Sure, but only if it won't cost me anything directly.
Many have compared autovotes to patreon-style support in the past on this chain while many others have been against excessive autovotes (yes, I'm one of them). I do like that autovotes exist, made possible by our feeless actions on this chain and websites such as hive.vote or any custom made bots to mimic them. I am someone who does receive a lot of autovotes myself, which at times like these when I'm feeling like writing again I appreciate they are still there and that those stakeholders trust me with their support, or at least trusted at one point.
While I do try not to take advantage of it, often forfeiting rewards if I deem the content I shove out not having taken that long to create or at least think about, or some times not posting for a very long time cause I have other more demanding things to do and thus "missing out" on rewards. There are potentially some who would call me crazy for doing so because from their perspective they'd never leave money on the table that way.
Which is fine, somewhat, it's understandable given how things work, voting power regenerates, autovotes don't usually shift too often and you have a guaranteed vote or two daily as long as you keep creating content, which again, is fine.
But when does fine become not so fine to the point where some stakeholders feel like they need to intervene?
I stumbled upon an account recently who - for as long as I bothered to scroll down - had been posting daily. The content itself seemed fine, sort of like a diary of sorts and book recommendation/promotion, along with some questionable double posted identical pictures and pictures that existed in every post sort of like a footer but instead of horizontal it was vertical filling up over half of the post. This author was getting support by a whale and either a trail following that whale or through other autovote services. The author would often receive comments but none were ever voted by the author, I decided to check when the last time was they had voted and I had to stop myself from "loading more" on april 2025:
Not a single vote. That's odd, but hey, not the worst thing ever, right? Sure they're not using one of the cool things that makes hive unique where you can filter and reward your followers who consume and leave you comments, but they're at least replying to them,
right?
Welp, not a single comment in over 1.5 years.
Is this account's activity valuable to our network? If they don't care about the community, don't care if their posts get consumed, shared, etc, what is the point of the post other than making 40-50 hive per day? Along with a few others with similar activity.
I'm currently actively downvoting some of these accounts, of course not to 0 as that'd be a bit rude/overkill, but removing 60-80% of the rewards and I think examples like these are one of the best reasons as to why we need downvote mana.
Back in the day if stakeholders wanted to downvote such obvious farms, they'd need to forfeit potential curation rewards in an effort to do so, but now we have 25% downvote mana compared to our upvote mana.
This is a straightforward case as to why downvotes are good to have, a tool to protect the reward pool from afk autovoters or malicious upvoters who wanna give free stake to people no matter if they're valuable to the network as a whole. Yet we still keep hearing people argue against them day after day and trying to fearmonger others that downvotes are what's causing people to leave and hive to die, etc.
I'd argue a very small % of downvotes are used badly, but I would say that when that happens we should speak up and try to counter it if we disagree with them.
I hate those accounts. It's inexcusable to just post and not interact in the slightest. I downvote them too. Lucky they ain't getting a kicking along with 😃😃
You might want to look into who he is talking about. I am nearly positive it is a person who has been here for 10 years, has never committed a disrespectful act, has been battling and chronicling their battle with mental health issues, oh... and currently lives in the Ukraine so she has to worry she or someone she loves might be killed every day. And her crime? She's not feeling up to socializing... when she clearly has anxiety and depression. But because of this, she is deemed "not valuable to the chain". Journaling is good for one's mental health. I wish Hive could be a place to encourage that rather than crush the will to do it. Heck we have yet to attract a specific community. Maybe marketing to people who want to journal and read journals of others going through similar challenges could be a way to attract an audience?
Oh hey you! I didn't know you were back!
I didn't look into the specific who, I was talking about extractors in a general way 😃
guy came crying to me in my dms about how cruel i'm being by downvoting someone who hasn't responded to anyone since summer 2024 because apparently I should know they may have anxiety and depression which is causing them to not respond to anyone yet post daily for 30-40 hive.
Had to block him when he admitted he was guessing and wasn't even sure what exactly the cause is.
It's kind of crazy the lengths people go to stigmatize downvotes and demonize downvoters.
I did say on another post the other day the worst thing about downvoting is how demonized it is. It should be no big deal. I didn't look into the details but generally I do agree, if someone can be finding the time to post especially daily it's not really on to not interact
What's important is that someone's willing to white knight and come up with excuses as to why they may not reply to anyone and make you feel like shit about it.
I need a break from this place
It's a thankless task mostly defending the chain from extractors and all the other bad actors. I have felt it a bit myself in the past.
