Now, I want to make it clear that this shouldn't be perceived as a "threat" or what some of you americans like to instantly get all shook about, if it was up to me I'd probably choose a more softer solution to what one could perceive this issue which I may not go deep in depth about but write about generally.
I'd like to start off with the example directed towards myself and my own projects.
Let's say that some stakeholders perceived my curation/upvoting to be not just unnecessary/not helping grow the network/not bringing value to hive/other "fair" reasons, they'd opt for countering my upvotes with equal downvotes. Naturally, this would require quite some stake since downvote mana is only 25% of upvote mana, so you'd assume they'd need 4x more stake to counter the upvotes of my projects.
I think on any given day, my own account and ocd give out about 300+ votes to unique authors. Naturally, this would mean a lot of unique and innocent users would be in the crosshair, eventually you may see authors asking me not to upvote their posts because the downvotes "look bad" or they fully counter my upvotes so they are "useless". This would be fairly understanding and I'd have to agree to stop curating them.
Now this is of course quite a wild scenario, but in the events that this would occur, it would also follow with other reactions. Since my project is now no longer doing what it is meant to be doing, they could face undelegations, witness unvotes, etc. Even if it's out of my control, it's something that one could imagine occurring. I'd eventually be forced to vote for other things, maybe @hbd.funder comments to stabilize HBD, @buildawhale comments to burn hive+hbd or if I wanted to make life harder for some curators I don't like, I could just trail their votes and now they'd have to deal with the downvotes as well, not something I'd do however but it is an option.
In the meantime, curation rewards would be flowing again because those stakeholders wanting to counter my upvotes would have to also counter the upvotes of much bigger stakeholders voting for the same thing I would. Our users would probably understand that we cannot continue to upvote them the way we used to because the upvotes would be automaticlly countered because of some reason other stakeholders had enough reason to counter them. One could argue if this is a net positive for hive or a negative, but the authors themselves would agree and they wouldn't be in a position to "demand" the votes to continue to occur. Our project wouldn't "owe" them anything so to speak.
One solution for us to continue to do what we do would be other stakeholders stepping up and countering the counter, basically. This would mean less curation rewards for both my project and for those helping counter the downvotes, but we'd at least manage to give rewards to authors in that scenario, maybe just as much as before if not more (but could also be less depending on how much stake is helping counter the downvotes), point is authors would still get something in that scenario at the cost of the curators returns.
Okay, let's now imagine another project that does things differently, and if they suddenly had a few stakeholders decide that their ways of doing curation is no longer good for the ecosystem.
I guess I kind of need to mention that these projects would be vote-selling ones, else you may not understand the point of the post.
These projects rely on people buying votes in one way or another, so stakeholders countering their downvotes would quite instantly render them useless. Authors receiving votes for votes they've purchased would instantly run into a wall, their posts not profitable anymore thus they can't keep buying more votes. They'd have to "give up" on seeing a return on those votes and start asking the seller for their money back or ask them not to upvote them any longer or start undelegating from such projects because their votes are "no good" any longer.
The project quite literally "owes" them an upvote because they've paid for one. So a counter in this case would put a stop to it quite instantly.
Now naturally, these projects could do the same thing I would do, they could opt for voting on hbd.funder or buildawhale, etc, but they'd be at least on the same earning window as other stakeholders who only earn from curation rewards. They wouldn't be able to accept more hive as vote sales would be put to a stop.
Okay, so again, I'm not trying to give people ideas, I have other solutions in mind that would only affect my own projects rather than them, but the point of this post is that if at some point the community/stakeholders deem these ways of receiving votes to be malicious and building a bad community with inflation being spent badly to a degree that's becoming too high, there are ways to put a stop to these things. We've done it before when bid bots were stopped and thankfully many of them were good sports about stopping when they understood why we were downvoting, but some others slipped through the cracks and have been allowed to grow faster to the point where I'm unsure of the effects they've had on curation, user mentality towards earning rewards, and other factors.
