I Now Vote For @Deathwing's Witness & Pushed Him Into the Top 20 - After Talks About His Support & Understanding of Free Speech on Hive

meesterboom 3 years ago

I'm not sure if that is because they don't pay attention to the chain or because they disagree that misuse of downvotes is a big problem for hive

I think it's the last part but don't let that stop you from glossing over it and constructing a narrative in which downvoting is wrong or should only be used in ways in which you agree.

ura-soul 3 years ago

Nothing you have said here is what I am doing. I can't even be bothered to explain it as I've explained it so many times and you are unreceptive.

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meesterboom 3 years ago

I understand, the problem is always with someone else... :0)

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ura-soul 3 years ago

that logic applies both ways.

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meesterboom 3 years ago

I can't even be bothered to explain why you are wrong as I've explained it so many times and you are unreceptive.

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nonameslefttouse 3 years ago

Fake news? As of this writing, that particular individual is not in top 20.

ura-soul 3 years ago

The positions were changed again a few hours after the post was made.

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nonameslefttouse 3 years ago

Never wise to take credit for the accomplishments of others.

ura-soul 3 years ago

I'll spell it out. The position of deathwing was increased to the top 20 after I placed my vote. I discussed it with him in advance. Then, after a few hours of being in the top 20, following me voting him - he then dropped out of the Top 20 after some people unvoted him and other people voted Smooth back in to the Top 20 (as I recall).

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nonameslefttouse 3 years ago

Smooth has been sitting in 19 for the past few days at least. Quochuy was the one you knocked down, but is also someone you vote for. 19-22 is a really tight race and doesn't take much to shake up.

No need to 'spell it out' though. I was just trying to point out you're taking credit for something that involves several votes from several people and if those votes hadn't been there, you wouldn't be writing this post, which comes across as 'flexing' or a power trip.

Hopefully your politics don't interfere with deathwing's momentum that he made for himself. I've been supporting that one for awhile. Haven't made any adjustments for some time, aside from dropping holger, who seems out of action.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

You are telling me about something that I watched with my own eyes, along with many people, that you did not. At the time the vote was made, Smooth went down, then was revoted up higher.
As already stated under this post, I made this post to inform people that proxy to my vote, why I voted as I did and it has nothing to so with 'showing off'.
I made these things clear because you repeatedly inject your own interpretations onto situations incorrectly.

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nonameslefttouse 3 years ago

I saw deathwing in the top 20 though. Smooth as well.

^{Update: Now smooth is out and someguy moved in. That final spot has been bouncing around and shapeshifting like that all week if not longer.}

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tarazkp 3 years ago

This conversation is a circle.....

urun 3 years ago

i vote for him long time ago :)

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tarazkp 3 years ago

Sadly, very few witnesses even replied to the offer of $1.7M worth of support for them! I'm not sure if that is because they don't pay attention to the chain or because they disagree that misuse of downvotes is a big problem for hive.

:D
Were you expecting an invitation to dinner or something? That is less than 2% of what is needed to get into the T20 and it isn't even yours - meaning that if you lose the proxy, they lose the value of the vote. Stop being so full of yourself.

It is nice that you twisted @deathwing's words to fit your narrative a bit too. Classy.

10 votes

ura-soul 3 years ago

If people don't want 2% of what they need to achieve their goal then there are either very comfortably there, without any concern of losing the position - or they don't want it very much. You might not have thought through your words here, but you are literally shitting on every person who works for a living and gets paid in chunks to achieve their goal. Not a good look.

Sure, the vote will stop if the proxy ends, but literally all people need to do is advocate for free speech, hardly a tough job.

I spoke to Deathwing for quite a long time in private and I did not twist his words in the slightest.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

You looking for some kind of recognition is not a good look mate. People vote witnesses all the time, they don't need to make announcements about it and then complain and then call them out for not bowing and saying thank you for it.

Sadly, very few witnesses even replied to the offer of $1.7M worth of support for them! I'm not sure if that is because they don't pay attention to the chain or because they disagree that misuse of downvotes is a big problem for hive.

This is a pathetic false dichotomy. Grow up.

I spoke to Deathwing for quite a long time in private and I did not twist his words in the slightest.

He seems to have felt the need to clarify what you said.

Also, on the comment he linked, Deathwing quoted numbers from your post.

around 4-8% of the rewards pool is returned to authors through downvoting overall - which therefore then gets paid to everyone making posts.. and this means that the downvoter will gain a boost on their own posts as a result of the downvoting.

Which is according to some report you have faith in.

I don't know if you remember, but even during the "haejin flag wars" it was something like 2%. I am pretty sure that this 4-8% is utter nonsense. There is about 150M vested, @blocktrades (main account) has about 6M, so about 4% of the vest. To combat 6M of 10x upvotes, BT would have to downvote 6M 10x - but he has 2.5 free votes to use. That means he would need to have 24M HP to downvote 6M worth of upvotes - and use all of the downvote power. He would also have to find 60M vests worth of posts to downvote, or around 3600 dollars worth. That is for the 4% - for the 8% he would need to downvote with 48M vests 2.5x - or 7200 dollars worth. Bye bye all of trending's first 100 posts or something and, it would mean that a full 1/3rd of all staked HIVE is using their full allocation of downvotes.

I am not great with numbers - but yours don't add up.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

.. and this means that the downvoter will gain a boost on their own posts as a result of the downvoting.