Just keep doing what you do 😃
I came to you to let you know some information about I person I had gained from reading their blogs for many years. I was definitely not crying lol. I was the exact opposite. I was pretty angry. Because of that, I swore and did not keep the conversation logical enough. For that I was 100% wrong and a apologize. That was super counterproductive and I wish I had remained calm. My intention was to ask you to look at the history of a person. My goal was to let you know about the person in hopes you would see there might be a different kind of value there. We were looking at the situation from two different points of view. I saw the emotional point of view. You saw the logical. I was hoping to show the two could both be true.
I don't know this person but I have a lot of empathy for a person going through what she is. I don't need to know a person to have empathy. We were both guessing about a person's motives. I was guessing there was not an ill intent of their actions based on following their blog for many years.
I did not attempt to demonize or stigmatize you. I meant to explain a point of view on this specific instance.
A point I was trying to make is that there may be a reason a person is not responding. You seem to assume she is not responding because she does not care about the community. That is a guess. I was just pointing out that there may be another reason. A person with anxiety and depression may not make comments or respond because they are mentally or emotionally unable to do so. It might be that she is already at her limit by posting her journal. That is my guess. I prefer to think the best of people.
It is not about the author, the only thing about the author is her lack of responses which may drive away consumers thus her content isn't getting consumed so it shouldn't be as valued as it is being by blind autovotes. It is more about the upvoter continuing to reward such lack of activities/consumption.
If no one read your posts or for a long time there was close to no proof that anyone did, you as well as me in that scenario should get their rewards adjusted if we're riding along on massive autovotes as we are. That is how the system is meant to work and why there is 25% of downvote mana compared to upvote mana among many other usecases.
I can understand your perspective and I do feel bad about this example, but we can't be bending over backwards to justify the lack of certain users activities like this and what it means for their perceived value on the blockchain.
I get it. I've just been rooting for this person for a long time and I think I got a little over-protective of her. But I do wonder if there is some hidden value here. We have been struggling to bring in an audience for years. I think it would be cool if there were a way for people to share their journals here and for others to consume them. Something like "I'm going through a divorce, is there someone journaling on hive about it that can help me not feel alone". I don't think that would be the main purpose but it could be cool to have a "journal room" or something... if we can ever get that big. But I guess we still need to find the way to bring a big audience of content consumers. I thought it would be video games, sports, or humor but that hasn't worked yet. For me, while we are figuring out how to bring in content consumers, I just want to encourage as many good people as possible. I don't want to scare any good people away. All of these problems we are arguing about now will seem trivial if we can actual get masses of content consumers.
Upon reflection, what I wish I had done was to simply provide you with another possible perspective and then let you choose what you wanted to do. After all, I'm not sure which of our guesses is correct. I could be completely wrong.
Sorry for not doing that and for my emotional words.
I guess I just got emotional thinking about a person who is struggling so much and wishing there were something I could do to help them. I think I thought that by encouraging you to let up, I was actually doing something to help her.
But there was actually something better I could do. I reached out to her to praise her for her bravery. I wish I would have done that from the start.
I'm sorry about the negative interaction but through it I was inspired to actually do something that I hope is productive.
That's okay, we're human after all, you weren't the only one being emotional. To me these examples seemed like some of the worst ones I've been able to find/have been reported to me, i.e. they were straightforward examples of needing their rewards adjusted. I'm not someone who's petty about rewards in general or think it makes a big difference if we use downvotes more often, but I figured doing something about the worst cases would be considered okay only to find opposition there as well.
I'm gonna focus on the other things taking most of my time for now
either way, maybe a good thing i'm focusing my curation elsewhere for now.
Yeah this needed a bit more context. Not every case is the same there is some nuance.
Yeah came back for fun about 6 months back or so. Hope you’re doing well! Always enjoy your posts even if I don’t always comment.
That's cool. I enjoyed yours too. Re-followed!
I don't like autovotes because they promote this kind of behavior, earn the autovote then drop the effort relying on the autovoter to check from time to time... Manual only curation would force a quality check, if one doesn't have time he could delegate to a curation project
On that particular case it makes sense downvote, it might even be an Ai bot trained to make that daily content so the user never even log on hive, I mean come on at least reply to comments on your posts
I've definitely benefitted from autovotes over the years and am definitely grateful for them, even though they're not massive ones these days. I always felt like a personal responsiblity to deliver good content (good being arbitary, as you well know) and to be honest, it's one of the things that have kept me here and kept me posting. Because of a sense of personal responsibility, I've also made sure I've commented on others, as much as I'm able depending on the day, week or month (life, right?). I guess not everyone has that sense of responsiblity. What would be awesome is a 'autovote reset' - say they expire after three months and you have to redo them. I reckon a lot just forget or they disappear off chain for a bit and the autovotes continue. I feel the same about community leaders who disappear from their communities and do nothing to maintain them - there's no monitoring of posts that might contain AI or plagiarism or aer 'shit' posts, and at the same time, no encouragement that might keep people posting in that niche area. If the admin disappear for six months, so should the community, paving the way for more enthusiastic people in that niche to run them. The various niches on Hive should mirror the plethora of niches in the 'real' world - meaning if new people come in, they find a place to belong fairly quickly, or even feel they can start their own community without thinking 'oh there's already one there'. I also wish you simply couldn't autocomment so we don't get stupid negative spam. Some of these are just me wanting a bit of tidy admin going on, some I genuinely think would make Hive a bit better. None fix everything, I'm just throwing some stuff out there.
