We have a problem with onboarded users who are new to Hive, many of them being new to crypto, discovering Steemit simply while researching more about Hive. When they discover it they don't realize that the protocol is compromised and is part of JS's money laundering empire, they just see a blogging site that gives tokens. They don't realize that by trying Steemit they are both partaking in crime and risking themselves, their information, and their funds.
We are now moving more towards onboarding content creators as an ecosystem. We must figure out how to approach this and mitigate the chance of an innocent person unknowingly making their way there through either misinformation on Hive Discords or through old links. Ideas?
Hive was created four years ago as a fork of the Steem blockchain after it suffered an irreversible protocol compromise due to a 51% attack. We're about to celebrate our anniversary a few days from now.
A 51% attack is an issue in baseline delegated proof of stake (DPOS) blockchains. It is possible when the elected, trusted and decentralized witnesses (block producers) are replaced without the consensus of the blockchain stakeholders. This happens when the weight of the combined stake (votes of) wallets voting for attacker servers overwhelm the combined stake (votes of) wallet voting for legitimate servers. These blockchains have 20 consensus witnesses who are meant to be individuals whose job is to run servers housing the protocol version (software version) that is agreed upon by them. They review the protocol code and vote on it.
When an attack is successful, that protocol code is replaced by a different protocol code. There are no mandates to ensure that in OS cases, the code that is published and the code that is run by the consensus witnesses is one and the same. No one knows for sure what is in it because it is private. Because those witnesses are private. The operation of a centralized, private, DPOS blockchain depends solely on the operator who has taken control. It's not a difference of opinion as some like to troll, it's a technical matter. Technology doesn't run on opinions and ideals.
Imagine a train track. The train track is going straight but an attack took place, causing a new track to be built. The new track is great but the old track still exists. The utility of the original track is altered but its integrity is also affected by that attack. The metal is no longer strong enough to hold the train and it can break at any moment, causing the train to crash. No one would knowingly ride it if they understood but they see cheap tickets. The train may keep going on the broken, weak track for a long time but the moment the crack widens, it will crash with everyone still onboard it.
Why does this matter? In my opinion, we have an ethical responsibility by the virtue of our existence as Hive. We created Hive because of our strong morals and ethics. We didn't want to have the community we built sold like chattel and used for the personal profit of two, the seller and buyer. Doing the right thing isn't easy. Many Hive stakeholders put their money where their mouth is and had it all stolen. We repelled an attack using three giant exchanges. No matter our personal differences and minor disagreements, we have ethics and integrity. That's why this matters.
Thoughts?
Hate to say...
But the onboarding isn't going to do anything with the downvote cartels.
Or the fully centralized power.
Or the chasing off of users...
One of which is me.
But people are.pulling out of hive. Our active users keeps falling. And having groups and individuals backstab hive businesses? Like the psyberx hatchet job... Or the bullying of ecency.
Hive isn't exactly a good place and if these groups keep shooting us in the foot...we could actually rise...
Only what are we going to do? Let hi e slide into centralized power? Or evolve to more community freedoms without losing our liberty?
Yep, I guess that's one problem with Hive. I have also shared some thoughts on it in my latest post.
After all, I guess the thing that matters the most is the amount of traffic and Steemit traffic is bigger than Hive.
This is what Similarweb shows.
That's exactly what happens when you drive everybody off... Sure is seeming like a ghost town around here and I haven't seen quite a few really awesome accounts here for a while...
It's because we have a lot of frontends and JS only has one site running.
Hmm interesting take.
But will it mean the other frontends are sort of taking the traffic away from Hive.blog hurting the cause?
They are not hurting the cause but its skews the picture.
Take me, as soon as I learned about Peakd or Ecency, I switched to those frontends and haven't touched hive.blog in years x)
So even if I am here everyday, its not counted in the graph above ^^
I also seems like Steemit have a lot of bots still, bidbots, vote for vote bots, properly AI making boys etc.
So it might be higher on Steemit site compared to hive, we do also have bots. But not to the same degree as Steemit x)
Just a few aspects which could prevent the success of HIVE in my opinion:
I think one of the HIVE problems are trails and auto votes.
A few powerful 'trail leaders' choose a few selected 'good users' who are getting upvoted again and again, while the majority of new users simply remains undiscovered and rarely receives any upvotes.
In my opinion upvoting should be more 'decentralized' in a sense that every user has to make their upvotes themselves and completely manually only, because automated upvotes means to comfortably select a few 'good' users and friends again and just upvote their posts without actually reading them.
