Another post about beneficiary usage which turned into something else

in Rant, Complain, Talk3 years ago (edited)

It was brought to my attention that there's now another project starting a beneficiary incentivized curation service and while I haven't looked into their activity or know too much about them I just wanted to point out some things of how using beneficiaries should be okay and what shouldn't be. (The post was meant to be about this but I went on a tangent and discussed other things Hive instead such as downvotes and maximization of returns, will write about that another time and after looking into the activity of linked announcement post more closely.)

Now of course some of you may think, any way should be acceptable, but we have to remember certain rules of curation we've put forward. They're easy to sidestep and many decide to go that route but they're just as unfair to the rest of us nonetheless and it needs to be clear why that's the case.

The issue with the project hope, aside from the usual overrewarding low effort spun content that a majority of their posts consist of, is that it resulted in a lot of indirect self-voting and gaining increased returns at the cost of the authors. Whether the authors are okay with it or not, that's not of importance, the importance is that this project is now gaining a lot more returns compared to other curators. Their actions also showed that they focused quite a lot to only curate posts that were giving them these kickbacks and that indeed their main prerogative was the returns that would let them lease more HP, donate more to community members, etc. Matter of the fact is that what is done with the returns doesn't matter, even if all of it is donated for charity, as it is earned in an unfair way to begin with. Let's not even get to the part where authors who may not have wanted to give them half of their post rewards had no choice as the way they would vote was pretty obvious that if you didn't, you'd be left out most of the time or receive very small votes. There was a lot of wrongs in one place with that project and I'm not going to go deeper into it here as I don't want to make another post about them, but it seems that they've started cutting back on the beneficiary kickback after a few weeks of downvotes, whether or not they've brewed up a new scheme or just the same one but only voting on certain people who'll give them the returns back other ways is not impossibly to assume but now that there's more attention to them maybe people will finally start using downvotes as a more genuine way to shave off some rewards if the content, effort or general contributions to Hive from the authors aren't deemed as deserving as the rest. I genuinely hope that not only will there be more downvotes come the next HF with the linear curve but that they're used well and that any malicious ones either downvoting too hard or due to retaliation or other harmful ways to a users experience will be countered appropriately as we do have more upvote mana than downvote mana.

Source

It feels weird talking about using downvotes well, I know many of you would never dream of using them in the first place and many of you would hope to never live such nightmares to receive downvotes on your own content. Hive is unique, so much so that no other blockchain has yet to implement something like the curation system we have here and finetune and use it as well and fair across the chain. It's easy to generalize and think it's not working well just because some people who don't like the way things are used are usually the loudest while those who are okay or really happy about it may not make as much noise. I like to think of Hive as a very long term project, this means many more years of inflation, development and proof of brain ongoing. We're too often too focused on either short term gains or short term effects of downvotes and how they make us feel, a big reason to that is also because we see upvotes the wrong way. We quickly forget that pending rewards means pending for a reason and many of us are so used to using Hive without even knowing where the rewards come from to begin with, or at least the value of them.

To put it in simple terms, think about dogecoin mining. How many of you are mining dogecoin right now? Probably not many of you, neither am I. I mined it early on for a while but I didn't want to wreck my GPU's too much as they were often running hot and not letting me do other things on the PC. See what I mean? Wear and tear, a sacrifice to mine dogecoin. Other than that I was also not too happy to see that at the end of the month the electricity bill would come knocking and cut out more than 50% of the value my mined coins had at the time, another sacrifice. Electricity cost and hardware.

What about on Hive? Well, we don't have those sacrifices, but we have other more human ones. I'm sure you all know what those entail but I don't think many of you think about what it would be like if you were getting hive rewards too easily too often. There's still a lot of people in such positions where they're getting a lot of rewards either for very little work done or work done at some point in time they're still getting rewarded for or just having invested at the right time and now enjoyin the returns they're getting after already having sold their initial investment and riding out the profits. That's how Hive works and it's okay, compared to investors there could also be many who've put a lot of time and effort into their stake, sold some and are now enjoying the returns of what they felt they could leave staked.

The issue is that there's always some people who just never get enough. It's alright if you're getting rewarded for consistently and constantly contributing to the platform in meaningful ways but I'm sure a lot of you attempt to do it in easy ways.

"Hey let's just get this post out there today so I can collect my autovotes and be on my way."

"Replying to comments? Nah, I don't have time for that."

