When Hive forked from Steem a few years ago we pretty much stamped a new name on Steem and away we went into the sunset patting each other on the back thinking we did a great job. Since that faithful day Hive has become more stable as a cryptocurrency and even when Bitcoin fell Hive held its ground pretty well. Many things have been developed and the Community has grown somewhat but not as much as we expected. We are still hovering between 15cent and 22 cent with a couple of minor blips along the way. Last Friday being one of them but generally we hold our own on the exchanges but I can't help feeling Hive should be more expensive considering all that is developed on chain. We are feeless also which is a major draw but we don't seem to advertise this fact.
Short form content has become the norm now as the young are used to video Reels and TikTok's where they scroll on after 5 seconds. Reading has now been replaced by watching. Hive has many challenges ahead and we have made mistakes. Some things are still big talking points such as downvoting, autovotes and the DHF.
There was some ideas floating around about Hive users not seeing the vote reward of a post or only the authors see their own. Also there was ideas floating around about taking away the post rewarding altogether. I see some downvotes on posts that exceed $60 and they are the token Ladybird posts and the reason is that they think that post is overrewarded. Now there is different pros and cons to each argument so I am not going to side with any today but I would like to ask the Community if they were to set up Hive in the morning. How would they do it differently?
What would they do regarding downvotes and upvotes? Could the upvotes be tied to the amount the post has been engaged with. If engagement is high then you are rewarded accordingly. If someone is going through the motions with little engagement then that post may not be awarded so handsomely.
Would there be any more benefits of powering up? Our Community culture motivates us to power up for a % ROI but is this the best use of our Hive token? Is powering the token up into HBD more profitable? Granted you have a higher standing in the Community and people talk to you more at Hivefest but what more can you give people who power up. A colleage of mine suggested that Hive being zero fees is actually a disadvantage because most token stakers of crypto tokens get rewarded by the % of transaction fees that they generate. With Hive this is not an option so the staker of Hive gets less.
What about curation? Would you change this? Would you get rid of autovotes. There has been some element of getting rid of this on Hive but we are all guilty here of this. I have seen even the most anto autovote users on Hive are getting autovotes so it's a tough one to manage.
The DHF is a massive issue and there is more money being drained from the Bank of Hive than any Steem ninja mine which was such a contentious issue with Steem at the time. Now we see a rally car flying through the air and think wow we have a rally car but nobody looks at the cost. So what would you do differently here? The largest stakers pretty much have a carte blanche on this DHF fund and there looks like to be no controls in place to prevent 1 whale from giving a quarter of a million in HBD to someone if they have enough Hive Power to vote for a project. Some blockchains use their fund as a rainy day fund and do not touch it until the proverbial shit hits the fan but it looks like Hive is hell bent on getting through theirs. So if I was the largest stakeholder in Hive and Little Jimmy comes to me on the streets of Kuala Lumpar and says to be:
*Oh Mr @blanchy my dear, my dream in life is the climb Mount Everest. But I only have the shirt on my back and the shoes on my feet, can you help me? *
So after I give Little Jimmy a hot dinner and I sort of like him. Good attitude. Calls me master. I tell Jimmy to put in a proposal to Valueplan and make sure he has a Hive flag of some kind so he can plant it on the summit.
Little Jimmy has failed in his first attempt because he has never been up a mountain in his life but there is something I like about Little Jimmy. After paying for his medical fees on his frostbitten arm. I fund him again to scale Everest and after his 3rd attempt and 3 amputated toes later we have a Hive flag on Everest. The Hive Community is ecstatic and can only see the positives but Jimmy is after costing us 400k to climb Everest. Now Jimmy wants to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and because he climbed Everest I can't really say no so I fund him on this as well and it just goes on and on. Jimmy relies on the income now and Hive is down 600k in HBD funding a guy with 13 HP in his account that didn't even post about scaling Everest. In the end it all turns sour and Jimmy writes a long post outing me for not supplying him with the adequate safety equipment and it all ends in tears.
So in summary how would you handle onboarding or marketing differently?
Downvoting looks to be an issue but personally I don't have a problem with it but would you change anything here?
Is there anything in the mechanics of Hive and HBD you would change? Inflationary controls or deflationary controls? Personally it all goes over my head a bit. Would you change the supply of Hive? Would you try to promote HBD on more exchanges?
