What social media site do you use?
If you look at my wife she is big on Facebook. If you look at my sons I have no idea what they are using now but I know that before they were doing Snapchat, Instagram, BeReal and others. Personally, I post only on Hive. Well, my wife made an account for me on Facebook and has posted to it on occasion but as for myself...only Hive.
Why Hive?
Well, I'm not really a social media person. I don't want everyone knowing what I'm doing and everything else that happens in my life. Then again, I want to leave a bit of a rabbit trail for my kids and grandkids in case they should ever be curious about my life. Hive seemed the right place to do that.
Why make other people rich?
If you look at Facebook the person who founded it is very rich. I would say that the person who founded Instagram got very rich also. TikTok? Rich. Truth Social? Rich. WeChat? Rich.
Are you seeing a trend here? People give their time and attention to the app. The app gives that time and attention to advertisers. The app gets rich and you send up spending money. All while you are giving out personal details on your life for free.
Am I against social media platforms? Actually no. Do I think any of them should be banned, stopped, or otherwise scrapped? Also no. Even though I would be loathe to use them.
The reason is simple. When I use these sites I'm giving the site my private data. I'm giving them the ability to use my photos. I'm giving them the ability to use my articles. I'm giving then pieces of my life so they get more money and power. That doesn't seem like a fair exchange.
.....and governments and corporations are figuring this out. Wonder why WeChat is ubiquitous in China? China can watch it and see everything their people do. All their chats, all their purchases, even all the places they went on the train system. Oh how wonderful for a government to watch over its people and keep things orderly.
Which is why the US government wanted to place a ban on TikTok. It is one thing when the Chinese government watches Chinese people, but what about when they watch American ones? The government steps in and poof banned...or it would be if there weren't so many people using the site.
Then we have sites that crop up like Truth Social. Why? Because President Trump didn't like being censored and/or banned by sites like Facebook and Twitter. Speaking of Twitter... it was bought out and rebranded of "X" because a wealthy individual wanted to reinstate some people and posts while silencing others.
I find it amusing that many people want privacy and don't want governments and corporations interfering with their lives but then give away their privacy so they can connect with friends.
My least favorite sites
I will admit there there are social media sites that I dislike. Truth Social as it seems like a blatant attempt by one or a few individuals to have a site where they can say anything with impunity. Only Fans as it is very much a site where individuals sell favors to others for money and views. Seems kind of sleazy.
But I have no desire to police people and how they get in touch with others.
I value freedom of speech. If someone wants to tell a story, show a video, tell a big whopping lie or whatever else people do on social media....that is up to them. If people want to give away something for valuable that again is their right in my eyes. Of in the case of WeChat...if people wish to have a more comfortable life by following the policies of the government, why would I stand in the way of that?
But I'll still stick with Hive
For all it's quirks and problems... I still trust it to be censor resistant. My posts are my own and will likely never be deleted. No one will censor me. No one can take away my username(s). Even better, because people have a limited number of texts or posts ... daily... there is little chance of a flame war or trolling. Neither pays off in upvotes (which is very important on Hive) and both can ruin a person's trust ratigng which is also important.
Sure I may get few to no views on my posts and I can live with that.
Of course you may disagree and I'd love to hear that in the comments and if you feel so inclined feel free to stop me a letter. I do typically enjoy getting responses.
Thanks for your time so far,
Until next post :)
Hive users can get -reputation, and their posts will not be visible in Hive front ends, but that is not censorship because their content remains available, and they can continue to write and express their opinion.
Absolutely! I know that if I get the wrong person angry with me I can be downvoted into obscurity. However, even if that happens every thing I've written will still be there for anyone who is curious to see :) Part of the true power of Hive.
Something to keep in mind also is that if you're truly being downvoted for something stupid, others will most likely act on it and counter the downvotes. I know I have done so at times, but most of the time most downvotes I see are justified.
Hmm.. How to give this a proper response.
First: My actual thought was that downvotes on Hive are rare. I mean really rare at least when you are a little fish like I am :) On typical social media I'm quite certain that my posts would draw a lot of downvotes because Hive Learners asks for viewpoints no touchy subjects.
Indeed I would say that downvotes are so rare that when I do see them I take them very seriously. I have heard that sometimes people throw a small downvote into a mix to increase rewards but I have little knowledge on how exactly that would work.
However, I was more thinking along the lines of what is a MAJOR player decided to get onto HIVE and dump huge coin into the ecosystem. If a billionaire wanted to downvote you on Hive and got serious about it? I would never see another payout and eventually my posts would be invisible.
but they would still be there
and that is the cool thing about Hive. Even billionaires can't make you vanish. Well, perhaps if they make 20 nodes and had enough HP to make sure all of them were top witnesses and decided to use that power to split the blockchain....
..... but realistically once its posted its there :)
Thanks for the eyes, really appreciate it.
They would have to have planned this for ages, and hold most of the liquid hive tokens on exchanges to then power those up to do so. Technically they could then start downvoting people at random but downvote mana is only 25% of upvote mana, so unless they want it to cost them a lot of curation rewards they'd only have 1/4th of the strenght of counterers.
In the events that they'd still wanna downvote with all their mana it could cause some issues yeah, it depends how they'd go about it. This is a weird example however because why would someone buy up so much hive just to make this place "worse" which would affect their own "investment". In the most malicious scenarios that they wouldn't care if their millions of $ in hive goes to 0, there's probably changes that could occur where we reduce the 25% downvote mana and many whales and stakeholders band together with the help of some bots to counter his downvotes so everyone would be back on equal footing and only the counters would receive less curation rewards.
About your last example, that actually happened on the legacy chain. It was however not without the help of exchanges that justin sun managed to overthrow governance. We the community were beating him at his game by voting up real witnesses even though he had just purchased ~70m steempower from steemit and was buying millions from exchanges. He had to go so far as to trick exchanges into powering up customers funds to take control over governance again which was illegal in so many different ways but having connections helped him i suppose. Then they also went ahead and stole 20+m steem from accounts they thought were helping hive being created, which a lawsuit occurred over and was handed back to their rightful owners. Since then we've implemented certain actions to prepare ourselves in case such events were to be attempted again, such as the delayed gov power when you power up new hive, it takes 30 days for those to take effect in witness/proposal weight.
And in the worst case scenario that we'd "lose" that fight we would just fork again and receive new coins while not airdropping the attacker any of the new coins while also having hive we'd then convert to the new coins - as happened with steem.
Not sure if you've read about what happened back then, it's hollywood level script. :D I can recommend the article by decrypt called hostile takeover steem vs tron (if you google that you should find it, if you haven't read, very worth it).
:) I have a basic idea of what happened when STEEM became HIVE. Funny to think I used to have a STEEM account way way back within just a few months of launch but after a couple posts I walked away because it was too...odd. Really wish I could remember what my username was so I could reread and remember what I said :)
As for a new takeover I think that unlikely. I smile when I think of President Trump starting Truth Social. If he had of just pulled in a bunch of money into Hive and made his own Tribe he would be censor resistant from day one. Then I smile when I think he couldn't make downvotes go away and couldn't delete any posts he regretted later...so maybe Truth Social is a better place for him to be :)
People have left their engagement because of social media
Yeah hive is one very safe place and you don't lobby for votes.
Drop something nice and inspiring and you get the votes.
No fake life here unlike some other apps
Haha...
... I would say no fake life here unlike all the other apps :)
Thanks for reading and thanks for replying I do really appreciate it
Hive is a good platform And I have been a great beneficiary.
I absolutely agree that Hive is a good platform.... Just not an easy one for the average person :)