"Commenting on other people's posts? Nah, why would I waste time on that."

"Checking if I can contribute to Hive in other ways? Bring some value to Hive by promoting it in other places so they can also check out how good it is to me? Nah, lol, that would mean potentially sharing the rewardpool with more people and maybe losing out on some voting power of all the autovotes I get cause I talked some people into voting my posts up some time ago."

It's easy to understand many ways people would not want to risk the value they're earning here today, many would even sacrifice the whole future potential of the platform rather than losing out on a % of returns or upvotes. It's human nature. Some people aren't going to care that many others aren't just looking how to maximize their returns even if they believe in the future of this platform more than they do. Even if they have invested and bought most of the Hive they curate with, even if they've never sold any Hive and have stayed powered up and curating and contributing to the ecosystem in many ways on a constant basis. They won't care if they're riding on the backs of others to still get good returns, while the rest get less and even if the reason their own investment is worth more due to the people who do use their stake well and less selfishly.

That's decentralization. There just will be all kinds of people.

The problem we have today is that we've alienated downvotes so much, we have clone competitors who are against it so much, one almost never used it and were against it since they heavily invested in it and today have got a clownshow of a trending and are centralized in most ways by someone who centralizes most things, the other one doesn't even have downvotes to begin with. We all know by now, after years of trying these other methods, is that not having or using downvotes at all will not work. Don't you think youtube has thought about it and tested it out? Don't you think Reddit has thought about removing downvotes and be more like Facebook? I'm sure they have and I'm sure the latter is a joke to the formers in terms of content, content discovery and rewarding (adrevenue, visibility, promotion) those who do good despite downvotes existing. The difference between those platforms is that their downvotes are anonymous, much like all their activity behind a private owned database compared to our open blockchain that anyone can look into what occurred when, what was posted, who did what.

Just because you know who downvoted your content doesn't mean you should get all up in arms and demand downvotes to be removed, look for ways to retribute to the downvoted or start hating the platform and start listing reasons why it will fail because you lost $40 on a $150 post. Imagine if YouTubers or redditors did that on a daily basis.

"Some of you downvoted my post a lot and I may have lost a lot of traffic to my website because of it, this is why Reddit sucks, why it will never become big, etc." Of course Reddit is already big so that last part doesn't make sense, but at one point it wasn't, when I initially started lurking it it was pretty small, still bigger than Hive is today but still tiny compared to the other giants at the time. Try and think about downvotes the same way you think about them on other platforms. Think about the publicity of them showing you who did it and for how much as a benefit to you instead of as a reason to complain, get angry, grow your hatred, etc. You can instead request someone to let you know why the downvote happened in the first place, not only that but others who see the downvote can counter it when they hear about it or happen to follow you and think it's not deserving. Sure it costs them a little bit as their returns won't be as high but it's possible and it's only possible due to how open this blockchain is. We've gotta be more smart and accepting of downvotes because without them this place will just turn into a never ending farm for certain accounts with stake and new users will have to fight way harder than they do on youtube or reddit to ever receive some recognition, rewards or get into the whole thing and do well if they're deserving.

Okay, fuck, I've been ranting on for a long time now and realize that my initial title of the post "another post about beneficiary usage" doesn't make much sense so I'm just going to title this differently and just post it in that rant community instead and do some more research on the new announcement I read about using the beneficiary in exchange for votes and why that's wrong cause this post spun out of that context real quick.

Hope this post helped some of you see downvotes in a different light and that maybe, the short term ROI and greed may not be worth it over your dignity and long term respect and rewards the platform may give you for not losing face and instead playing by the rules that make this platform the best one on the internet.

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As a reaction to my smiley, removed his vote lol.

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Classic.

Great write up. Got me thinking about privacy and anonymity on HIVE. I remember, at one point in the early days the STEEM roadmap had an outline for privacy features. It said something about ring signatures and how they could possibly be used, although from what I understand ring signatures are not sufficient enough for privacy anyway. We would most likely have to look at something using zero knowledge proofs if we want the best privacy...

Unfortunately as one of the most intelligent figures in the crypto space Zooko puts it "You can’t add it(privacy) without breaking existing systems and user behavior"

  • who knows, maybe its possible and someone will figure it out one day. something to think about....

Hive would be interesting with a privacy feature, it's something I've been thinking off as a layer 2 token as an experiment but there's still a lot of stuff to figure out and not being a dev/technical it's hard to know the boundaries.

