LEO is favoring voting for authors based on money paid to LEO. This isn't hidden, it's out in the open. I've seen direct statements from Khal saying that the way to get more votes is to buy a subscription, for example:
It seems to be one rule for one and not the rest as far as i can make out.
I don't have time to spend on every abuse of voting power on Hive. Like everyone else, I pick my battles when it comes to injustice, or I would have no time to do anything else. So as it relates to Hive, I choose to focus on the most egregious offenders who are most likely to cause financial harm to the most people.
There is a lstr.voter that is auto.voting holders but that is a separate project albeit linked to the leo team.
"linked to the leo team": yes, that's one way to put it. How about saying it is the same people?
I know from years of experience how much drama and controversy is caused by downvoting and it's the smaller users and hive/leo community that suffer when we see these actions.
It's almost the exact opposite: downvoting of this type actually gives small, unaffiliated users who aren't in on the voting scheme more rewards (because the rewards pool size is fixed). But perhaps you're talking about hurt feelings, not rewards. I would buy this argument if the users complaining weren't always complaining exactly about rewards they didn't receive.
And I know that Khal is not always the easiest character to talk to as he throws strops when these things happen
We view Khal differently: you apparently view him as a basically good guy who just doesn't control his mouth well. I believe he is a con artist and a liar who makes up stuff from thin air to suit whatever narrative will make him money.
Just yesterday he was claiming that he thought it was likely that "hive core" (whatever that is) was DDOSing his node (I'm not sure what "node" was in this case, whether it is a witness node, an api stack, or something else). Somewhat laughably from my point of view, he and his compatriots have several times accused me of wanting to kill LEO because it somehow damages some scheme I'm running to extract money from Hive. Which is funny because I spend way more money on Hive than I make on Hive. But of course, that's not convenient to his story. He needs there to be some nefarious scheme behind my opposition to his voting schemes, otherwise he would look bad.
For the longest time, I paid no particular attention to Khal, but over time, it's become obvious to me what kind of person he is, and I think his impact on Hive and Hiveans is a net negative. Inevitably he will cost some people money, and there's not much I can do to stop that. But I'm certainly not going to help in the process.
Working together or towards a common goal is always better than fighting over a few pennies.
"Working together" with LEO guys is a joke. Maybe you haven't read much of what they've published about Hive stakeholders, but if you do, it should be pretty obvious to you that they are not particular interested in working with anyone on Hive that isn't sending them money.
Look at the money being drained from the chain by the DHF every week and see how a few votes compares to that.
If we want to talk "magnitudes" of money: for most of the time that the DHF has operated, I've spend more of my own money on Hive than the entire DHF. Does that mean I shouldn't worry about what I vote on in the DHF? I'm guessing you will think otherwise.
But for the most part, I don't think the DHF money is wasted. Otherwise I wouldn't vote for the proposals. But it is true that many proposals will fail to deliver in terms of return. This is the nature of startup-style investment: it is high risk investment with the hope of a few big winners among many losers. But voting schemes are guaranteed not to have a return: they are a strict loss.
I aligned with Leo because they had the only realistic plan to onboard new users to hive and create meaningful links to other ecosystems, as well as the only plan to make an app many new users might actually want to use (short form done well), and because they recognized my contribution to their ecosystem far more than any remaining hive whales (short of acidyo and 3speak guys) ever have. Not only that Khal was thinking about bringing money into the ecosystem, THAT is why I felt ok about premium, because peakd and ecency are great projects without any realistic plan to become self sustainable.
I think some things Leo does are questionable. But you all put up with far more nefarious destructive shit than anything Leo has done.
Azariwhatever and a few others have scared off everyone who disagrees with them. I’ve stayed silent on it cause I didn’t think my voice was enough to change anything. But if you downvote me (for any reason), I feel invited to speak my mind.
If you want to balance out all the bullying and arbitrary “dispute over rewards” downvotes with counter-upvotes (especially when the user is clearly targeted through multiple downvotes) AND make a plan for onboarding better than Khal’s old DHF plan (where he tried to collaborate with multiple other crypto projects and get them involved in hive through Leo threads), then I’ll listen to what you have to say about Leo…. Otherwise it kinda just feels like a big circle jerk where you better comply to the big votes or get out. Please think about it. I want to see Hive thrive.
A lot of the old bid bot owners still have a lot of power here and unironically they’ve never given me an upvote once, I would guess because I was one of the first voices against self voting back then. Or maybe they just didn’t like my content, right? I’m sure that’s it, cause we all know how much they care about quality right?
So many friends have been scared off by downvoting, not because of less rewards but because the feeling that a bully could come and take it all away with a click. I found the one community left that seemed welcoming to me. I get the idea that downvoting necessary parameter for certain reasons but where is the counter balance to abuse? If it's not in the code, it's up to the community, namely the large stakeholders with good will.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now. I care about Hive more than I care about my upvotes at this point but I’m sick of the double standards and lack of acknowledgement that downvote bullying is a huge issue at hive (and I’m not even pointing the finger at you, I just want an explanation for the double standard).
Ignore this as “the insignificant whining of a content creator” if you want. Or maybe you can prove to me that this isn’t one big circle jerk. I’d like that.
It’d be nice to actually feel like my opinion matters to those who control this chain for once, after almost a decade here. It’d be nice to see them want to spread hive power further and make hive truly decentralized rather than something they can control. I believe it’s still possible, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.
Leo.voter curates people who use the platform. If you are Premium you appear more in the feeds
Both Ecency and PeakD offer services to pay for more visibility in feeds. This is exactly how premium works. Nothing more, nothing less.
Are they being targeted? It seems this is solely targeted at LEO. If there was a standard against this, we’d be happy to change things.
Thank you for the detailed explanation, along with your reasoning.
Veritas Omnia Vincit
I have some parts I agree with here, and some parts I disagree with. Mostly the Con-man accusation, I totally disagree with that. I don't have a proof for or against it that's not a subjective opinion. From the public plans I see and AMAs I listened to, I don't see any indication of @ Khal being a con-man.
Still, I'm really happy to finally read your perspective. @alpha
Steemit images r not working properly. They are also accusing hive for DDOS attack. When u can't fix something, blame it on DDOS attack by hive so people don't ask when it will be fixed! Classic move.
Let's assume it's an attack by hive to steemit, can't they do better to protect against it? It's easier to blame hive than to acknowledge own flaws.