How many times has it crossed my mind to write this post before being personally impacted at the risk of losing my objectivity?
One time too many it turns out. 😉 I'll try to contain my rage. Let's just get through this.
Since finding a tiny home on this blockchain a few years ago I've always had mixed skepticism and appreciation for HiveWatchers and its predecessors. But on balance more skepticism.
The thing is this. There are already successful platforms where anyone is free to login and be told what not to talk about and how not to say it. Plenty of em.
The presence of HiveWatchers has been taken by several people I've known as evidence that onboarding to Hive would be about the same experience and risk. Only for more work and a smaller audience.
One such friend, even though he was in strong agreement with HiveWatcher's anti-spam efforts, pointed out to me how HiveWatchers proved to him that it would be easy to impose some other arbitrary speech code on Hivians.
"Millionaires," he said, "with fringe ideas about what's True and what's the One Great Satan are not exactly hard to come by."
But I digress.
A few days ago a week's worth of my daily news aggregations and commentary were down voted to zero. Initially, I figured my 185-word opinion on Apple's #spyPhone controversy had rubbed some whale or other the wrong way. Or perhaps I'd triggered retaliation with my open letter to POTUS:
Oh well. Easy come easy go. Being wrong on the internet is surprisingly easy to live with.
Here's where I'd like to say I don't really post for the rewards, but that wouldn't be completely honest.
I do like earning a smidge of crypto to experiment with, but I don't depend on these rewards even for pocket money. In any case, I earn about twice as much from curation as I do from posting.
So, I'm mainly here to learn about chains, socially as well as technically.
But emotionally, I do probably look forward too much to the validation of a few daily upvotes — especially those from the repeat voters whose stuff I read myself. And from those who I know are at least occasionally engaged by it because maybe we've commented back and forth or we've talked off chain about this or that.
Gimme those little blue hearts, those magic internet points.
I'm a gamer and gamification works on me. I suppose to me an upvote means something because it's worth something and that voter could have done something else with it. But instead they decided to pat me on the back for hanging out here, being interested — at least — even if I'm not all that interesting.
That's enough to make it easy to cope with having something that I wrote actively disliked. Heck, if someone with deep pockets actively disagrees with me that's still validating — at least sempai noticed.
Less easy to live with is the policing of content because it was misread or misunderstood. Or worse the content police misunderstand what they're policing without ever asking the author.
So, of course, I did eventually stumble across the slightly opaque connection between the account that downvoted my posts and the HiveWatchers and Spaminator projects.
The connection could easily have escaped, especially since, as far as I can tell the account didn't actively or recently disclose its connection until about 6 days ago, roughly 6 days after the latest of my downvoted posts closed for rewards.
The stakes are low for me. But for others they may not be so low.
At first, I was still a little inclined to attribute the whole thing to some sort of content-based disagreement because all articles in my posts point to their original sources and therefore, by definition, are not plagiarism. Likewise my summaries are not infringements because they either quote small portions of the article or make fair use of blurbs which are published expressly for the purposes of news aggregation.
And I wasn't completely wrong about being caught up in someone else's beef. I later found a discord post where a user — notably one that had recently been sanctioned for trolling — complained about my account.
HiveWatchers acted quickly and — in my opinion — mistakenly by its own standards. I suspect this happened in a rush to show how "fair minded" it would be to act on a complaint that came from a previously vocal critic? I really dunno.
I do know that I was not approached about it before hand and that no explanatory comment was left on any of the posts.
For now it's impossible for me to take any position on whether that user's other grievances are legitimate — dunno enough about that situation, can't chase every rabbit down every hole. But it doesn't strike me as a casual or typical complaint. It seems more like a whataboutism raised in the course of a long running argument.
Apparently this complaint was never submitted via HiveWatcher's usual form. It's not clear to me whether this will or won't show up in HiveWatchers reporting? I think of that because it's another way I might have found out what'd happened? Eventually.
And also I wonder how consistently what procedures do exist are being followed. I've started a conversation about this in discord and haven't yet figured it all out, but will update if I learn more.
Impressions and concerns
Here are a few of the reasons I have not been a supporter of HiveWatcher's proposal. For what it's worth, my opinion mostly pre-dates the roughly $10 in downvotes I received. I'd like to think I can set aside whatever biases that might create. But it is what it is.
The project needs significant revision including a policy of greater restraint, full transparency, and safeguards for fairness. Absent that it should be defunded and free to enforce whatever standards it considers fair with its own stake.
What HiveWatchers calls an appeal really isn't. Appeals examine whether an arbiter may have made a mistake in applying a rule or understanding facts.
The HiveWatchers process in contrast involves compelled contrition, including the writing of obligatory apologies, which is a type of negative reinforcement. In that sense it is not an appeal.
HiveWatchers judges unilaterally without confronting the accused. To be clear, typical curators let posts speak for themselves and vote up or down according to taste. That's fine.
HiveWatchers is different. They accept community funding on the promise of benefitting a community as a whole.
In turn we should expect them to uphold broadly accepted principles of fairness when using their power against much less powerful individuals. One of the oldest and most basic of those principles is that an accused gets fair notice and time to respond.
There's a noticeable amount of intemperate language in and around HiveWatchers' community. Good faith isn't always assumed toward critics of the project and people defending themselves. There's overlap in those groups which makes decorum particularly vital.
I get that HiveWatcher's draws a lot of hate and that's no fun. It's a natural human tendency to respond to slights in kind. Taking on the mantle of an arbiter means they should resist that tendency — it helps a community be sure that standards are being applied neutrally and with a level head.
To that end, I believe HiveWatchers has a responsibility to do more in moderating and disavowing personal attacks, ridicule, demeaning language and prejudices directed at its critics, those it is accusing or even someone it has found "guilty" of violating its standards.
