Hi everyone! I recently posted about a serious problem we have on Hive in the following article:
https://hive.blog/hive/@joshsigurdson/thanks-for-the-downvotes
I want to make it clear that I'm not against being downvoted, but when there are people like "altleft" going around mass downvoting every post by 90% or so despite 99% of people voting to support the post, that is no longer "free market competition." That is just abuse. Targeted abuse.
Imagine thinking if you have more money than others, you can undo what 99% of people agree to. Don't like their politics? Make sure they can't make a living!
I've been trying to get my viewers (I reach about 1 million a week) to join Hive and support not only the blog, but the currency. Then they come on and they end up leaving as they feel like they're witnessing censorship when they see some guy with a million dollars obliterating any value someone might make on a post. I feel this is detrimental. I mean... It's OBVIOUSLY detrimental.
In the past, when I bring this up to the community, people say "there's nothing wrong with people downvoting you, that's decentralization." Yes, of course. But to say there's nothing wrong with one rich person obliterating the funds of 100 people who all support a certain blogger is insane and hurts the community.
Why can I not block someone who is abusive towards the Hive community? Can this be a function in the future?
I literally post a scientific study by Yale and Johns Hopkins backing up my claims and this "altleft" guy of course doesn't need to argue. He will just downvote me to almost nothing and walk away.
The free market is individual demand. Not Bill Gates coming in and purging anyone who disagrees with him. Or in this case some guy with more money telling us peasants that we're all wrong and only he is right because he has money.
This was a problem many years ago on Steemit and it lead to thousands of people leaving the platform. I don't want centralization, but I wouldn't mind the ability to block people and deny association as a free human being. That's not centralization, that's individual defense against an abusive entity.
Something to think about...
Power up Hive and counter the votes. You can't say anything if you are actively powering down and reducing your stake on the network.
Also, I don't have 1 million dollars to counter. lol
I hodl my Hive. But I do occasionally power down. I've never sold Hive though, that I can remember anyways.
Why not power up and have a stake in the network? You have 4k Hive just lying around. You can influence with a vote if you power that up. Expecting things to go your way and not taking steps towards making it happen will result in no action. Why should anyone with stake listen to you when you are actively reducing your stake in the network?
You said it, same thing as with steem 😅
I think any successful social media needs a block/mute feature. Everyone has a right to say anything they want, but nobody has a right to force others to listen to themselves, or force others not to listen to someone else. Freedom of association is a very important freedom that is underrated in 2021 America.
I completely agree!
Peakd and Ecency frontends both have a mute feature already x)
Nice! I can't get Peakd to work for some reason. 3Speak works though!
Ohh weird, whats the problem?
Thats at least good! Not sure 3speak have such feature xD
I don't know what the problem is. I haven't fought it yet. I might give it a real try today.
Ohh okay cool!
Peakd is a quite good frontend, just like Ecency. Would be a shame to miss out :D
Was? After I was talked countless times about the general lack of real human comments on the Hive blockchain, someone told me in the recent past in one of the comments that people rarely comment on the Hive blockchain, because they fear that they will get downvotes, so looks like the cycle continues.
I don't feel a lack of comments at all for those who get involved in projects or who leave a lot of comments
I actually leave a lot of comments. So much that I am the 6th in the engagement league this week, so I really try to add my part to the engagement, but when I look around, I see a lot of posts from various authors without any real human comments. I see a lot of bot comments. I also saw someone, who literally talked to himself in the comment section of his post.
why have income related to visibilty? you can downvote to limit visibilty, but it does seem wrong to use vote power to take away someone's income.
That's the thing. When 99.9% of people support something, it doesn't seem like a great "market reaction" for one guy with a bunch of money to downvote all of the money away. Why does someone with a million dollars have more say than 150 people with less?
Blockchain rules could be changed such that the users with 10x the stake could have less than 10x the voting influence. This would mitigate things as long as you have unique identities for each person. As mjhomb points out, making sure everyone is using a unique identity is hard. So such rules would result in people getting multiple accounts in order to have voting power linear to that of their stake, again.
It's always been a problem with Hive rewards.
Yeah, well I know one thing, this continued attack is really frustrating. Guy voted down a post of mine with a TON of upvotes from around 45 dollars to 2 dollars. I make a large part of my living off hive and because he disagrees with the FACTS I'm presenting, he obliterates my income. A HUGE downside of Hive.
You probably have earned a sizable amount of Hive Engine tokens. Check that out. Rich Hive whales cannot influence your POB (Proof of Brain) earnings. They're 2 front ends. https://proofofbrain.blog and proofofbrain.io. A user which is wealthy in Hive Power cannot influence any earnings of any particular Hive Engine token unless they are also whales of that token. Whales can have thier influence revoked which is really a plus for users who want to support authors with voting. We have banned a user on the basis of incorrect flagging in the past. You can post in the Proof of Brain community, to get more POB. You can get others to power up the POB token and power down Hive.
I am going to set up a mirroring function so you can post to Hive, Steem, and Blurt simultaneously by checking boxes when you post.
Unique identity on blockchain is hard. When that is solved, hopefully in a way that protects privacy, more complex voting/consensus algorithms are possible that could consider unique individuals, reputation etc. as well as stake... will be a game changer when it arrives
I agree but I include "impossible" under the "hard" definition here.
No, it doesn't. If this was removed, then 10000's of people would abuse and milk the blockchain for Hive until the token have no value. Just look at blurt
First choice to make for a social media platform - do all user should have (a) the same vote power or (b) there should be power levels?
