For those living in a cave, Dr. Robert Malone has been grabbing online attention for days following his interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. Gettr is a new 'free speech' network that has now exploded with millions of followers as a result of Twitter banning Malone and him promoting Gettr on Rogan's show. Lessons need to be learned here on Hive.
EDIT: Predictably, the Getter Terms of Service make clear they are NOT a real free speech site at all and will delete any content they find 'objectionable' ;)
I have been interacting with Dr. Malone here and there on Twitter right throughout COVID19 and first promoted him on Hive back in July, 2021 when he first came to public attention in his appearance on the Black Horse Podcast.
I am told that he created an account on 3speak and uploaded various videos here. He's a smart guy who pays attention to technology and how to overcome the scumbags who currently control so much of the world's resources. Here's another post I made a while back that highlights his statements on the relationship of Vitamin D to COVID.
Whether you think Dr. Malone makes sense or is in error regarding his extensive commentary on COVID19 and the associated vaccines, you cannot successfully deny that he is grabbing major attention, despite being censored by Twitter (and now Youtube) and blacked out by the mainstream media. His appearance on Joe Rogan is currently the most watched show on Spotify.
Given all of this and given that Hive is primarily designed to be censorship resistant, there is a glaring problem here that the Dr. Malone situation is highlighting (again). PEOPLE REPEATEDLY CHOOSE ANY OTHER 'FREE SPEECH' NETWORK OVER HIVE!
I am told that Gettr is hosted on Amazon servers and uses Google Captcha, among other bad design choices for a free speech network, yet it now has 8 million users from Joe Rogan alone! It's only a few months old. Similar 'free speech' networks made similarly bad design choices, such as Parler, got big and went nowhere due to bad design. Hive, as most people here understand, legitimately improves on these poor design choices and yet the majority of well known activists, whistleblowers and controversial voices refuse to come here.
I've been saying this for years and yet it seems that enough people don't care or disagree with my message that I am ignored and nothing much changes. We are now at the point where one single person on Hive has enough power to zero my account for months without repercussion, meaning that one of the few advocates for Hive's primary use case is being forced off the network. Do you really think this is going to make Hive a success?!
You really need to question now what the real agenda behind the downvoting is because as a professional marketer, free speech advocate and fairly well connected researcher/activist, I know for certain that there are well organised operations in place on social media to use whatever tricks are available to shut down conversations and people that stand a chance of genuinely helping humanity by exposing and ending serious largescale abuses of human rights (usually by scummy corporations or governments).
Hive (and Steem before it) have consistently missed out on so many opportunities to grow that I have lost count and this has largely been due to a failure to recognise that it's primary use case is being overlooked. Free speech is one of the most undervalued human rights and points of dignity - not because it isn't important, but because so many people, in reality, want to shut it down in order to hide their own lies. In short, we have a crisis of dishonesty and DENIAL.
One of the points that Dr. Robert Malone made in his interview with Joe Rogan was that the world is trapped by 'mass formation psychosis', which is a fancy way of saying 'people are frightened and unconscious, which makes them easy to hypnotise and lead down dead ends by nefarious people'. The way to end this trance state is to understand DENIAL and to end it. This means recognising how much we are blocking out and therefore how much in error our thinking is about all kinds of things.
One of my main aims online has ALWAYS been to help end denial in myself and others. It's pretty much what I am doing constantly - there is so much denial that it is a full time job! From my perspective, my intent to end denial and therefore to stick to what is verifiably accurate and also what is very likely to be rejected by many people is both why I get a lot of upvotes here and probably also why I am getting downvoted to oblivion.
I put a few weeks into creating the Untrending report to list out the current downvotes on Hive because failure to take action to respond to crippling downvotes from high stake accounts means Hive loses it's primary selling point - free speech support. I'm not really interested in going through yet another round of listening to people claiming that downvoting is not 'censorship'. Just look through the accounts receiving the biggest downvotes and check what happens to most of them in a short space of time. Most of them leave, no matter how long they have been active on Hive and this is the point of the downvoting. I have been told directly by the biggest downvoter to leave (with no reason given!).
I am really at a loss as to what the 'leaders' of Hive want it to be at this point because few of them show any evidence of doing much to actually grow it based on it's primary selling point. Perhaps they are frightened and in denial - as are most people at this point. That seems likely, so I am asking them to get real and feel deeply into what is really going on inside of them that causes most of them to 'overlook' this issue or even support the downvoting.
I read an old steemitblog post from Steemit Inc. from over a year ago which highlighted the problems with downvoting at that time and stated that SMTs were going to solve the problem. Obviously they never materialised and now we have layer 2 options via Hive Engine, but the cost of entry is too high currently to empower these to fully solve the problem. Until we have robust and cheap layer 2 solutions, it will continue to be possible to frustrate, stifle and eject people on Hive simply by holding enough stake on Layer 1.
Two Key Questions on Downvotes & Marketing
Does the community want/intend to do anything about the habitual downvoting of people based only in disagreement? Do we not really care? Or are we waiting for someone else to fix it - perhaps via Layer 2 groups like VYB?
What exactly do the downvoters see as the main selling point of the rewards pool in the world? Given that they often seem not to want the biggest target audience to make use of it (dissenters and those ejected from Web 2.0). To many intelligent people, they seem to just want to dominate it and control it for their own reasons, rather than use it to attract new users. Note: blocking rewards from established/growing Hive users in order to try to lure in new users is more akin to a pyramid scheme than much else (Which is exactly the complaint I most see about Steem/Hive from 'influencers' in the crypto world.).
The total amount of rewards paid out to authors is a small enough percentage of the overall staked HP that it is surprisingly insignificant overall, yet these folks have no problem in acting like saviours for dominating a small number of people for months on end to protect what is actually a small percentage of a normal marketing budget and that generally isn't spent on marketing all that much!
I get that people have better things to do than stand up for the victims here - I was similar for a long time. Not that I didn't want to help but I didn't really know how and wasn't aware of the nature of the problem as much as I am now (and not being limited like I am now too).
If nothing else I would like people to comment on the marketing vision for Hive based on the current scenario because as a marketer I feel it is very difficult to promote the system as it currently is - for the same reasons that Hive is rejected by so many outsiders. It's particularly frustrating to hear @acidyo complaining that I am not doing anything to onboard people, while he does so much, while I can clearly see that millions of people are being turned away by missed opportunities as a result of not understanding psychology deeply enough. (Note: I appreciate that Acidyo is the only one of the downvoters to engage me, listen and respectfully change direction so far - this is not an attack on him or OCD).
It is accepted scientific fact in business psychology that people are FAR more bothered by losing something than they are by the prospect of gaining something. You can try to sell them on rewards and free speech all day long, but if they smell that they can have things taken away from them, they will be MUCH more affected by the thought and are likely to recoil. From what I gather someone put people in charge of 'vision' on Hive that doesn't really think free speech is worth marketing.
It's just such a shame to me that Hive is being so limited by limited thinking. Let's have a conversation and create productive solutions!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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