How would you handle the Dapps? It looks like we aren't great at it. They are like the England football team. They have not won the world cup since 1966 and the country is wanting and wishing for the current team to bring it home but yet when they get to the tournaments , the press go after them like they are the enemy. Some blockchains have a fund to attract blockchain games / projects to their blockchain? Have we been burnt by Dapps just taking the money and leaving before? What are the controls measures or contracts in place to combat a run on the Hive Bank? Is there certain deliverables that are needed from these Dapps to get funded? Should be be more professional when dealing with projects and their founders? What is the relationship like with two of our major Dapps in Splinterlands and Leo? Is it good or could it be better?
Would you structure the witness system differently?
Or maybe it is something that I have not even spoken about above?
What have you seen on other blockchains that you liked?
Answers on a stamped addressed decentralised envelope or just in the comments below.
Awesome question. I have given it thought over the years I've been here, considering the abysmal user retention the ragequitters almost ubiquitously ascribe to flags. Flags aren't the opposite of upvotes. The opposite of an upvote is no vote. If posts were instead Toyota pickup trucks, an upvote would be comparable to buying one, and the opposite of that is not buying one. The equivalent of a flag would be a tax. Decreasing the income of Toyota for making and selling the truck, which is what downvotes do to content on Hive. In fact, DV's allow anyone to tax production to the limit of their stake, and Ford, Chevy, and American motors would have never let Toyota profit one satoshi if they had that kind of power to tax.
DV's are taxes. Taxation is theft, so they need to go. Additionally, I've spoken extensively with the most prolific flaggots on the platform, and they assure me DV's do very little to discourage actual spam and scams. They are probably more effective against plagiarism, because the purpose of plagiarism on Hive is to get rewards for better posts than the plagiarist is capable of, but neither scams nor spam care much about rewards for their posts. They profit from the scam, or have some other reason to be spamming.
What flags do, as they are employed by the most industrious of flaggots, is drive posters that have made some error, such as not properly attributing a pic they use in a post, or whose opinions on matters flaggots disapprove, off the platform. Since 2017 Hive has shed ~1M users whom, if they bother to say, say they were driven off by their rewards being zeroed out on every post and comment. Of course that brings up the fact that driving people off the platform is a form of censorship, just as is double tapping someone in the back of the head. It shuts them up permanently, at least on this platform. Also, it's the ultimate antimarketing strategy, because all of them thereafter bitterly complain about Hive to anyone that will listen. It's just bad business all around for Hive.
It's good for whales though, because they centralize stake by reducing the number of accounts with stake, and whales extract >90% of the inflation from the rewards pool, so DV's, that return rewards to the pool, then almost all end up in the wallets of whales. The most important thing driving people from the platform with flags does, though, is prevent Hive from growing and attracting rapine investors that could spend the entire market cap of Hive on lunch for a few hundred of their most obsequious minions on Fiji without batting an eyelash. In our little pond the whales look huge to us, but they are basically plebs to actual billionaires, as Sun Yuchen proved.
They don't want another Sun to shine them on again. They want to maintain their total control of the witnesses which their bare majority of stake has since 2016 (except for when Ned sold the Founder's Stake to Sun Yuchen and the witnesses were elected at his sole option) because the witnesses choose what code runs, and that determines who gets the inflation from the rewards pool, and whales like it going to them best, which is what they make happen when they control the witnesses.
I'd also get rid of curation rewards, because they create a financial incentive to curate that has not a damn thing to do with content quality, so replaces actual curative intent with seeking financial gain, and that produces the absolute mess Trending is. Curation rewards aren't necessary at all to incentivize people to upvote content they like, as dozens of other platforms have all kinds of upvotes being cast without any financial emolument of the voter. That would restore post and author qualities as the reason people upvote posts and comments, and improve the library of content that is what attracts consumers to come here.
I'd replace it with HBD savings, because that enables investors to bank a predictable return for their investment in Hive without deranging curation, and HBD isn't voting stock, so that would also reduce the plutocratic control of Hive governance, which is the next thing I'd do. IRL the world is ruled by money, and that's observably a terrible, awful way to run things. Stake weight determining whom governs produce war, genocide, plandemics, and corporations saying that people have no right to water, as Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said when he was CEO of Nestle before he become interim Chairman of the WEF some while back. People with the most money want everything to be monetized and sold to the highest bidder, because they can outbid everyone else, and this deprecates human rights like flags have BPCVoter's Hive account.