You and @smooth should get together to discuss as he's the privacy expert afaik. :D

One of the most interesting and promising layer 2s I have been researching is called StarkWare. They have their tech deployed in a working product on Ethereum already called dYdX exchange. Its really smooth, you should play around with it. I am not sure if this could be utilized on HIVE down the road for privacy...as you say I'm sure @smooth would know much more than me.

https://starkware.co/
https://twitter.com/StarkWareLtd
https://dydx.exchange/

Oh yeah! They're behind the immutable X development which is the first l2 to use zksnarks and made trading of gods unchained cards possible again since eth fees have made it unusable. I only know cause I'm into the game and play it every now and then and bought a bunch of genesis cards a couple years ago. I don't even know too much about zksnarks, just that vitalik always referred to them as a solution to the layer 1 fees and so far it seems to be working alright even though imx is only on the first few rollouts of the dex.

Wow, people should keep an eye on their L2 privacy solutions if it can be implemented on Hive, would be really amazing to curate content where you don't know who the author behind it is especially to compare to our current layer 1.

Heres how you do it, you create a steem account and a golos.id (golos classic) account with same keys as your hive wallet

now you change the keys on one

now the other
hhahaha
@acidyo gets where im going

you can always check the chain and link up recovery accounts and create an insane web with 3 chains steem golos and hive and you can probably add in eos and @telosnetwork

now we have to have a hive witness voted by all witnesses to be run on steem and a steem witness voted in by steemians and steem witnesses on hive and also vica vica versa with golos and even eos and telos. they run a block producer on telos ON HIVE.... in fact i think @telosnetwork or @hellotelos could get enough hive to vote in their own witness by using the telos proposal system. i tried to do that with POST upvotes i should have thought harder and done inter chain witness carnival back then

anyway yeah imagine you stack up beneficiary rewards between chains

also imagine just within hive you get a beneficiary reward that AUTOMATIOCALLY goes to @leofinance which then automatically sends you LEO, no fucking hive engine transaction needed other than a send, no market orders lol

also beneficiary rewards that can automatically go to your TOP commenter or ANy commenter i mean dude.... why dont we have THAAAAt

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who knows, maybe its possible and someone will figure it out one day. something to think about....

I think, instead of waiting when it could be possible, we should try to bring it onboard. If You and @smooth can figure out, that's great, else we should engage some expertise from @blocktrades team as well. The entire development, could be done by another team, but the first hurdle is feasibility analysis. So using these expertise, if its determined to be feasible, then we should actively try build a separate team and work on it using some funding.

This sort of thing is out of my league. I am just an investor and learner. However if someone has a viable solution one day I would be willing to fund development for it via the DHF.

Hopefully someone is thinking about privacy down the road, although like I said I am not sure if it would even be possible. Transparency does have its benefits in a social network. I am sure people much smarter than me are thinking about this. @smooth @blocktrades

It's certainly possible. Whether it is desirable or a priority is another question.

appreciate your input.

yeah we need to pay people beneficiary rewards to a @tipitbot account that then tips the users in PHIVE on telos and eos over twitter telegram discord etc

I'll downvote this post a bit as the rewards are excessive. Need to spread it around. No criticism of what you write. Have some !PIZZA.

I was thinking that those who get the big auto votes should be able to make use of the rewards cap that dbuzz has. Doesn't seem to be an option in peakd. Can also set beneficiaries to send some rewards to people who ought to get more. That is a form of curation.

I also noticed an account that makes a lot from SBI today by delegating most of their HP. They have a few thousand shares, but there ought to be a cap on what delegation gets you. Manual delegation ought to play a bigger part and maybe the next hardfork will encourage it.

Yeah.. no one does, though. Feels like I'm the only one aside from hbd.funder sending it part of the rewards, aside from my last two posts.

I do share rewards from my #FollowFriday posts. May do it more, especially where I mention someone. Maybe peakd should suggest sharing when you tag people. I think we're losing a lot of users who feel neglected. It's easy to take big rewards for granted.

Downvotes are awesome and I honestly wish more people would use it. Content derives value from consensus and if we only have one way to vote, we really don’t get to an accurate consensus.

They don't want to ruin their earning potential by hurting someone's feelings even if they do honestly think the content ain't all that. When someone just whines about other authors getting more rewards I check out their profile and see the downvote mana not being used, then be like, yeah just one of those users that whine but never do anything with their stake. There's a lot of content getting rewards that aren't even really worth putting money onto but people just look at it and complain proof of brain is broken.

