I think you underestimate the power of the existing Hive community to moderate content.
Even if Hive gains 4 million new users from Parler, these new users will have little HP and if some of them post genuinely anti-semitic content then I and many others with plenty of HP will downvote it and them into being hidden on most Hive front ends.
Hive has free speech but it also has effective content moderation by the upvoting and downvoting system. Instead of one woke millenial working at Big tech deciding what is OK, the votes of large numbers of people who have invested in Hive decides what is great, good, OK, poor, Bad or beyond the pale.
People that really want to post anti-semitic content can create their own little community of haters with negative reputation that no one else on Hive has to see. They will earn no Hive from their content and if they want to create an anti-semite token on Hive engine it will likely have little or no value.
Well said. I believe in the power of the community to moderate & feedback what is acceptable, without needing to delete & censor.
Maybe I'm just being cynical, I wish I shared your optimism. Perception is important. The first big market/userbase Hive taps into will largely define it in the eyes of the world.
I remember the days when PizzaGate had a more than healthy foothold on the trending page and many established users cheered on The Dark Overlord for using the blockchain to post extortion demands. I can easily see a future evolve where anyone who’s not a Q believer won’t want to give Hive the time of day.
This particular appeal at this particular time to bring in the masses actually risks relegating Hive to niche status in my eyes. It’s kind of like the actress who figures she can do a few porn movies to get her name out there and then transition to “real” acting. She may even be a good actress... but that reputation is going to be very hard to shake. Just like her, I feel that right now Hive needs to be very careful who it gets in bed with!
I understand what you are saying but this is centralised thinking. Its the sort of considerations a company CEO might have about its brand.
Hive is not a single actress, or a single brand, it is a back-end database for a broad and diverse set of humans who form all sorts of communities.
When Hive achieves mass adoption the vast majority of joiners won't even know they are joining Hive.
They will be joining LeoFinance or Splinterlands or StemGeeks or one of the numerous communities that attracts them.
In any case, at this stage of Hive's development any publicity is good publicity.
If Hive is limited by one community joining, then Hive has failed already. All of the conspiracy theories, bad actors, etc all used Twitter. Sure Twitter banned them, but they accepted them first. The front ends on Hive can ban who they want. If people are violent they will be removed from the front ends. That is the job of front end owners. The blockchain does not care who you are. If someone breaks the law, they get booted from front ends and then arrested because the data is public if they tied their identity to it. I’m not here to be a referee on who can join Hive. I am here to give everyone an equal chance at free speech. If they abuse it they won’t get far on Hive. They will end up creating their own siloed communities on Hive and if they break the law they will have the suffer the consequences. It is very dangerous thinking to label a whole group of people a certain way and say they don’t even deserve to speak. Not everyone on parler id a violent criminal, and I despise that way of fearful defensive thinking. If we want to succeed we have to be stronger than that.
And if the fear is if we give a platform to anyone, and that rulfles regulatory feathers, let then be reffuled. Hive does not need our protection it isn’t centralized. If a regulatory can come take down Hive, let them do it. I rather hive fail soon if it’s not strong enough to stand on its own two feet. But I know better than that, no one is bringing down Hive. I am one who likes to see Hive tested I want to know what we are made of.
Exactly! Hive is the Bitcoin of social media.
It is resilient and very difficult to take down already and will only get stronger and more resilient.
18 months ago I was very worried by the over-reliance on Steemit Inc's API nodes.
When Hive went independent 8 months ago there were 7 API nodes which was some diversity but not enough.
Today we have 19 with more coming online all the time.
People like @techcoderx and I are pioneering and encouraging every witness to run an API node, preferably on their own physical hardware. $1000 is all it costs to build an API node (4/8 core CPU, 64Gb RAM & 2 Tb NVME) that can handle all Hive's current traffic.
Many people can spend a couple of hundred $ to upgrade an existing machine.
With API nodes and front ends easy, cheap and quick to set up and hundreds and then thousands of people worldwide running them in their homes and businesses Hive becomes so diverse and resilient that, like Bitcoin, it is just a fact that has to be accepted and cannot be stopped.