We all simply should do the hard task and read through posts manually day after day, while not selecting them by the criteria if written by 'good' and 'bad' users but by their quality (to prevent that 'good' users are getting lazy and 'bad' users getting motivated to become 'good' users)!
Another improvement would be to allow downvotes only in case that their original purpose is fulfilled: to fight spam and plagiarism.
I actually also get the sense of downvotes which serve the purpose to 'redistribute' the rewards pool by downvoting 'over rewarded posts' or users who publish lots of low quality posts.
What is really bad for HIVE are downvotes given because of different (political) opinions or just simply personal antipathy. Especially counterproductive are automated downvotes where the attackers don't even read the content of their 'victims' but just flag whatever they write.
I think in cases like this the 'victims' should be able to call a committee of highly respected users (with a rather big stake of delegated HP) whose task would be to counter unjustified downvotes. (Another option would be to try to solve that problem by AI).
Concerning your Hivewatchers I would wish to see more interaction/explanations in case you downvote new, unexperienced users. First tell them what their mistake is, and only next time downvote them in case they didn't react to your explnations/warnings. Also better answer to their questions on the HIVE blcokchain (not only in Discord).
I should add, that you are doing an important job, though!
Furthermore, in my opinion the HIVE government system is not 'permeable' enough. In a vivid democracy politicians have to change from time to time to prevent the system to 'freeze'. However, in HIVE I more or less see the same user names in top witness positions since I started to use STEEM in 2016.
The reason is the concentration of power in a few hands, which partly stems from early mining from the early STEEM days and partly from the extensive use of bid bots. Even if these times are over since quite a while, they still affect the current state of the HIVE eco system.
In addition most of these old witnesses are connected to each other and support each other. That of course doesn't make them 'bad people', but nevertheless is rather bad for a real decentralization of HIVE.
I personally think that 13 weeks of unstaking one's HP is just too long (even if I understand the reasoning behind it). You simply cannot use your HIVE in case you would need them, and most investors simply don't accept such a long unstaking periond. I think a time span between four and six weeks would be more realistic.
Most of your points are about increasing communication. A lot of this can be achieved through frontends -- a custom field to fill out when upvoting and downvoting which would be recorded along with the vote as part of custom json. It's possible. The trails could also be managed in the same sort of way but all they'd say is 'trail vote' or along those lines (where the trail is controlled through a service and not a personal bot). One issue is that voting would be more 'expensive' simply because instead of one, two transactions would need to be sent. This wouldn't affect most people however.
In regards to the same witnesses being there it's largely to do with the fact that witnesses have to work together, understand the protocol code, and it's generally not inexpensive in relation to resources. Around hardforks, for example, I have at least 4-5 nodes on different servers running. Every hardfork we end up seeing the same people engaged from both the consensus and backup witnesses. In the pre-Hive days, access to witness communication resources wasn't accessible to all, it was tiered. Now it's all easy access from various platforms to the same chat. Hive completely changed all of that.
I agree in regards to the power down/unstaking, it would be a good idea to start projections of what lowering it could look like.
Some valid points.
When I see discussing Elon Musk on X how to fight spam, and if - as a consequence - he should take a member fee of every user who wants to write there, it shows me how important platforms like HIVE are which already offer the solution to problems like that (and others).
But anyhow, the hurdle for many people to join and use HIVE still seems to be too high ...
I mention (very briefly) during my HiveFest presentation, that we need to amend the witness voting protocol.
Rather than having each token able to cast 30 witness votes, it should be closer to 5 (or 1/4 the number of consensus witnesses, in case that number needs to change).
That simple change makes a 51% attack impossible. A hostile stacker would need to control 77% of the total stake to successfully put 17 rogue witnesses in the top 20.
It is really interesting to know the details that we still do not know, in my case I have to keep learning to be able to impart an accurate knowledge to new hive users (...) how interesting how you illustrate it with the train track.
It is extremely important to educate and tell the story to the people we bring to Hive, especially those who have projects that are dedicated to it. Ignorance of what happened is what makes them seek to go other ways on other trains. This March 20th we will celebrate true freedom. 🤘🏻🥰
This shows that we must continue to educate, to show the events and how they really happened. A description of Hive should be loaded with a historical review, how it was born and the importance of being able to overcome the attacks on decentralization. The community made itself felt and is our greatest strength💪
my opinion, I think we have done enough for the people to see. Sometimes people don’t what what’s real.
Lets take the projects in Ghana for example, @mcsamm have built enough wells and there isn’t anything that Steemit have done to say it has impacted lives.
What this means is, we have done so much to let them see the light. We can’t force to onboard them sir, when they finally get the vision in their sight, they will come. When they do, they will appreciate the decentralization of Hive.