It's pretty obvious that downvotes are necessary. Just look at Blurt and the shit goes on there. Last time I paid any attention to it, they wanted to give the witnesses to remove full earnings potential from any individual. Just downvotes except controlled by a few and full downvotes.

If you don't like the downvotes you are getting on Hive, there's always second layer tokens that you can participate in. People are stupid is really what I've learned.

Last time I paid any attention to it, they wanted to give the witnesses to remove full earnings potential from any individual.

So they ended up wanting to be a centralized platform. Just people not knowing what they want and then having what they want and realizing it's not really what they need.

People are stupid is really what I've learned.

A wise sage I know said this.

"People are lame." - sage of the internet 2020

I find the 2nd layer being as profitable if not more than the first layer provided you are really doing well on a niche and not pissing other people off on that second layer.

Exactly, I just mentioned this to someone yesterday, if you don't like that you're getting downvoted and there's no one around or wants to help you once you've made a case that you don't deserve the downvotes, you can cushion the blow with L2. Most of the time people are happy to help counter even if it means less curation reward returns for them, it's the right thing to do on malicious downvotes if the content isn't overrewarded or it's just something personal, you'll help the other voters on said posts get some returns back as well that way. If people don't want to counter them, there's usually a reason and it's not always cause they don't want to be targetted by downvotes themselves.

Same thing goes for those wanting to remove layer 1 completely and shilling for layer 2, tbh. They've not even tried to use their downvotes or attempt to normalize them, especially for disagreement of rewards. There's a lot of stuff that gets overrewarded, my posts included but I'm not here trying to farm it on a daily basis and often forfeit a lot of them. It's really not that difficult to find out who's here just for the rewards, a lot of the times some downvotes show people's true colors easier than a lie detector and most of those reactions are pretty cringe.

There's a lot of stuff that gets overrewarded

It's always been like that. The entertainment comes from the drama over rewards. It's always about drama over the rewards. I don't recall any major drama on the blockchain that can't be linked with the drama over rewards. It's all about the damn rewards. Just as human history has been shaped by wars, this blockchain has been shaped by reward disagreements.

It's quite entertaining some times, but pretty sad when people use it to go after smaller users which I have zero tolerance about - unless they're being assholes in one way or another ofcourse, there's consequences to your actions here just like anywhere else in the world and that's good else we'd just have trolls constantly patrolling the place all the time.

Can you imagine with more people and bigger people who have feuds with one another from the past being on Hive and the drama that'd ensue then?

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but pretty sad when people use it to go after smaller users which I have zero tolerance about

I don't really consider stake as a big factor to character. It's not like an asshole with less stake will change their views after receiving more tokens. If we remove the social rewards to the argument and just strip down the drama to it's core of rewards disagreement, I don't think people would still put up with the drama and would just be on their merry way somewhere else. As soon as the argument about censorship is supported by rewards being taken, that's when I know it's not really about their free speech they care about but the rewards.

Can you imagine with more people and bigger people who have feuds with one another from the past being on Hive and the drama that'd ensue then?

I can but it's on a microscale drama that people shouldn't bother with. If Hive does get more love from the mainstream, making posts about rewards disagreement, value of engagement will be evergreen content here.

Myeah, that's true, I mean more like someone who just cause he happens to have bigger stake lashes out at smaller users knowing he's doing a lot more "damage" to them in an attempt to scare them away from voicing their opinion with downvotes on overrewarded content - which often times the bigger user gets a lot of and most of the time its from vote-trading or other shitty ways. When I see those kind of downvotes is when I lose my cool.

I'm glad you digressed from your original topic since the downvote discussion is a super important one. Lately am thinking of solutions that may help to make HIVE more fair. Whatever concept I think of, the red line seems to be the need to increase transparency.

Interestingly, when applying more transparency to downvotes, this may cause (oh well... more like 'likely cause') negative effects to those casting these downvotes. This may be the prime reason why many users don't use the downvote feature. Another important contributor for many HIVE users not to use the downvote button, maybe the little influence they have, the vote value.

