
https://hive.blog/hive-167922/@informationwar/r47vgn
If I am reading that right, someone is downvoting content just copy/pasted between chains. Do I have the basic facts correct?
Pretty much, it's content that Phil wrote on Blurt he was crossposting to Hive.
There's a lot of examples of things like this happening when it comes to downvoting a lot of us don't see, I happened to see it because I was browsing around and happened upon it.
To an extent, I can see the point of such downvotes. Double-dipping on different forks has been frowned upon by many since the break from Steem. I personally would use Blurt more like Twitter, and retain HIVE as a long-form content platform. I think we have much bigger abuses to worry about first, though.
Steem/Hive has been sold as a censorship free or censorship resistant platform.
Censorship has somehow been redefined by the people here to only mean "deleted" which is simply untrue.
If you look up the definition of Censorship you will see it means "suppression" and not "deletion". That is THE defintion in the dictionary. Somehow people here made everyone think this place is censorship free, downvotes are built into the protocol and that suppresses a post or comment when downvoted. Censorship is built into the protocol.
If you take a few steps back and look at Steem/Hive as the system it is, it has censorship built in. Now is all censorship good or bad or inbetween? Certainly some can be good, for an example of someone just posting graphic nudity under the tag of #news or #politics that obviously has no place there, or someone making posts that are garbage and says "asldkfjaw0r9aw0er9a w0r9 ajw0r9 aj09f jasd0fja w0e9rj a0werja 0wer9j " that would be worthy of a downvote as it is SPAM, etc.
Suppressing someone's post because they have the most minor of wrong things in it is not a correct action to take, ESPECIALLY zeroing out the post.
I see in your bio it says you are an anarchist so I would think you would be more aligned with what I am saying, no?
Is a Reddit downvote also censorship? No. Any system of voting can be abused. That is why I distrust democracy as much as oligarchy and monarchy. But despite the flaws, I think our system can work. The blockchain is supposed to be immutable regardless of votes, after all. But yes, downvote abuse has been an issue since long before HIVE forked from STEEM.
Great article - here is a response:
https://peakd.com/hive-168088/@montycashmusic/living-and-living-free
Love the post, hard to speak about it, as a new user on hive i have yet to form a solid thinking on this subjet at all, is dv needed? when? ... is weird :S
In most people's thoughts, it should only be used for spammers/plagirizers/stolen content/graphic content that isn't marked NSFW(so that it hides it), calling for direct violence, etc.
Hey! ...should I downvote this post because you keep mentioning Web 3.0 when many people out there assure that we are well past Web 3.0 and we are already at the verge of Web 6.0?
Am I allowed to downvote you just for pure disagreement of opinions regarding the Web ?.? nomenclature you insist to use and therefore in my own biased opinion you are just posting serious misinformation? };)
As the inventor of the concept of Web Versions, I have the authority to downvote myself if I am wrong, but I also have the authority to make everything up as I go along.. Reality creation is like that. :)
If anyone tells you that Web 3.0 is over then simply remind them that crypto exists and is only just getting started!
Alright! fair enough. Just don't forget to let me know if you downvote yourself because you eventually found out you're wrong. Simply to go behind you to support you in the downvoting solidarity mission. ;o)
I have just become aware of the so-called "downvote wars" and I am over here like WTF is going on??
Lack of social graces, respect, care and awareness of marketing principles?
I saw an account a while back that was set up for the very purpose of looking for posts to downvote. My understanding was zero.
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I strongly agree with this point and your thoughts are wise indeed. I always try to be bold when commenting is a specific point. And also speak up honestly whatever I feel and believe. Thanks for such words and its a helpful blog there is no doubt. 🙂
Minds is an awful alternative. I was there early on for nearly 2 years. It's as centralized as it gets, censorship is centralized through a small jury pool and that is the buy price you show, not the sell price. Back when Minds charged(not market driven, but set by Minds) $1.75 the sell price was 30 cents. After gas fees you make dust...Bill Ottman is a fake. I had that tag going strong and they removed it. So, not only do they ban accounts consistently, but remove tags as well.
Imo all erc20 tokens are junk.
I never said centralization isn't happening here, but minds is worse, it's their business model. Why ditch one for a worse shithole?
I'm not sure why it matters, but both before and after the jury pool was created the tag was taken down. I just kept using it and eventually it no longer showed up in search nor did the tag link itself go anywhere. And shadow banning has always been a thing there. I called it all out since day one and am proud to be the first user blocked by Ottman.
Bill Ottman has made tonnes of promises since day one that never happened or turned out to be plain lies, because the reciprocal happened. So imo, not only is Minds not a better alternative, it's not worth bothering with.
Hive has potential, Minds does not.
I've long deleted those accounts. But it doesn't matter, like you said, I just added my two cents. I've been on hive since 2016 and minds from 2017- 2019, so have just as much experience as you on both.
Since you don't hold ppl to their word, then integrity must not be important. That's on you and good luck on Minds.
Having read this comment, and the replies under it, this is a prime example of why Hive has serious problems. Just because someone voiced a different fucking OPINION, his/her content was flagged with "this content got a low rating by people", which creates an atmosphere of distrust(especially to those who don't understand Hive). Hive is designed to be decentralized, but Minds isn't, but that doesn't make it better. When new users see shit like this, do you think it encourages or discourages them to use Hive? What about onboarding? Not everyone can be a genius and understand everything there is to know about Hive to see its potential. Most people are laymen, and when they see stuff like this they avoid it. Who wants to invest time and money in something when you get penalized for having a different opinion? I think Minds is an awful alternative, but also less forms of censorship.