Let’s focus on Hive. Build it more as we are already and leave them to their fate. They will come when their ignorance runs out.
My opinion.
Reflecting on those experiences is quite saddening. But as you said, we moved on. A lot is building on Hive and thriving. Really impressive and every sane person would be able to tell clearly how far Hive has gone with respect to Steem.
I think we need a lot more in localized marketing of Hive until it becomes a household name like Steem was years ago. A lot of human-engaged activities would be pushed forward. Glad for what Valueplan is doing=, however, more can be achieved.
"We have an ethical responsibility" I believe that in this small phrase encompasses everything that entails the sense of belonging that we should have with the platform. Excellent reflection!
Maybe building some good SEO positioned sites that explain what HIVE is and what it's not (pointing to the right place) could push those search results down in the list...
Since it's somewhat a marketing thing, it could be added to a marketing proposal.
However, it will always be people that will park on the wrong side...
Hello guiltyparties!
It's nice to let you know that your article will take 6th place.
Your post is among 15 Best articles voted 7 days ago by the @hive-lu | King Lucoin Curator by blind-spot
You receive 🎖 0.5 unique LUBEST tokens as a reward. You can support Lu world and your curator, then he and you will receive 10x more of the winning token. There is a buyout offer waiting for him on the stock exchange. All you need to do is reblog Daily Report 241 with your winnings.
Buy Lu on the Hive-Engine exchange | World of Lu created by szejq
STOPor to resume write a wordSTARTCongratulations @guiltyparties! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
Your next target is to reach 2000 posts.
Your next target is to reach 6500 comments.
Your next target is to reach 8750 replies.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCheck out our last posts:
Your level lowered and you are now a Dolphin!
Check out our last posts:
Congratulations @guiltyparties!
You raised your level and are now an Orca!
Your level lowered and you are now a Dolphin!
I think some of the current groups here lost there way and need oversight to ensure that power is not abused as it seems to frequently be or is the image that is put out there that many are to afraid to say here but other platforms like twitter you ask someone on hive shit they have a lot of things to say about how it is here. Honestly if the game I own a part of was not here i would have left a long time ago due to how people are treated by the oligarchy here. The optics are not good and many people think the same way as I do but wont say anything and that right there should tell you we have a problem that a supposedly censorship free platform has ppl not saying things out of fear of retaliation lol. Many people here are gamers and play various games and if those were to either leave or go under many people would no longer use hive.
A thought on how to fix this image is have a independent group funded by the DHF with term limits elected the same way witnesses are but not based solely on stake weight and have protection from the DHF from retaliation votes as well. This group should be in charge or reviewing the conduct of many of the groups like this the downvote cartels here that permanently put ppl on auto vote lists which I think is a huge form of censorship and if we do that we should not advertise were free of censorship. I am even hesitant to post comments or posts bc of these groups screwing me over bc I had it happen once and they ruined my old accounts forever for a few pennies. I mean it was cents lol but either way i just made new accounts and made sure i don't post against the popular opinion so i can make money. This is not a place i consider censorship free i consider it a place i post what people want to hear and make money if not you get whipped.
These are my opinions and opinions based on what i have herd from others and are not backed up by hard facts that i currently have it is based on opinions, thoughts from others , experiences I have had and others have had but not any hard facts from the blockchain but I'm sure i could find some if i wanted to but i don't have the time and maybe i would if it would do anything but it would likely fall on deaf ears. I hope i don't get retaliated against for posting this about what I really think and how hive is perceived as that would really prove my point that we have censorship. this is not plagiarized or anything and if we are really decentralized and not retaliatory i should get not blow back or retaliation downvotes on my account for commenting i clearly stated these are my opinions based on optics and other peoples thoughts as well and not fact in any way like a hard fact.
We have improved from the steem days but there is a lot that needs to still be addressed that i would probably sooner have pigs fly out of my ass than they actually address these problems bc it would likely impact the money and where money and power are concerned we all know what usually happens.
I've said it for years now downvotes are killing hive
I was supporting a friend who has been getting downvoted and now the downvotes are on me what a stupid system you stupid people have
I ignore over 95% of blacklisted accounts and DV power stays at 99-100%.
Remove your downvotes and fuck off you piece of shit
How so?
Downvotes are part of Hive and were always supposed to be. That's just how the voting scheme was designed, that's why there's 7 days to establish value. That's nothing that any of us had anything to do with.
I'm going to warn you once turn your bot off and leave me and my friends alone otherwise it's not going to be good for those around you so fuck off you piece of shit