Solution?
To increase downvote influence, we should pool downvotes and give (downvote) curator teams the power to use this power. I believe we need more than one Hivewatchers team. I also believe we should be able to delegate our downvotes independently of the delegation of our upvotes. Not sure if splitting delegation for up-/downvotes is possible, but it would be great if we can. When we can, we immediately solved the anonymity 'problem'. Although delegating our downvote power to some other account controlled by a Hivewatchers-like team, can still be traced back to the users providing downvote power, it is highly unlikely those who receive downvotes by one or more Hivewatcher-like teams, will retaliate by going after all those who delegate their downvote power. At least, I think such retaliation on large scale is highly unlikely, especially when many of the HIVE users start to delegate their downvote power to said teams.

Personally, I use Hivewacthers to report abuse. Lately, not so much anymore, simply because I don't have the time anymore now curation takes a lot more time due to the increase of activities in our community. For good reasons, Hivewatchers want to see proof when reporting some post or user. But getting the proof above the table, cost time. It would be great, if we can create something that allows users to report suspious abusive behaviour, without solid proof while Hivewatcher-like teams are taking on the work. The later require a compensation model for such teams. Could this become part of our base chain? Something similar to the ways we compensate witnesses?

We've brought it up many times to create a curation blacklist where we'd co-op with other projects such as @curangel to input users we'd prefer not to curate for many abusive reasons they may have shown in the past. We just really lack the manpower atm.

The lack of manpower, I fully understand. That's why I believe such activities need to be compensated by the platform in one or the other way. When compensation is available, it's much easier to find people to perform tasks that needs to be handled.

Oh snap, wish I saw this before I finished my post on Free Speech Vs. Censorship on Hive, I could've totally quoted this:

Just because you know who downvoted your content doesn't mean you should get all up in arms and demand downvotes to be removed, look for ways to retribute to the downvoted or start hating the platform and start listing reasons why it will fail because you lost $40 on a $150 post. Imagine if YouTubers or redditors did that on a daily basis.

And added a companion section about it, then linked back to this post. Fantastic perspective on things @acidyo , thank you for writing and sharing these insights.

🙏

love your infographic posts, thanks for letting me know you've posted a new one as I jus woke up and may have missed it :D (manual curator problems) will check it out with coffee

Ayy, honored to hear it man, thank you! It's definitely a 'with coffee' piece in my mind, so that's probably a good call, lol.

(And I'm kind of a fan of manual curation, so, props to that.) 😁

Let me know if you're interested in doing a similar infographic post about the curation and structure we have built up with OCD at some point if you're out of ideas. :D Would be really cool as I've always wanted to see it in such a format!

That's a great idea, it'd be a fantastic learning experience for me as well, since I know almost nothing about curation structure, OCD, etc.

If I wanted to get started ASAP, what would you say the next step is? Is there a resource I should read? Are there things you could explain about curation/OCD that would help me write it?

Looking forward to wherever this goes! 🙏

Hey @acidyo , I trust you're well! Just wanted to check if you saw my comment here, (didn't want you to think I was flaking or ignoring you :D) I'm 100% down to pursue this idea.🙂

Hey, sorry been a bit busy, read your comment but forgot to reply! Can you remind me again in a few weeks, I want some more things of OCD going before we can compile a full version of all our activity with your infographics and writing style. I think it would turn out a lot better then, I'll be trying to post about the new ones during this weekend or early next week!

People posting short sentences and mentioning links alone be so surprised when the rewards the post has been getting can be disliked. I don't know, when I saw a clickbaity title I should at least get some content to consume for my time but I got links and an ad leading to promote their site.

One quick way to know if a 50% beneficiary is set to pH-fund is just seeing the post posted on project hope and find @crypto.piotr's tipu comment on it.

They didn't even make an attempt with their activity to pretend they're not just voting for the returns while having the community act like a placeholder for "content".

 3 years ago  

Yeah, way to go and making use of this little awesome corner of Hive :).

I will just throw in that for my part I haven't used a downvote yet. Maybe because I do not look at the trending page. Maybe because the project hope has not crossed my way yet.

I get the psychological part of being hesitant to use a downvote, esp for new Hivers.

Content that I don't find interesting or effortless I just ignore. Content that I read and find interesting I upvote. That's the way I go along here.

Aren't Hivewatchers taking care of fraudulent stuff like that?

 3 years ago  

I mostly ignore effortless and spam posts. I use the downvotes when it's plagiarism or identity theft. Also sometimes the drama after throwing a downvote is not worth it. You never know what kind of karen you're dealing with 😅

 3 years ago  

Lol, true. Don't wake the sleeping dog or what is it called 😄. Downvoting when plagiarism or identity is stolen is legit. And when it comes from a curator even more. I hope the Hive doesn't turn into a thing where lots of downvoting is needed.