Something like requiring a minimum stake before you can vote for witnesses is a good idea, because n00bs without much stake are typically short of understanding how Hive works and what witnesses do, and why they should choose one over another. However I wouldn't enable voting all your stake for each witness 30 times. Some other metric needs to weight votes, or simply have straight 1a1v (one account one vote) - but that requires excluding socks and bots, which Ned never actually got around to achieving through the use of oracles. I reckon we should discuss what metric would be best, or how to implement oracles that exclude bots and socks from voting witnesses.
Given the way the crypto markets have been subjugated to surveillance, I'd implement the anonymity that Monero and such privacy coins employ to prevent creepy stalkers from being all up in their financial affairs. That's one of the original purposes of cryptocurrency that has become all but impossible today, and is something we need more than ever with Palantir and the WEF taking over the world.
The DHF is about the worst managed development fund I can imagine, and I'd just burn the whole thing, which would transfer that financial value to the stakeholders according to their stake. With less Hive and HBD in existence, our stake would increase in value commensurately. If we want to fund development we can spend our stake to do so, rather than facilitating the festering fraud the proposal system does today.
Those are the main things I'd do and why I'd do them if I was the god of Hive. The lure of censorship proof social media is far more valuable to the market than some tokens (unless you're a whale that could care less about speech or social media because you just want money. Something that neglects, however, is that social media has become the biggest financial sector in the global market in ~10 years, and were Hive run properly, it could capture all the society using media without getting paid for it, and being censored and banned when they do). This is only becoming more important globally as governments increasingly jail people for calling politicians fat or being opposed to crimes against humanity pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors corrupt government to profit from. Ending the practice that currently drives people off Hive every day, flagging away every satoshi of rewards for every comment and post indefinitely, is how to end that censorship, and that is an existentially valuable feature Hive is failing to provide.
Thanks!
As per usual @valued-customer you never disappoint and as per usual I will have to read this reply 4 times before I can properly understand it.
This.
I have talked a lot over the years about what I would do differently and I am back in a place where I am thinking the community at large might be a lost cause. There are individuals here who I value, but I am not sure about "Hive" as a whole because the wrong incentives have attracted and retained people who just want to work the system with as little contribution as possible.
We have people who are funded heavily to promote and market Hive who do not know how to do the most basic things required of the job and are unaccountable.
Engagement would be great as a factor for managing over-rewards, but with so many people already botting the comments (eg. "wahh wahh my spam gets downvoted, ask your friends to stop downvoting me otherwise I will keep spamming you for calling me a spammer!!1") and the farmers who post eleventy times per day across all of their accounts would think nothing about filling the chain with sock-puppet "thansks mr poster!" comments even manually if it maintained their work-free lifestyle.
The bad Hive price keeps some of the sketchier folks quiet but the next spike in price will get the "I deserve $1000 for my picture of an ASDA bag on grass" to come back.
Any other web platform would incentivise things that bring more activity to the platform, but when people from "out there" discover that I am a hive user I get embarrassed like they discovered I have a weird addiction or fetish. I would be less shamed if people thought I hung out on 4chan.
😂 and this my friend is why you are talking to a bee gee . On a serious note your points are excellent.
Heh I figured that was the case, but it is a shame because there are a few people I would miss if I left, so what I do is keep hanging out at the shitty bar and hope nobody sees me come and go while wearing a "MY NAME IS CHRIS" badge
😂😂😂😂
hmmm, If you ask me, I see two things that are not quite right for me
The voting mana
Many say that Upvote and Downvote are the same, a vote is a vote. Then there come many justification to support it, such as the downvote is only less than 2% so what the fuss is all about.
Well then put them in the same pool. So whether you vote or downvote, you eat your voting mana. You have freedom whether to use your mana pool to vote or to downvote, which the current one both are coming from different pool.
Let give people what they want, what their belief is, a vote is a vote, whether downvote or upvote, both should come from the same voting mana.
The Fork gave births to Bad Actors
when we made the fork, I had not been here that time so I can not say in detail, but what I know is that people were given some free HP based on what they had in the legacy chain. That was a bad call actually, so it was very easy for anyone to double their HP in a instant.
And now people talking about KE ratio. so be fair, make the KE ratio which negate the HP from the fork. See how their KE are in a fair condition.
We all know many justice crusaders here were self voting and using bid bot in the past. They could make any excuse such as they did not know it was bad, but why can they give same condition to new users to when the newer users do the same. Instead to showing them what to do, Crusaders just tend to wipe them all
And the last is DHF. our DHF should be sources from HBD that generated after the fork, not something that copied over from the legacy chain.