I'd agree with this. I think this is a case where downvotes are warranted and honestly, it's your vote to do what you want with anyway. If you don't agree with the rewards, you have that right. Of course, you can probably do a bit more damage than the standard user. I'm sure if they are still even sort of active they are going to let you know their displeasure sooner rather than later!
You might want to look into who he is talking about. I am nearly positive it is a person who has been here for 10 years, has never committed a disrespectful act, has been battling and chronicling their battle with mental health issues, oh... and currently lives in the Ukraine so she has to worry she or someone she loves might be killed every day. And her crime? She's not feeling up to socializing... when she clearly has anxiety and depression. But because of this, she is deemed "not valuable to the chain". Journaling is good for one's mental health. I wish Hive could be a place to encourage that rather than crush the will to do it. Heck we have yet to attract a specific community. Maybe marketing to people who want to journal and read journals of others going through similar challenges could be a way to attract an audience?
I went back and forth on auto votes and down votes. Both can be used and abused very easily. I also can see the positives to both but I can also see the negatives of both.
After going back and forth, I auto vote I think like 4 accounts and that is just the 4 people who I call friends and we talk about Hive stuff all day in Discord. My conscious just doesn't let me autovote big whale accounts or like autovote any post that is posted in Splinterlands community, sort of thing. I am not knocking people who do, but I want to be able to defend my choices and decisions. The internet can be a very fickle thing where people love to cancel people over little things.
Maybe one day IF I become this big massive Hive Whale and I attract the negative @**holes that auto downvote, then I may change my opinion on down voting. But right now I just block accounts I don't like or don't want to support. It works for me for now.
But I love HIVE because like most online communities that is basically a DAO of sorts... the community eventually becomes the average of it's users. If 60% of people on HIVE just autovoted everything all the time the entire blockchain would slowly turn into just garbage posts to just get the autovotes and then the price of HIVE would lower and lower and it would crumble. So while auto votes and downvotes can be decisive, so far I think it is working out pretty well.
That's just my 2 cents anyways!
It's terrible seeing someone with little effort, as you mention, always getting good rewards, while others always get pennies. But, everyone gets what they deserve or what they've earned... or maybe not in this case.
If someone doesn't vote, doesn't respond, doesn't comment... they're like someone who comes to contribute nothing and on top of that, extracts and extracts. must be best friends with the whale . Reminds me of haejin, who used to post like that.
But as long as there's a community, this network will have life . The other problem is closed circles creating islands... if you're not in my community, go away and don't come near . It happened to me... they have their rules and if you don't accept, then you're out. So what's left? Follow like a lone wolf .
I did analysis on this some time ago. Indeed, low effort posts by a certain circle of authors is consistently rewarded more than longer form content with more complexity in its structure.
Eventually it resulted in the hive report card, which enables a user to snoop on another's habits from a few objective language and other measures. (In English only)
https://holoz0r.github.io/HiveReportCard/
Ok i will review this because it is hard for some people.
I always thought autovotes were users voting on their own posts.
I've been enlightened.
I use hive.vote and schedule votes for half a dozen users who share excellent posts and communities that do an excellent job of creating highlights daily. This half dozen isn't fixed; I alternate them from week to week.
I do this for a very simple reason: besides the content deserving votes for its quality, they publish in a different time zone than mine. And I don't want to lose the power of my vote. In other words, I don't want to be voting after the large curation groups or whales.
That's my strategy for autovoting. Even so, when I wake up, I check the posts I autovoted on. If there's anything I don't like, I have 7 days to remove the vote.
I don't think I'm doing anything wrong or harming the ecosystem.
However, I'm not sure about that because my account isn't two years old. Those who have been around longer, if you see that my strategy isn't correct, feel free to comment and clarify.
Thank you.