Nice post etc, are certainly less here than Steem, mind you that may well be as the people on the platform have evolved, downvotes are a good thing as long as there used to redistribute due to content not being above parr, rather than punishment.

It's sad to hear that this is till happening and hopefully your actions have served as a deterrent.

We tend to get well written and worthy content on our community, which is good to read, tells you something about the author and shows they really wnat to support hive, ta muchly @acidyo

We need less autovotes and more active human curation with both up- and down-votes. Much as I like seeing a price boost in the first half-hour, I much prefer interaction. I admit, I would also feel slighted if there were knee-jerk auto-downvotes in response tobthe boys, too, though. I like to think my efforts are more hit than miss.

Autodownvotes would definitely suck. I really hope the next hardfork will make manual curation happen a bit more (and some other plans after that which @blocktrades mentioned in a previous post of mine to maybe lower the amount of daily votes an account has to give). Too bad it's not possible to reward manual votes more than autovotes (nothing outside of captcha's or something bots couldn't perform compared to humans, but that would quickly become annoying if every vote you want to cast has to run through a captcha - especially for curation projects that vote hundreds of posts per day to share distribution wide).

Hopefully we can just improve from here on out, I do want people to get more used to downvotes existing and using them as I think with the linear curve many will attempt to bring back vote-selling or other schemes to increase their ROI like we've seen already happening that need to be nipped in the bud quick.

PeakD pools upvotes and downvotes in a single "votes" chart. Over half of my total votes seem to go to three abusive accounts I flag. I think if we promote the ownership concept of stakes vests, and encourage people to clean house as part of their activities, it might help. I liked the old Steem Flag Rewards initiative, and maybe some kind of Hive reward pool for responsible downvote curators might encourage more activity with some oversight to protect against abuse?

 3 years ago  

Thanks for posting in my fledgling little community here, feels like a celebrity sighting lol :D

Ah PH. I really liked working with Piotr back in the day, it helped me get my start back in the day, not so much from a reward perspective but gave me some exposure to different people and concepts that have helped me stay here. This was before the community and nowadays it’s gone so far from those early days and feels like a scheme through and through sadly. Don’t know where it went wrong but I’ve unfollowed anyone who posts in the PH community routinely because they are astray in my opinion.

I think there’s a lot of nervousness around down votes because you can’t anonymize it so people know who did it, and can react to you or engage with you. I don’t find many posts that I find warrant a down vote but I don’t go hunting for them anymore lol. I’ve gotten some but I’m not into the mix of the content that typically gets strongly down votes, I get the annoying fleas sometimes and that’s whatever lol. I try not to take them personally, someone disagrees with me on something you can do it, I just hope they don’t do it maliciously to always try and reduce my post rewards for no other reason than being a dick. Maybe I’ll follow your down vote trail, is it through OCD?

Only ocdb and for very few occasions atm. The downvotes on this account are a bit more random.

Cool, way to go and making use of this awesome place of Hive♥.

My voting power is very low but I always give 100 persent upvote to people randomly. Hive decentralised the world. Everyone should help each other giving up votes and donate delegation. Sometimes down vote lower the confidence of newcomers like me.

It shouldn’t. Downvotes are normal. Just gonna happen. Not everyone agrees with your content and can cause downvotes. Don’t be discouraged. Just keep going. It’ll go well in the long run just being you.

Like I said in the post people get downvoted everywhere on the rest of the internet, sure it sucks especially if you're new and don't get a lot of upvotes/likes or views but they don't just quit or start calling youtube customer support to help them.

you promise you would do better THIS IS NOT BETTER ACID!!! lol i will be honest i got here to gossip about the beneficiaries issue and now im left wondering will come back when there is gossip to read about! 😅

lol, random I was just talking about you in our Discord. 😏

is bad to talk about people when they are not around! that explains why my ears were ringing

"Hey let's just get this post out there today so I can collect my autovotes and be on my way."

"Replying to comments? Nah, I don't have time for that."

"Commenting on other people's posts? Nah, why would I waste time on that."

I consider these one of the reasons why it's so hard to get acquainted with other users both from te previous blockchain Steem and now Hive. Although there were so many users who were like that to newbies, there are still some who appreciates others like they do understand how it feels and how it was back before when they were new to the community.

