As most of us know downvoting posts and comments on Hive is used to maintain content quality and prevent abuse of the system. The ability to downvote acts as a corrective measure against things like spam, plagiarism, or low-quality content. Downvotes reduce the rewards assigned to a post or comment. With this every user on Hive has a possibility to reduce rewards of blogs and/or comments that don’t add value to the community.
It's obvious that downvotes are being used to downvote content that contains plagiarism or is offensive. And we see downvotes being used this way quite a bit.
But downvotes can also be used to balance the distribution of the rewards. When a blog is overrewarded, every Hive user can use his or her downvote to bring the reward for that post down.
But this is a controversial topic within the Hive community, as downvotes can often provoke personal reactions.
I was triggered to create this post by a snap from @godfish who brought up this subject.
He created a poll with some questions if anyone every uses downvotes.
https://peakd.com/@godfish/re-peaksnaps-smvrqo
The poll has 15 different votes, but nobody has downvoted "over-rewarded" content.
When is content over-rewarded?
We can have a long discussion about when content is over-rewarded. I think there everyone has its own idea about it.
What is a well written blog worth?
Do we really think, despite the fact that it could have taken you a couple of hours to write a blog, that a rewarded of more than $100 dollar can be justified?
Maybe for charity, but for a normal post. Personally I don't think so.
Yes, the community decides about the value of a post. Both with upvotes or downvotes, but the latter can be kind of tricky...
Repercussions
Downvotes on Hive for content that is not offensive or plagiarism isn't very common. It's not like we see on other (Web2.0) platforms like reddit or Youtube where downvotes are common.
It surely has to do that you as a downvoter have a direct impact on the payout of a post.
But the rewards on your content are temporary. They aren't yours until payout after 7 days.
I've seen quite some cases in the past where a downvote was taken personal and caused a downvote war between two Hivers.
It is that risk of pissing someone off with a downvote that withholds me from downvoting content I think is over-rewarded.
Large stakeholders could easily zero out all of your posts with their stake if you like, so you don't want to step on their toes.
I don't want to risk making a larger stakeholder angry with a downvote that might result in repercussions that will zero out all my future rewards.
Surely not all content creators will be offended by downvotes. Like @godfish mentions in his snaps post he wouldn't mind if his blogs with much rewards will receive downvotes to distribute the rewards better. And there are more in the discussion that think the same about that.
But you never know how the author will take it.
A positive exception I want to mention is the @smooth account. I see this account does regularly downvote posts that have quite a high payout. But that account isn't a personal one since it doesn't post any blogs itself, so has no problem with potential repercussions.
But I do like to know how the person(s) behind this account make their decisions.
How can we do to solve this problem?
- First of all I'd like to know if you think over-rewarded posts is a problem
- When do you think a blog over-rewarded?
- Does someone who has invested time and money have more rights to receive a high reward than other users?
- Do we want a maximum amount of rewards a post can have?
- Should we downvote these posts to have a more fair distribution of rewards?
- And how can we prevent repercussions?
- Do we want to normalize downvotes within Hive?
- How can we use downvoting without having to fear for repercussions?
- Is there perhaps a role for the curation initiatives on Hive?
- I'm really curious how you all think about this subject and especially the ones that regularly receive large payouts on their posts. Do you think your post is worth that amount?
- Are there any other ideas on this topic you want to bring up?
I hope we can have a nice discussion about this topic in the comments!
You can answer one or more of the questions above or share your thought about this subject.
Feel free to reblog this post or tag people to draw more attention to the discussion. The more opninions, the better!
(Disclaimer: Image created with ChatGPT. I bet you already noticed that because there is a finger missing 😂)
FriendlyMoose
Creating blogs about photography, cycling, gardening, craft beer and more...
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