Even if plagiarism, spam or abuse are horrible crimes against humanity, every person is better than the worst thing they have ever done. We should all do our best to talk to each other like that's the case. Institutions with more power than the rest of us can set that example.
Finally, plagiarism is viewed differently across cultures. As mentioned in Wikipedia, "the modern concept of plagiarism as immoral and originality as an ideal emerged in Europe in the 18th century, particularly with the Romantic movement." So, it is ethnocentrically western in outlook, relatively young in the history of thought and didn't develop with the Internet, online discourse, or blockchains in mind.
None of this by itself means that HiveWatchers is a bad endeavor. But I do think the project should be encouraged to tone down its condemnations and create further protections for basic fairness, in light of the fact that people find the Hive blockchain from many different places and backgrounds.
Well put
Hivewatchers needs to be replaced by something else or removed completely.
It has some benefits but its drawbacks are more than its benefits.
One big issue is that the person who bans and the person who reviews the appeals is the same person.
Another big issue is the lack of monitoring on the actions of hivewatchers.
@abit maybe you can help with the change? AFAIK it's mostly your stake controlled by hivewatchers.
Ping @wil.metcalfe
1st comment "Get out of my head!"
2nd comment "Get out of my head!"
I have no intention of starting or joining a hatefest against Hivewatchers. I still firmly believe they have a place and provide a vital service; however, you highlight some of the other areas of concern that I already had before you, and I started talking on Discord. I'm delighted you mentioned Transparency, a pet subject of mine and one I have mentioned to several others, including Hivewatchers before.
There's sadly a catalogue of worrying practices such as paying people for reporting others. While the reward might be tiny, it's the principle that worries me. It strikes me to being very similar to bounty hunters, and as for the abusing of the accused, well, I was gobsmacked when I first saw it. The appeals channel isn't really that; it's basically a bear-baiting pit where the likes of me go to get entertained.
I've tried to help out by explaining to one or two accused in such a way that makes it a lot clearer than "Jump through these four hoops, and maybe we'll take you off our list." I see no end of folk that truly believe after 30 days, it'll all be over, and their rewards will be returned. And nobody before me thought of putting these people straight.
I'm actual somewhat hesitant to voice any opinion on this because of not wanting to attract any attention from some of the "powers that be" around here. I don't typically like to make statements about such things but it doesn't seem to be fair that even your Actifit posts are downvoted.
There are a lot of valid arguments about why copyright should be abolished. I think it was originally designed to protect the creative folk who produced content but it seems to be doing a better job of protecting the companies who control the copyright to the content.
Fair use of content in making more content can be very subjective. Getting on the wrong side of copyright laws can cause problems for artists and other creatives.
The original content creator is paid a small wage and the company who owns the content can sometimes make a lot more on the content. (If they don't they won't stay in business for long.)
In short, a lot of our laws around all this stuff are mostly for protecting the business who are profiting from the labor of their employees.
I'm not advocating taking credit for content that is not yours but honestly I think that some of what is being done is protecting the very institutions and business models that some of us are trying to improve upon through decentralization and PoB rewards.
Thank you for sharing your considered insights, especially in light of your concerns about facing some backlash just for joining in the conversation. I certainly hope that doesn't happen. But I respect you for speaking up, even knowing there is some risk attached to that decision.
Imagine, then, how much more chilling that risk is for people who have not yet joined Hive, but may have been considering it. Or for those who join with enthusiasm but quickly encounter unwelcoming and unfair practices.
Ok. Very eloquent and well spoken response. Not the sort of mind that would go about generating content that’s detrimental to the blockchain and its community of owners.
Information travels in many formats and mediums... one should not be judged better than the other. Personally I don’t mind the readers digest version of news. I don’t have time to follow every rabbit hole so having something that sumsUP the facts neatly and succinctly and in an aggregate format is very useful. I’m able to keepUP with the broad strokes and not get bogged down in the minutiae. That, for me, is value because it saves me time. If it’s coming from a source I trust... even better!
Since when is it @hivewatcher, @spaminator, and @guiltyparties privileged right to determine how news gets disseminated to me/us.
This does seem to be a clear case of swampy ground if you ask me! Why would anyone in their right mind want to decide that they are the ones deciding such things...? and then to follow through without any due course and procedure that holds “the service” being rendered accountable...? well it’s just a whole lot of grounds for nothing good if you ask me!
As an owner this isn’t the sort of “service”we would want on our blockchain and I believe it’s time for people to start putting their feet down and saying enough is enough already.
This can never move us to a marketable and friendly Hive.
Imagine with me... if Hive were a country... would this be the sort of country you would want to live, invite your friends family and famous too... would you then be excited to build your future and invest your hard earned money in that country?
I think you already know the answer to this hypothetical.
There are potential solutions to making Hive’s content more sound while maintaining our friendly social environment other than what’s being currently played out here...
Evolving how we human has got to be a process that makes us better than the social2.0’s, not worse... otherwise we make ourselves irrelevant only to be left by the wayside and forgotten by the dustbin of human history.
I will leave a potential solution to how we could manage downvote spamming (yes! I can come up with terms too!) and downvote abuse in a link to @theycallmedan’s post. My thoughts about all of this can be found in the comments section of the post.
I do believe that we are dealing with something that seems innocent enough at first glance... (dusting, etc.) but when you roll the log over... we are getting way more than we bargained for. This is serious and needs serious consideration by the entire Hive community of owners.
Alright here’s the post and my comment that I was referring too 👇
https://ecency.com/hive/@theycallmedan/a-bit-of-a-rant
👆Please read my thoughts on how we could do this better (removing the direct human element from the process... and actually create a systematic process built right into the blockchain) within the comments of this post.