I think things are changing on Hive and that there is more interactions happening every day. I may just be following the right people or have the right people on my various list, but I do see more interaction in the comments section of post now, much more than before, and across a wide spectrum of post and account sizes.

Yes, I do think as well. I've met good authors who share the bounty of the platform to newbies. It my point of view, that act encourages them to stay and do great in their own way. When it was my time before, it was really discouraging since no one wants to talk with you even though you put out so much comments on many bog posts.

You should rest, watch porn, or whatever. Stop the rant and give me the OCDB keys! 🙈

What an interesting topic, I'll keep an eye out for comments.

I saw a comment today on a post and thought "what a shit thing to say to someone' I really wanted to downvote that comment just to say I really didn't agree with their way of thinking but I didn't as I'm just a little fish and they had a big rep! A downvote for me would wipe out my whole post lol - I guess I need to grow a pair if I want to have say!!

A downvote for me would wipe out my whole post lol - I guess I need to grow a pair if I want to have say!!

There are parts of the social system an individual is given liberty to choose their battles. When I can't be open and express disagreement on anyone, that's when I know I have treated them as above me. The social rewards on the posts are nice things to have but you don't need them as you can earn just fine with curating content or increasing your stake and delegating passively. I'd like to think decentralization means everyone exercising their freedom of speech and etc but then when these social rewards are tied to the consequences of not being able to earn anything, that says volumes that it's really about the rewards rather than the free speech.

I hadn't thought of it like they were above me but now you mention that I suppose that's true to a certain extent... I have always been a peacekeeper and don't like to cause conflict which limits what I say of my own beliefs :)

I agree with what @artofadamada said in the reply to you, to add to that, if someone does go out and retaliate based on that, someone usually notices, shares it around and it might reach a bigger user sooner or later. There's always bigger fish around and lucky for us the bigger ones aren't all assholes on this decentralized internet today so they may help out.

Yip that made total sense to me ... The peacekeeper in me will probably always win out though. It's good to know there's still non assholes around :D And thank you... :)

In every platform, you're sure to have all set of people. Those that want to game the system while contributing nothing, and those who are sacrificing for the system and reaping tremendous benefits as a result. There could even be those sacrificing for the system without getting much in return.

Gaming a system is the most unfair thing that could be done to a platform, it ruins it and reduce it to nothing.

I think the solution is that some lovers of the platform should run initiatives that rewards those that are obviously sacrificing for the system, those that are trying to game it should receive a heavy blow.

Some people don't take advise until they receive a penalty of some sort.

I think it is kind of sad this is the top post of the day on top of trending.

Go back to Steem.

:D

Excellent post. I had many things that I really did not know, I had no idea of the existence of the use of beneficiaries in exchange for votes and yes, when I started on the platform I never imagined the use of negative votes. They should be used, yes, but not maliciously, the ideal would be to use it to deny plagiarism and rude content on the platform to maintain the blockchain as a platform that generates valuable content.

And about automated votes, I never agreed with them, manual curation generates more interaction between users, support and permanence on the platform. automated votes are for "muddling through"

Good write up and I agree with your points. At the same time, I think downvotes are a difficult issue. Hear me out—I'm going to ramble a bit (but hopefully there will be a point in here somewhere)

This is a logical vs emotional thing. On one hand we can all understand that downvotes are not necessarily personal and only express some kind of disagreement: with a point you made, with the reward size, with something else. But on the other hand, it feels like a personal attack. And that feeling is not only hard to ignore, but hard not to respond emotionally to.

We see this problem a lot in writing critiques. Back when the Writers Block was a thing on Steemit (I think they self-destructed long before Hive) I was a poetry editor there. And before that, I took many creative writing classes at Uni long years ago and I remember the problems of critiques. The thing is, no matter how nice you are in your critique, no matter how softly you try to pad things, people get really really hurt, to the point of bursting into tears, running away, quitting. Now objectively that seems nuts. Why get so upset over someone pointing out that you have a tendency to use run-on sentences, don't know how to use a comma, or tend to have characters speak when you should be having them act? But trying to look at it from their side, they worked really hard on their story or poem or writing, they put a lot of energy into it; not only that, but they allowed themselves to fantasize when writing it about how successful it will be and how much praise it would get. Getting any critique after that is like a slap in the face.

Again, objectively that is silly, but we do need to understand that is what's happening. I mean it's human nature. We can say it shouldn't be this way, but we can't (or shouldn't) deny what it is.