I am completely convinced that users who don't contribute to Hive shouldn't be rewarded. We are a community, and we must work together. We must support those who contribute and help this ecosystem grow. Interacting, supporting, creating quality content, and promoting Hive should be a priority for everyone who is part of this great ecosystem.
This is my humble opinion and what I try to do daily on Hive: a small but significant effort that has given me great satisfaction.
I noticed creators who are not on the list for auto-voting, don't usually get votes on their content.
And so one can be engaging here for long yet has nothing to show for that. Down vote isn't what is making people leave hive, but lack of support and engagement. The power is concentrated within a few people.
Do you want to make hive a better place, build more curators. The more people being supported or empowered to have more hp, the more up-voters we will have here and the more people's content will be supported.
Build more curators, and how do you build creators? By supporting their content with consistent up-vote. Build new creators you will see that it will be easy to keep new Hivians.
Create new creators monthly. The power is concentrated by very few people, and they can't curate most content (including interesting ones) except by subscription and Relationship.
This is the first major thing killing hive.
We already do this through @ocd and @ocdb, although some of our focus has shifted towards rewarding sharing of content to potentially bring in new people.
But yes, more power to manual curators any way possible. If no downvotes ever happen, autovoters get the same rewards as manual curators which isn't really fair.
This is what hive needs now, more curators. I have placed a limit order on Binance to buy hive at least 15,000 units immediately hive drops to $0.03. I need to power up so I can gradually support people.
good luck, feels like my voting power is barely enough these days.
That's because the price is not the same, currently at $0.066 price level. I am hoping bitcoin will drop to $50k, if that happens, hive will drop to $0.04 and gradually drop to my point of interest.
If you aren't even responding to comments on your own work... what are you even doing here? Oh right, milking the system for rewards.
I used to do a lot of autovotes/curation trail following but ended up stopping a lot as it meant that I didn't have enough voting power for when I wanted to upvote someone. So I seriously reduced that and now do more delegating to support projects I like. While the rewards are automatic, it is to me a good way of saying "Hey, your project is cool, have some support from me."
I think if someone doesn't want to be part of the community we've a right to deny them the rewards of the community.
Ironically the only downvotes I've gotten were for agreeing with you :P
You've gotten downvotes for agreeing with me? :o
Yeah it was during the whole autovote debacle with the freecompliments guy.
Also thank ya for the follow :) hope you like my art :)
I have been on this platform for over a year, and I haven't received a single down-vote. So, I do agree that the down-vote will be of positive use mostly. Furthermore, the whole patform, in my observation, works on the network building, engagements, content specific and a favor-for-favor scenario. If one is not contributing enough to tcommunity and earning a great amount , it sounds bit harsh.
I have one question, how did you check someone's activity?
I use peakd for the screenshot above, there's an "activities" tab on each user and then you can filter on the right side, like here: https://peakd.com/@acidyo/activities
Is it possible to use it on ecency or just peakd?
not sure about ecency, you'd have an easier time checking than me currently as I have some network issues with it
Gracious for the information, it means a lot!
I think it is important for us to keep a balance between helping creators and making sure the community grows with valuable interactions.
This is a really thoughtful reflection. I like how you balanced appreciation for autovotes with the ethical side of not wanting to abuse them. The example you gave about daily posting and passive voting really shows how complex this ecosystem can be. It’s easy to forget that behind every vote and reward, there should be real engagement and community spirit. Thanks for sharing this perspective it made me think about my own habits on Hive.
You sound like AI is generating your comments mate
Not AI, I'm just trying to express myself clearly. Appreciate your feedback
kk, well I appreciate more authenticity
Hey, when you have time (i.e. probably never), run this BBC article through the translator... seems super interesting how we could leverage our chain to appear in these kinds of scenarios. Sorry for the ask, but could be important.
Hackeé ChatGPT y la IA de Google en 20 minutos (y qué logré demostrar con eso)
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c4g02k43n6no
Its me... I made this patron comparison before we developed in our current form.
The reality is, we don't have anything really worth anything. Imo, we shouldn't be voting for anything or anyone who receives DHF funding or content about the platform itself.
Content and relationships around that content are where value is developed.
Trending = who has most autovotes.
but on the other hand, upvote a meme is bad. IDK maybe we need a lower price to rethink and let people do with their stake what they want. Or change downvote / upvote math ( like inflation from 14% on hive stake to 4%) so the impact is from math not relevant upvote memes and fun and let communities build.
The bully downvotes ( not anti spam and scam, thats good) should be also a thing to rethink.
you can pretty much post bullshit every day, as soon you are on a auto upvote list.
And tbh, if you own 2 accounts that not connected, its a self upvote. The system is retarded.