If choice 'a' - there is no much more to add.
If 'b' - what should decide about levels / power allocation?
a) number of followers
b) wealth (in tokens)
c) experience on the platform
d) number of posts
Hive (and its predecesor - Steem) has the model of 'b' + 'b', thus the rich downvote trolls play by the rules and, in the name of the justice, there probably nothing shouldn't be done with them.
Except perhaps giving people the ability to block abusive people who use money to shadow ban other users which can be construed as a form of censorship.
(a) means people can make 1000s of alt accounts and you're back with (b).
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Its hard right. We need downvotes to fight abuse and we need upvotes to undo injustice.
But when it all come to all, altleft is free to downvote who and what he wants x)
Blocking a person shouldn't disallow people to downvote someone, sinxe it can be abused by abusers
People have a right to freedom of association and a blocking feature would seriously fix a problem that lead to thousands leaving Steemit. If we want what's best for this blog, we need to have the ability to block abusive people. Yes, no one claimed he couldn't downvote whoever he wants, but he's clearly doing it with malice. He's telling 100 people that his money is better than theirs and that because he has money, others aren't allowed to have different opinions from him.
Again, if we allow a feature wherw we can block people and they can't upvote lr downvote us, how can we stop abusers for using that feature to milk hive?
Why is it more important to stop people from making money if the vast majority of people are upvoting them and supporting them? It's obviously a more pressing issue that trolls with lots of money can obliterate anyone's content they wish despite 99.9% of people liking that content.
What??
Said we got the feature you wanted. Then Altleft could make 10 accounts extra and make the post once daily and upvote all of them with 100% and anyone who downvoted it he could block and continue to milk the system..
He could make 400 dollars a day easily just by doing that..
Then there would be less for others.
The daily hive reward pool, isn't infinite.
As someone who actively downvotes people who copy/paste, 0pagiarize, and otherwise abuse our network, I can see a major problem with people being able to shield themselves from downvotes.
On the other hand, @sincerelytori is being unjustly downvoted by @adm/ @hivewatchers/ @spaminator and there is apparently no recourse.
It's a significant problem and I don't know how best to address it.
I just wonder which is worse. Shielding from downvotes could be an issue, but is it worse than trolls obliterating any reward genuine Hive supporters get?
I don't know. I want the ability to disincentivize bad behavior to remain because it's an essential part of curation. But it is also undeniable that there are downvote abusers.
EDIT
What if we create a Community built around reposting unfairly-targeted posts? I think we could vet people we trust to vet downvotes and only authorize them to post in the Community.
@joshsigurdson @jacobtothe
Please stop spreading false information about the innocence of "gringalicious/sincerelytori".
The user cannot be more fitting for the blacklist (which was put on the account 18 months ago).
The user was recycling posts despite being asked to stop several times.
The responses were aggressive and rude every time.
The user was asked to stop not just by Hivewatchers but many Hiveians.
They got the same aggressive responses full of self-entitlement and no feeling of any sense of wrongdoing. The user continued to recycled despite being blacklisted.
She did recycle content. I do not dispute that. She may indeed have been rude. However, I cannot support your blanket policy of lifetime blacklisting. Her new account should be treated as an olive branch, an effort to turn over a new leaf. Give her an opportunity to demonstrate reformation.
You have the bigger account. Be the bigger person, too. All I ask is time to see what really happens. As your self-appointed Hive Pope, I offer this moral advice because I am concerned that your power is corrupting your organization. Don't turn into a bully or a censor.
Better to let one thousand spammers rampage on The blockchain than crush one potential content creator willing to reform.
"Better to let one thousand spammers rampage on The blockchain than crush one potential content creator willing to reform."
This user has been earning substantial profit through her pages. All this user does is crossposting content from her pages. There is no content created solely for Hive. It is just one big milking. Recycling is even worse.
Also, the user has never made any substantial effort to promote Hive anywhere.
The user was blacklisted once and appealed. Was removed from the blacklist but went back to the same scamming of Hive through mass recycling. The user has farmed thousands of HBD through farming.
The second blacklist means permanent blacklist. The vast majority of the community is very happy about this blacklist.
We will not change our rules because someone tries to do a proxy appeal through a "damsel in distress" campaign.
It is a problem I have been faced with too in the past, my experience is they eventually stop downvoting you, but there should be a solution for it, but I can’t think of any, really…
It’s a difficult balance. A block feature that influenced ability to downvote would essentially render all downvotes useless. The best solution I can think of is a very sophisticated rep system that has less influence over upvotes but a big influence on the weight of downvote. It could identity potentially connected accounts through behavior and reduce downvoting ability on someone who is bullying the same person all the time without a variety of other people also downvoting.
Perhaps people could be voted on their downvoting behavior and it effects their rep and people with low rep have little downvoting power.
I think ideally you don’t want to make downvotes stronger when they come from more diverse users with wider connections to different groups of users. Sounds like it’d be a pretty difficult project but maybe someone could do it.
I would say, it should have the same influence on the downvotes as well as the upvotes. So people just ciclejerk themselves or their alt account upvote would be worth less, if thats how the downvote is monitored
You should get them into more than just the currency. The hive ecosystem has a lot of interesting projects within it. I typically only up-vote the videos on your blog that I see on Bitchute, but I have been learning more and more about Hive from other sources and that has shown me that I could help support your efforts, (even if only a little,) in a time where discretionary income can be rather scarce.
Here's a project that might help that is down-vote proof. !PIZZA
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You can’t block someone from downvoting because then spammers would just block everyone so they can spam farm.