I was talking to someone on the chain about Hive's user-friendliness, and it was a good short conversation. Why? The person learned one or two things from my input, and I learned something else from their response, which is why I use the term "value for value."
If you are not learning something from the content you are consuming on Hive, you are most likely following the wrong users. On Hive, you must constantly learn to be a better user and web3 person, and the only way to do so is to follow the appropriate set of users.
Remember that I used the term "users" rather than "people." In terms of how they interact with the chain, the type of content they create, and the knowledge and experience they can share.
DVs Vs Being Silenced
For example, many people have come to associate downvotes with being silenced or having their free speech taken away. They believe that when their content is downvoted, their freedom of speech or ability to create is violated, and they are forced to refrain from creating. However, this is incorrect.
Most entities on Hive choose to downvote people for a variety of reasons and act autonomously. Hive does not have a ninja-mined account titled "Hive" that downvotes users, and even if there were, it would only be "taking rewards" from the creator rather than deleting or making their content invisible to others.
In this case, it would be demonization rather than being silenced. However, there are no accounts like this on Hive.
DV Trails
On the other hand, we have things called downvote trails. People trust a single entity with their downvoting power, and that entity uses that DV power as they see fit. So, most of the time, when a user receives a DV, they believe it represents the entire chain, as well as 300 other people who have downvoted them.
I've seen a case where a new user is commenting or tagging everyone on a DV trail and pleading that they stop downvoting them, meanwhile it was just one person who triggered the trail.
I am not going to sit here and say that DVs are pleasant in any way; they are not.
I have gotten a lot of them in the past, and over the last six months, I have seen people rave about the chain being occultic and satanic because they got DVs. In fact, some of these users have begun to champion and form an anti-Hive campaign, urging other users to power down, sell their stash, and join blurt, where they will not be downvoted.
Months later, they are back, despite having called it quits months before. In reality, they do not really mean anything they have said about Hive; it is just the pain and hurt, and since they cannot financially match their downvoters for strength, the only thing they do is try to create a FUD campaign to see if they can hurt the chain by asking people to mass-leave.
So, these people can create whenever they want, and their accounts are active, but they can not earn, and sometimes the inability to earn is interpreted as silence, when it isn't. However, they are misplaced because some users only see the dollar value of their posts, and when there is no corresponding dollar value on a post because it was removed via DVs, it is common to assume that it means being silenced.
In reality, we frequently underestimate being silenced on web2.
There are people whose accounts are completely obliterated on web2 because of what they've said. Their accounts vanish into thin air or have their reach reduced (shadow banned), which is synonymous with Twitter. However, we do not hear much about this unless it is a big account (i.e., celebrities or popular people) or one that has been monetized.
So the bone of content is often being demonetized.
Being demonetized is a completely different demon on web2, and it differs significantly from what happens on Hive. On web2, it hurts because, for example, you have managed to build 100,000 followers on YouTube and now you can not earn money with it because you posted something about the Israeli war.
When a non-monetized account is deleted on web2, the account cares less because they have lost nothing.
On Hive, we often overestimate the concept of demonetization. In reality, demonetization is a large and harsh word, and while it is less severe than being silenced or canceled, it is still extremely venomous when compared to the concept of downvote. This is because, in the case of a downvote, the person or persons are not speaking on behalf of the chain, DVs do not last indefinitely, and when the effect ends, nothing is harmed except the user's numeric reputation on-chain.
In Conclusion
As I have always stated, DVs are not evil; they are simply tools of protection, and some users may be overzealous with them. We saw it incessantly in the past with a huge curation account, but then, I think it has reduced a lot nowadays. By any standard, DVs cannot be compared to being silenced.
This is a much more expansive concept than downvotes. The latter is synonymous with web2 due to its high centralization, ownership, and control patterns. The Hive system is not perfect and requires a lot of work, but it functions despite the contentious hinges. When we remove a lot of emotional play, we can begin to apply the necessary logical biases.
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