I have been on the other end of this too. Sometimes I submit my poetry to publications. Like almost all writers except those who have made a name (eg Stephen King) I am rejected more than accepted, and those rejections still always hurt a little. I can say thank you, I understand, and I can take any points given to heart, but I still don't feel good about the rejection. I've writer friends who are in advanced age and they tell me they still have the same reaction.

Downvotes trigger the exact same emotional reaction in most people.

Let's not mention that when you get a downvote, it's what, 1 or 2 out of the 163 this post has made. You can shrug and move on. But when a newbie who only makes .1 on a post they worked really hard on, then someone comes along and downvotes it to zero, that really really hurts. Even if the downvoter leaves a comment "It's not personal, I just don't like the point you made", that still really hurts.

Hmmm

So I don't know. I mean I agree with what you write and I think we do need to police the system to encourage more high quality posting and less trash, only-for-a-voting-trail-vote, posts. But at the same time we have to be careful with downvotes because they can also be very hurtful and disincentivizing. Hive has enough problems attractive new users, we really want to be careful about not chasing the good ones away.

I've just been added to some fancy list telling people to go downvote the downvoters. So I must be doing something right.


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Thanks for letting is know the matter.

Weird synchronicity as I just posted about downvotes yesterday. I'm new and got downvotes and didn't understand why. This post has made it even clearer now, I think I'm starting to get it. I think my downvotes might have been a mistake, believing I was plagiarizing. I did ask for someone to come and tell me what I'd done wrong but no-one did so I'll just have to go with my own theory. We'll see.

Thanks for letting us know. 🙏

The issue is that there's always some people who just never get enough. It's alright if you're getting rewarded for consistently and constantly contributing to the platform in meaningful ways but I'm sure a lot of you attempt to do it in easy ways.

Which is what 50/50 rewards doesn't incentivize contributing to the platform in a meaningful way, it incentivizes buying stake -> joining a curation trail -> get rewards lots of rewards because you are rich and were able to buy tons of HP(or got in early/cheap/minedsteem/etc).

Now if they are joining a curation trail that is manually curating and helps the platform by upvoting good quality content that is another thing and I am all for it, but trending/hot page has never really been that

If a WallStreet banker all of a sudden tweeted out "I am buying 10 million HP over the counter so the price doesn't go up, and going to get tons of rewards for joining a curation trail, never post, never comment, fuck yall!!!" the problem would be pretty obvious that it's immoral for some rich person to swoop in and make money off of doing this. It isn't any different for current whales/dolphins.

Right now you are downvoting people who get upvoted by people with large stake, who are doing just what I described, and you end up downvoting dozens or hundreds of random people because of it and that causes a bad user experience. It's only going to get worse.

50/50 incentivizes NOT contributing to the platform in any meaningful way, it DOES keep Hive staked so the price MIGHT go up. With 75/25 you could downvote the specific people who self upvoting/abusing, with 50/50 you have to downvote mostly innocent random people who are getting huge upvotes from whale accounts. I do expect more people to buy Hive and come here for the easy rewards over time. Eventually see that this platform will turn into the extreme milking we see happening on Steem right now, theres nothing really stopping it from happening. Steem and Hive are extremely similar, it will get to this eventuality.

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Anyways, it's 1 whale being downvoted on 75/25 who makes 10 shitposts per day vs dozens to hundreds being downvoted on 50/50 who don't even know the whale upvoting them. I don't think i've seen anything more clear cut.

So you would have to excuse me for reading your post and believing that you DO NOT like 50/50, you outlined some pretty good arguments against it. Did you mean to do that? If not, your subconcious must hate 50/50 and is telling you something ;)

I took my time to read to the end, and I must say I enjoyed your rant. Balance is always an important part of life, where there is good, there is always bad, after rain will come sunshine, as long as there is truth, there will always be lie. So what am I saying, If there is an upvote then downvote will be available too. It's a matter of balance. Different humans on earth and they all like different things, the Idea of downvote is okay same way there is upvote also. People should concentrate more on growing here on the platform, it's a lovely Community, but a Community will remain lovely when the people in it support each other to keep the community so. Thanks for sharing this beautiful post. I had a nice read.

This is a really great post and I don't know why it didnt show up on my feed earlier. I stumbled across it as it was mentioned in another post thread.

You're one of the only ones progressing Hive for its block chain, I fear that too many are in on it soley as a profit scheme.

Keep up the great work mate!