When Steem was fresh in 2016 it had great promise in a less crowded field of cryptos. Social media was then, and is now, the largest industry in the world, and Steem was practically the only player in that field. But the plutocratic governance mechanism enabled censorial stakes to eliminate users, in a variety of attempts to shape narrative, and focus rewards (into their wallets). The bidbots put paid to Steem's promise, an awesome showcase of the flaws of a plutocracy that has gained us two new oligarchs, Wolfie and Marky.
The conquest of Steem and the creation of Hive were the fulfillment of the hazards of plutocracy demonstrated above, and the history of hard forks hasn't changed the fundamental failure of plutocratic governance to provide a great censorship resistant social media platform. We have a social media platform, and we're using it right now, but I'm donating 25% of my rewards to resist censorship for reasons other than spam, scams, or plagiarism and promote other creators. I kick down 5% of my author rewards to each of three creators (@logiczombie, @baah, and @por500bolos) that produce valuable content, do not spam, have never scammed, and cannot get a satoshi from comments or posts on Hive today because they're all flagged to zero. That is a sign that Hive isn't the social media platform it should be.
The initial claim to fame of the platform was censorship resistance. I am a true believer in that feature to drive a platform to success because everyone wants to be able to hear information they desire to know, and to speak their understanding. No one wants to be censored, and in 2016 censorship was already a blight on the Western world. Today it is much worse. The Twatter files have resulted in lawsuit against the USG for coercing 'private' social media companies (strangely all being initially funded in part by InQtel, the investment arm of the CIA) illegally to censor Americans, whom are specifically protected in the First Amendment to the Constitution, that is the charter defining the limits of power of the USG.
Today I hear that Musk is considering making Twatter paywalled in order to counter bots, but the bots that don't create nominal income to afford any potential paywall that leaves Twatter any users at all are crude and easy to ban anyway. Not that I care about Twatter, but it still has many users despite Musk failing to turn it into a free speech haven as he said he would, and that very (false) claim illustrates that market in social media for censorship resistance.
Just yesterday I read that the Online Safety Act just passed in the UK and will soon become law. This will either cut the UK off from social media platforms, or those platforms will conform to this law in order to retain UK users. Other edge cases exist. Exceptions to the rule always do. Censorship resistance becomes more valuable by the day, and Hive is dodging that mass adoption a decentralized censorship resistant social media platform would enjoy like OJ Simpson dodged tackles.
The best part of Hive isn't it's token. It's the use case. Social media, despite it's increasing degradation across the world, remains the largest industry on the planet. It's a crying shame Hive hasn't been able to fork up actual censorship resistance to tap that market begging for the functional application of the primary use case of the token. We even have a decentralized blockchain that prevents content from being eliminated from the platform (as a rule), but the anti-spam, scam, and plagiarism censorship mechanism has been abused for a variety of reasons that have turned that original promise and potential to explode in value by providing singular utility to the market into a shrinking, economically moribund coulda been contender.
We've let our token undercut it's own value by making it a tool for censorship that prevents Hive from gaining adoption that is demonstrably today desperately seeking a home. If we fix that problem Hive could easily surpass BTC in market share.
Thanks!
Look at how the Online Safety Act reads.
This is top-down enforcement just like everything else.
They can't fine Hive.
They can't stop Hive from using end to end encryption.
Legislation like this is 100% targeting centralized WEB2 platforms.
Best they can do is remove programs from app stores or at worst IP block websites.
Which isn't going to matter at all if the financial incentive to use Hive and other WEB3 protocols is great enough... which it will be when unemployment is 50% and the legacy economy is in shambles. I look forward to seeing how they try to apply a censorship bill onto censorship resistant networks when all the punishments they dreamed up can't even be enforced and it's not even possible to comply in the first place.
I don't. I have found injustice to be all too easy for that ilk, and I have no interest in fresh, new horrors.
This is all just part of the process.
We can already see how shit like this is gonna go down by looking at places like Nigeria.
It doesn't matter what the government says when the citizens are just like nah.
When life is hard people just stop complying without apology.
Fascinating. How are they going to read the data before I encrypt it when the data is encrypted on an offline device?
And then filtered through a QR code airgap.
That would be a pretty neat trick.
Certainly not impossible but pretty unlikely.
Why do you so smugly predict that we are all doomed to 1000 years of eternal darkness?
Maybe you should prepare yourself for war instead of being such a nay-saying punk all the time.
Or have you just decided that living that slave life is the way to go from here on out?
Understandable if so, but disappointing.
Very thorough comment as always.
I guess my only question to you would be the obvious one:
Do you believe that Hive has been successfully 51% attacked?
I feel like you are both heavily implying that this is both true and false at the same time. On the one side you talk a lot about the censorship on the platform being a problem. You often act as though this network has reached a point of no return in terms of corruption with the rich using their power to further enrich themselves (heavily employing the 'plutocracy' keyword), which is only going to get more pronounced over time as the corruption compounds upon itself.
And yet you are still here, which confuses the issue. Anyone who truly believes that Hive is being 51% attacked every single day and that this will be the case for the foreseeable future really shouldn't be sticking around under any circumstances. What am I missing?
I have to assume that you don't actually believe Hive has been corrupted in this way, and that the consensus of the network could change on a dime at any time... which is 'coincidentally' enough also my own assessment. These downvotes and censorship you speak of could be countered by other players on the network in an instant if they so willed it. Hell, even a fortune as small as a million dollars coming from outside the network could accomplish such a feat quite easily. An alliance forged inside of Hive itself could also materialize to do the same.
Perhaps the thing you are interpreting as censorship and corruption is simply the basic will of the network and collective consensus expressing itself. You're not a fan of the bitter flavor Hive is cooking up in the moment, and that is understandable. That doesn't mean the network is FUBAR, which is why you are still here having this conversation in the first place.
Is it really possible to write this and then read it over and think you've somehow gained the upper-hand within the discussion? Hurling your insults and venting frustration in such a childish and comical way all the while acting like some kind of intellectual superior. Isn't it painfully obvious that your emotional intelligence is just scraping the gutter?
You haven't gained anything from this comment. Not a single step of progress, and the best part being that you knew this was the case as you were writing it, but you wrote it anyway because you don't know how else to voice your frustration. How's it feel to be so smart and yet so dumb? If you don't have communication, you don't have anything. Those are the rules of humanity and the cooperation required to actually get shit done.
You accuse me lacking integrity, honesty, and objectivity, but it really feels like you're just projecting your own bullshit onto me. Do you really not understand what I mean by a 51% attack on Hive? I thought I described it pretty well, and I think you understand perfectly well and you're just pretending not to in order to "gain the upper hand" once again. Not very honest of you. Lacks integrity imo. Tell me more about how 'objective' you're being with a comment like this. Super comical on all fronts. Thanks for the laugh.