I remember getting the same amount of Hive for Steem during the fork and I sold all my Steem. I don't think many people complained at the time but yes your point is valid. Thanks for the comment. The upvote downvote from the same pool is interesting. I wouldn't have a problem with that although many would I would imagine
It started out that up/downvotes came from the same pool, we used to have to give up curation rewards to fight abuse.
That was changed to overcome a known issue, and it worked.
That account is no longer an issue.
Bidbots are now wholesale only. (smdh)
Maybe @themarkymark will add a time tab to the span of the ratio?
I could see a reprieve IF the account has bled us for less in the last 2 years.
The thing I would most like to see is the original n2 curation game brought back, but that would take self discipline from 'the whales'.
A 1000mv voting cap voluntarily respected by 'the whales' would go a long ways to making this game more enticing to people that are doing it for dimes.
Too few people understand that when a whale votes every other vote loses value.
'They' incessantly cheer to their own detriment.
The only real change we can expect is for folks to power up and overcome those that keep things the way that they are.
Things are working just fine for 'them', or they would change things.
Same as the real world.
Why would people do power up, if they only need to do for better rewards is getting votes from whales?
sadly most people still believe that the indicator for doing well on Hive is on how much you can withdraw regularly
Poor people have poor ways,...
Those that spend it as fast as they get it, or before, only get rewards IF one of us votes rewards to them.
That makes it our own fault if we let them bleed us dry.
Spend DHF funds on actual marketing aimed on onboarding users and their retention.
I agree here. We are not marketing at the moment. We are doing giveaways.
How about we burn the DHF instead and transfer all that value to our wallets per the stake we possess? Then we can spend our stake on development as we wish, rather than letting Blocktrades determine how it's spent.
Now that's an interesting idea :) An airdrop of a kind. Yet I'm afraid it would just end up in massive dumping and exits, especially considering the current market situation.
Anyone that dumps because of that and goes away is good riddance, IMHO.
Yet we need every single active person with this shrinking userbase we have :/
When an organization has been infiltrated by traitorous criminals seeking to profit from corruption, that organization begins to decline, and we feel just as you state above, that the declining organization has need of it's members that remain. The blanket statement is not true, and the organization primarily needs to evict the traitorous corruptors. That is the necessary action to end the decline that will eventually end in the destruction of the organization.
People on Hive that care only about wresting value from it's token are not beneficial to the platform, nor the community, but haply sacrifice both of them for their financial aggrandizement. Hive, and Steem before it, have continually been deprecated by this population of profiteers, and nothing would improve Hive more than eliminating that population. No matter what we do nothing will enable Hive to attain it's potential if that traitorous infiltration of corruption remains in control of Hive.
I'm not sure this is a plus?
🤣. I can imagine myself drinking a pint in the corner while the DHF gang are dancing away on the dancefloor.
I kinda like Hive the way it is. I would like to see what it would be like if it hadn't been created with the Steem baggage.
If I had infinite power to do so, I wouldn't likely change Hive, I would change the people on it. I would like to see less focus on the financial incentives generally, but I probably won't live to see people evolve to that level.
You didn’t strike me as a conservative @oldsoulnewbie . I’d say you fecking hate AI . 😂😂😂
I'm fiscally conservative, culturally liberal, and it's not AI that I hate, really... it's the way people use it.
I can not repeat all i always say and will also not explain again why in the following - but FIRST THING is:
Different Brand - HIVE is used already and is one of our main problem - Steem(it) is more known still as "our" Hive - saying this as because out there are other more known projects or companies in similar space called "Hive" -not always the first decision under pressure is the best - even withinb 1 hour one could have researched this......
Yes I would imagine the original Hive blockchain company were rightly pissed as well. Considering we are all whales dolphins and minnows I was of the thinking we would go for a fishier name. 😀
I just created a rant post - hope it helps (if not ok)
Have the hive token somehow become deflationary.
Any solutions how we could do this ? Why would this be the goal?
The problem I have with this idea is that I have no idea.
If we have more active users, that is essentially deflationary as less goes to each person. Demand, in theory, increases, and the theory is, the price goes up. But... To me, the price doesn't matter all that much because it... is content driven, but so many people are attracted to comparisons to fiat currency, when hive will continue to do the same thing it always does so long as it has witnesses and API nodes and front ends.