Also to note that whoever does vote buying and such usually doesn't have a big stake nor big stakeholders backing them since they have no value, that makes it easy to counter and make them stop
yeah and it makes it hard to counter their downvotes because they're already giving so little effort and barely being consumed by anyone that you have a hard time justifying countering the downvote and asking the downvoter to stop, as was a case recently with someone.
I probably just understood half of your post, as I'm entirely new to the concept of downvotes (have not cast any or received any, as far as I'm aware). I guess that as far as I'm concerned, I'll just do what I do without expecting any massive rewards, and whatever comes out is something positive :-)
I never really understood how negative votes worked, but I did notice that there were votes that reduced the reward for my posts. I found it curious and thought it was a system error.
Now that I've read about it and understand it, I can see that it's quite a substantial problem.
Why do you think people give negative votes?
And for example, what are the fundamental criteria for giving a higher percentage of your vote to a post?
Perhaps these people want to start conditioning their votes because your reward system is not benefiting them.
Honestly, I think it's an unnecessary war, but at the end of the day, there are just bad people, right?
That's one disadvantage of a decentralized platform like Hive. Someone who doesn't like your curation efforts or your posts for no good reason can downvote them so far he has enough HP/Voting mana. The ideas you've given for countering that kind of situation seem effective. Hivers will always be divided as to what a good enough reason for a downvote should be and that in itself is a huge problem for the platform.
Thank you for your explanation. Perhaps more transparency regarding curation decisions would be helpful. For example, there could be a clear community guideline to avoid such conflicts. YouTube has guidelines, for example. Or, at least, create some guidelines for beginners.
YouTube is a centralized platform. On Hive each community has their own guidelines as those are centralized too, and there are some general rules about what you should curate or not, but at the end of the day no one can tell you what to curate.
Keep doing what you're doing sir, it's helping so many 🙏 Hive’s voting system is more complex than i even thought. It's serious to me just how much influence stakeholders can have over rewards and the ecosystem. Anyone can get in a cross fire , a lot of innocent ones
I’m with you on this one, 100%. What you’re saying makes total sense. If big downvotes start chasing your curation, it is not just you or OCD that gets hit, it is all the random authors (and curators) in the middle. They never signed up for that kind of drama, and suddenly they look bad or feel like your support is useless. That kills motivation fast.
Stakeholders already have the tools to counter stuff they don’t like. The bigger question is how they use them. If it is just silent downvotes without context, the people who lose faith are not the projects, it are our everyday valuable authors. If we want Hive to keep growing, that part matters most.
I don’t even have the words but it is really annoying. Innocent people getting downvoted because you’re trying to prove a point? That’s just unfair.
Some persons put time and efforts into these posts, so if they’re not going to vote it, why can’t someone else? Your opinion must not matter to everyone.
Also people that downvote posts, it’ll be nice if they gave their reasons.
I never knew DV mana is 25% of upvote. But then I normally only deal with small time abusers where a very light touch will suffice.
It sounds like this is exactly what happened with marky previously. He was curating properly, but so many people were caught in the firing line, so in the end everyone loses out. It's a pity
Can you contact me by DM?
Excellent observations. The real challenge lies in establishing a preemptive dialogue between the various stakeholders before it escalates into voting and countervoting wars. These downvote wars risk eroding the trust of authors and undermining the collaborative spirit that Hive seeks to embody. Unfortunately, a friend of mine, @will91, was also subjected to the practice of downvoting. It's a shame because he was making quality posts. HIVE is now becoming more of a collection of profiles that talk about themselves and less about general topics that might be of interest to everyone. Lately, to find general information, I've been going back to looking at posts about X... and that's not good. Maybe I've been too critical, but I have a bad feeling that HIVE is losing its way. I sincerely hope I'm wrong. !PIZZA
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@stefano.massari(1/5) tipped @acidyo
Come get MOONed!