Healthy markets function by consumers supporting things they like.
This isn't that sort of market. You're getting influence over inflation that doesn't come from your own stake, it comes from all stake. You're not a "consumer", you're a participant in shared decision making.
For this to make economic sense it has to also benefit all stake. If the other stakeholders don't agree that what is being paid out benefits them, you can't have unilateral decision making over that shared resource.
You CAN certainly support what you want as a consumer with your own money. That works just like any market and can't be downvoted.
However, when the whitepaper speaks to negative voting, it only says that it is possible, it does not say that it is "VALID."
It says more than possible. It also explains why it is needed: For significant cases where rewards do not add (enough) value, while also noting that not every single little instance needs to be stopped (which I agree with).
Also, it kind of matters that the original system had superlinear rewards. You needed to get a LOT of stake voting in order to get significant rewards. A small amount of staking trying to vote where others don't agree would accomplish nothing (tiny or no payout). That had good and bad elements. When we eliminated, downvoting became more important, not less, because individual upvotes were then able to pay out significantly without any sort of stake consensus.
Right. I think you are speaking to consensus-of-stake. The problem with that is there's no merit, nor rhyme, or reason behind it. There is no wisdom behind it, not when one can null the will of the many. When you abuse the downvote function as you did on this post, all your doing is battling other stakeholders for no good reason. It's a major turn-off for any would-be investors, and it's damn near impossible to rewire people to think that it's well and good. Those kinds of mind tricks only work on the weak-minded. Additionally, the optics from a PR standpoint are terrible. When you have chain dictators who police content why bother opting in when Twatter, Fakespace, and Bootube can give you the same unbellyfeel that you get here. Hell, when fakespace gets their Diem rolled out, what'll be the difference? You can get demonetized over there for your opinions or demonetized here. And over there, there might be a bigger audience.
Fakespace with Diem won't reward you for posting, at least not to anywhere near the degree that happens here. That's the difference. You want stakeholders to pay you, stakeholders are going to decide if and when doing so is useful to stakeholders, both large and small ones, but mostly (for BOTH up and down votes) large.
No one is policing content either. It's rewards. Post whatever you like, as long as it isn't child porn or whatever where the UIs block it. If you get no rewards, then you don't. You still get to post.
Before the downvotes, the only legit reason for flagging was spam, scams, plagiarism, and improperly labeled NSFW or the type of illegal content you mentioned above. That's until you made your proposal in the previously mentioned GitHub issue #215. That brought us to the shit show we have now, where we have a minority of stakeholders who dictate reward censorship on legit content like this post. I'd encourage you to watch the 'Community' episode called 'App Development and Condiments' S05E08. The 'Black Mirror' episode 'Nosedive' S03E01, and 'The Orville' episode 'Majority Rule' S01E07. These will give you an idea about the kind of dystopic hellscape we have here at HIVE because of this willy-nilly opinion-oriented downvoting. Sure it's all fine and dandy for you now, but you may not always be one of the major stakeholders on the block. You're one of the ones setting the standard. And the stakeholders who demonetize politically oriented content because they disagree, that's the same as all the other social media companies. Any interested money power in the age of hyperinflation can buy enough controlling stake in HIVE and run it right off a cliff without the aid of the exchanges. And if that happens, they'll have no obligation to list us in another split. Anyways, if HIVE is going to be a bastion of free speech, censoring rewards on posts that demonstrate the user writing them has a brain is not the way to go.
No, that's not right. The downvotes were always about rewards. The "flag" thing and listed types of abuse thing was added in the UI by the former owner of the web site, with no community discussion and frankly no useful thought process. The actual inventor of the blockchain was against it.
My 'proposal' was to revert that insane idea, it wasn't anything new. It certainly didn't "bring us" to anything, because these issues were always there, and motivated the entire debate even back then.
Nobody is "demonetizing" you in the same sense as centralized platforms. That is ad revenue, which you are free to continue to accept (by putting ads in your posts), and sure enough the blockchain gives you an open permissionless way to receive that revenue which no one is going to block. If you want to be paid by stakeholder inflation, that's something ELSE, which doesn't exist on centralized platforms, and stakeholders necessarily are going to be "voting on paying it", not just "paying it by voting".
In case you don't believe me, you can go look here at the site in 2016. Downvote button right there. Only later was the dumb "flag abuse" idea pushed out.
Well, I'm glad you included the Wayback Machine link. I came here in September of 2016 when there was only an upvote and a flag button. I see now that it launched with an upvote and a downvote button. That appears to have gone on from 03-24-16 through 07-04-16. Sometime between July 5th and 6th of 2016, the downvote button got removed and turned into a flag. We had about three years of that, then the flag for specific use cases, as opposed to a downvote, that got changed sometime on May the 2nd, 2019.
I also see that @timcliff had some role in "making downvotes great again," but in that post, he highlighted shit-post-spam-comments. Now, I can see the stakeholder argument. And maybe some stakeholders want to be completely amoral and perhaps even cruel by excluding certain content from receiving inflation from the reward pool. But here's the thing, whether it be the shit-post comments Tim drew attention to, or Haejin's Elliot curve charts, or your @hbd.funder comments, which presumably does something? I'm no genius on this stuff.