That is why Hive is shrinking the userbase by flagging people off the platform. That concentrates the token in the bags of whales. Because governance of Hive is controlled by a majority of stake, the whales that have maintained a bare majority of stake (excluding the Founder's Stake, which did not participate in governance until Sun Yuchen acquired it) since Steem advented continue to completely control the witnesses and the code underlying the platform. Hive whales currently capture >90% of inflation from the rewards pool, and that's the way they like it.
Not to mention the DHF :)
Not to mention significant witness rewards.
Not to mention significant (more) curation rewards.
Maybe we cut curator's dicks off. All rewards to creators.
Witness rewards are 10% of the rewards pool. Curation rewards come out of the rewards pool.
I proposed many years ago eliminating curation rewards and replacing them with HBD savings accounts with a high interest rate*, which latter has been done, while curation rewards have risen to 50%, which obviously is a deprecation of curation that replaces curative interest in the quality of content and author with pecuniary interest, resulting in Trending resembling late night TV marketing.
Edit: actually Edicted proposed the savings accounts to replace curation rewards, but I had long prior pointed out curation rewards deranged curation and were unnecessary to provide incentive to upvote content.
I will let you read between the lines here:
Reward pool that actually goes to authors ~30k / month
Burns ~15k / month
HBD Stabilisier ~15k / month
Witnesses ~40k / month
Curation ~60k / month
Edit, plus, DHF - whatever the DHF does per month...
Get back to basics. Censorship resistant content creation.
Absolutely ditch the DHF. Pay some qualified marketing experts as consultants and stop handing out cash to leeches to ride the conference gravy train. Ceremonially burn the rally car and drop the 5000HBD a month Karaoke competition.
Start focusing on users who bring value instead of the 100% takers and focus funding and projects in regions that have the ability to influence and invest instead of basket case countries where Hive is doing nothing except enabling scammers and pumping dollars into failed economies.
Complete rebrand.
Remove proxy voting.
Reduce curation back to 25%. For larger stakeholders, it's barely worth creating anything when you've got an autovoter that's voting popular creators and bringing in whopping daily passive income.
Whilst we're on the subject, ban auto voters.
Bring back vote selling. It builds turnover and doesn't make the buyers that much profit but linked to lower curation rewards, should encourage people to stake more Hive.
Triggered?
Absolutely!
What's wrong with proxy voting?
Edit: also, how to ban autovotes/bots/socks? Ned proposed oracles, but never detailed the specific mechanism that enabled oracles to differentiate between bot/socks and a human being.
Thanks for taking the time :-)
My objection to proxy voting is two-fold.
If people are too lazy, uninterested to make up their own mind and vote on an issue, they should forfeit their vote.
I suspect that many, many proxies are people who haven't been anywhere near the chain in years and are legacy users from days of yore. Also possibly accounts full of Hive from the original ninja mine. Votes should only be cast using sp that's been bought or earned.
The system as it stands is absolute BS. If BT wants a project to be funded he votes it. If he doesn't want it funded, he doesn't vote it. If it looks like a project may get funded anyway, he can choose to vote the return proposal. One account controls all.
As for autovoters. No idea how to stop them but I do think they're a hugely negative thing.
When I learned I could proxy my witness vote I found someone I thought knew what to do and proxied to them. Eventually I had to vote myself as their circumstances changed and they weren't voting. By then I had learned a lot, and voted as I thought best. I think that's how proxy voting should be used, and folks that haven't paid much attention in years can also use proxy voting well.
I can see that folks that don't feel they well understand whom to vote for should withhold their vote - but I don't think they will. I appreciate your view that people should simply have to vote themselves, but they can still pick someone they think is a good example and mirror their votes.
I agree about BT, but don't see how that comes into the discussion. Do a lot of folks proxy to BT?
There are some mechanisms where several established individuals can vouch for an account, but I neither think these are foolproof, because they could vouch for their own socks or bots. I think bots are existentially dangerous, and are about to destroy sovereignty globally, because agentic AI is going to replace government. That's what digital ID being adopted now across the world will enable, and why it's being pushed everywhere.
I’d agree with most of this but I don’t know enough about vote selling to comment .
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STOPI would very gradually increase the number of consensus witnesses. A kind long-term slow increase.
I would let witnesses or stakeholders have an influence over RC costs. My personal view is that it would add a lot of benefit if writing to the chain is better priced in and we treat it as more precious, common space, to be preserved for many years. It can greatly reduce spam and help us think more carefully before we perform some operation.