However, the community managed to organize and change the code to tax content creators 25% in favor of giving these rewards to curators for the so-called "greater good." The change, according to your seemingly amoral viewpoint that stakeholders can do whatever they are empowered to do—that must have been unnecessary in your eyes? It should suffice to say that some of these intellectual quagmires hinged upon token functionality that never existed in the first place, and that's PoB.
PoB was supposed to make it all make sense, and if they could have tapped the crowd wisdom, it would have made sense. There'd be no disagreement because rewards would be fair. But as you and I know, it's impossible to tap into crowd wisdom without breaking the other things. But I don't think this should stop the HIVE Layer 1 community from encouraging a healthy downvote culture or outside-of-the-box solutions.
Here's the thing: Every time you get someone new to HIVE, if you have to rewire the way they see the world for it to work, then it's the product that's broken, not the people. I'm sure when the King got his new clothes, the swindlers who sold the "outfit" said something to the effect that only people of royal blood are capable of appreciating this precious fabric. And there you have it, with some simple word magic, a little gaslighting, and a sprinkle of Asch conformity, they buffaloed the sovereign of the land.
Long story short: I think we need to respect the social dApp roots of the platform--it's what drew content creators in to publish here, and it was their positive word-of-mouth that helped to grow our numbers. If we cannot create a system for wisdom to prevail on layer one, then more and more people will become less willing to spend time here and continue to grow this ever-expanding digital library.
We will lose intelligent and generally positive influencers like Kenny. The inverted negative word-of-mouth will set the tone for would-be stakeholders. And the market will continue to judge us as it has, and it will continue to find us lacking. This hostile working environment will cause the token to remain lower in value than it could be because of the unproductive and generally caustic atmosphere set by a few stakeholders. You are the minority on this one.
We can certainly work to improve the social dApp component. I would suggest that is probably best done by further supporting and emphasizing second layer innovation, which is frankly where most of the social innovation has ever happened on Hive/Steem anyway, as you can see from looking at those wayback links where things look pretty damn close to the same now as five years ago. It's too slow and too much of a quagmire to try to build social into the base layer. It was done that way in 2016 largely for feasibility, and for a frankly questionable at best business model of a startup that no longer exists. Times have changed.
The hbd.funder comments support the hbdstabilizer, which both supports the stability of HBD, along with earning a profit (at least 1 million USD) for Hive (largely, though this is somewhat speculative, in the form of higher HIVE price, which also feeds back to higher rewards for creators). The stakeholders voting for hbd.funder, including myself, think those benefits are a good use of reward funds and that they help Hive, which is why we vote for it.
I figured I'd address both of your comments in this one. I can appreciate your work with the HBD stabilizer if it's going to try and peg to the dollar or be stable(ish). The problem now is that we're rapidly entering into hyperinflation, and I'm sure we'll probably go full-Zimbabwe with it. I don't know if this was ever done with the so-called "world's reserve currency" in the past. I see a lot of turbulence ahead, and a dollar peg might become more and more useless as the dollar becomes more and more valueless. And then they'll transition to digital. Who knows if pegging to something digital will be a transition for the work that lays ahead for you. Regarding second layer innovation. If you believe HMTs, as opposed to sidechain tokenomics, are in HIVE's near future, then maybe you could do people a solid for several months and put the velvet glove back on the iron fist, if not only for the sake of optics.
I think here you are leaving the space where you are objectively trying to achieve something that cannot be objectified. The vocal criticism of those who complain about downvotes is a value that can be called the value of "conflict in existence".
If you were a cool rational being here, you could probably readily agree that the presence of conflict makes a great value contribution in the social space of communication. I usually compartmentalise my subjective judgement of what I consider not worthy of approval in such postings (complaining, bruised egos etc.). I can abstain from any vote, but simply comment.
But I see the overriding potential of such postings precisely in the fact that, as a rule, the engagement of the comments that then start are quite passable: To see conflicting views being debated with each other. This form of engagement can hardly be found anywhere else. I think that can be readily admitted.
Now, one can say pejoratively that no one needs such a thing when it comes to advancing the cause and would probably meet with approval, but just not totally. Those who open the barrel and criticise loudly may not be totally right, but they are not totally wrong either. On another level, however, I would argue that the obviousness of conflict in the public sphere deserves as much of a presence as the obviousness of non-conflict, triviality and superficiality.
I would find it a nice surprise to see such gouged by the usual downvoters, just as it would be surprising to see the usual upvoters criticise it.
However, as long as one pretends that there are two firm fronts and neither individual is willing to admit that he is nevertheless on both fronts, the demand for proof of the other's probity is rather hypocritical insofar as one's own probity cannot be clearly proven. Since neither can be proven nor not proven, the impulses to try to do so nevertheless have a rather paradoxical character. My interpretation of "What is of value?" would consider the naming of this paradox as valuable.
I didn't entirely understand that, but I do agree that in cold rational terms, conflict can have value to social media. Many people would consider that a problem, but it is what it is.
Thank you, I find this is a great insight. Conflict has in my eyes potential in many directions. It can be used for hardening the fronts, it can be used to communicate on a different level, it can be seen as an asset, very particular for us humans.
Maybe you remember a quote from Starwars where Darth Vader denies the very fact of having a conflict.
While it's obvious, that there is, for us viewers :)
I don't remember that line. I'll watch for it if I see the film again,