And I will also add, that for someone to actually benefit significantly from the downvoting they do, they would need to not only be downvoting with 4x BT-sized stake, they would also have to have open posts that are very heavily voted for them to be impacted from the return to the pool.

For example, if BT ,used his stake as I suggested above and had 10 open posts a day that he voted 100% and they sit at $360 each. After all of the downvoting, he would get a 4-8% benefit on them, meaning that they would move from 360 to a *whopping 374-388. Not only this, he would also have to have those 10 posts a day (70 posts a week) not downvoted until payout.

If you really think people downvote to earn more on their posts, you are lacking so much information on how this platform works and should rethink how you talk about it. If you don't think this, you are then purposefully misrepresenting in order to influence your readers - either way -

it is not a good look.

ura-soul 3 years ago

A 4% daily guaranteed gain is a hell of a lot more than many investments offer. All that is required is to farm out enough content creation channels anonymously that you have your full quota of upvotes pointed to your own sockpuppet accounts (worth doing if you have a lot of HP).. Then you just make sure you downvote others to the max. If you happen to have a particular political ideology then all the better, you get to shut down topics at the same time.

This is very simple and an accurate assessment of the potentiality here. Big downvoters are big upvoters.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

A 4% daily guaranteed gain is a hell of a lot more than many investments offer.

You seem to have issues understanding the math here.

So, using BT as the example, he would have to downvote with 24M HIVE power to remove 4% - but it would also have to be on posts that have 24M worth of upvotes. AND, he would have to have 10 open posts a day that he upvotes 100% himself AND don't get downvoted by anyone else. He doesn't - he has zero open posts and, he doesn't downvote to full capacity with 24M Hive either - he doesn't have 24M staked afaik.

So, if he did all of this and had 1 post open he voted at 360 dollars, he would gain about 50 cents on it, after downvoting 17.5 times in the week with 24M Hive Power. Totally worth it!

All that is required is to farm out enough content creation channels anonymously that you have your full quota of upvotes pointed to your own sockpuppet accounts (worth doing if you have a lot of HP).. Then you just make sure you downvote others to the max. If you happen to have a particular political ideology then all the better, you get to shut down topics at the same time.

You are a nut if you think 24M worth of stake would go through all of this trouble and risk for 4% gain on the vote, when they can just vote whatever content for 50%.

This is very simple and an accurate assessment of the potentiality here. Big downvoters are big upvoters.

lols. Senseless statement.......

you really should think through what you know about this chain and recalibrate what you say on it.

ura-soul 3 years ago

The 4% figure is the average I have seen for the amount that the total value of downvotes equates to as part of the available reward pool. So in other words, if all downvotes that are cast are actually removing stake (which is ultimately their purpose) then 4% of the total reward pool is returned to the pool as a result of downvotes globally.

If one individual account, such as BT in your example, does NOT downvote at all, then they will still benefit from the overall amount returned to the reward pool via downvoting on whatever posts they upvote - this is by design of the blockchain. If they DO downvote then they increase the overall percentage returned and they benefit from that too.

So in order for my point to generate worthwhile returns, all that is needed is for the downvoting account to farm out content that gets upvoted a lot and for them to expend all their downvotes. If you look at the downvote tracker you will see that the vast majority of all downvote value comes from a very small number of accounts, with roughly the top 15 most heavily downvoting accounts resulting in about 70% of ALL downvotes. Therefore, these 15 large accounts have the ability to add on a few percent to the total amount removed via downvoting ever day.

For reference, when @kennyskitchen started downvoting hbd stabilizer recently using his big account, the percent of the reward pool being returned almost doubled straight away. Just one account had that ability. If my maths are wrong, you are welcome to show why - based on the numbers provided.

You are a nut if you think 24M worth of stake would go through all of this trouble and risk for 4% gain on the vote, when they can just vote whatever content for 50%.

I have demonstrated how large accounts can create quite big shifts in the rewards here already. The effort involved to make this work is minimal and the amounts to be gained are sufficient that with take above a certain point it becomes worthwhile. It is doubly so if you have a political agenda. You can call me a nut if you like, I am just applying logic to the system.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

You seem to think the largest accounts on the platform are going to go after scraps of percentages using a complex network of alts, risking downvotes and getting unvoted as witnesses - it is nonsensical.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

Now I am just skimming.

this is by design of the blockchain.

I know enough about the design - you should start learning a bit too.

the percent of the reward pool being returned almost doubled straight away.

But, it gets spread to every post on the platform. How do you not understand this?? double, triple, go 10x - makes very little difference for any individual downvoter's posts.

I am just applying logic to the system.

You should look around for a shovel, you keep digging yourself in deeper.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

You looking for some kind of recognition is not a good look mate. People vote witnesses all the time, they don't need to make announcements about it and then complain and then call them out for not bowing and saying thank you for it.

I explained why I voted because I am voting as part of a proxy chain who want the votes to go to witnesses who support free speech in specific ways. I have no idea what you are talking about regarding 'calling out' or 'not saying thankyou' as nothing I have said in this thread or any other is relevant to those ideas.

Which is according to some report you have faith in.

It's according to a report that I coded. If it's wrong then people are welcome to correct me. The report is based on HiveSQL data.

You can see the summary of the numbers I am referencing here.

The last 7 days of posts received a total of 2078572 upvotes & 18174 downvotes.
The 5000 largest downvotes (with a total value of $10887 HBD) were processed.

These downvotes are equal in value to 3.5% of the $306912 HBD value of the pending rewards pool for posts.

By all means show any errors there may be in there, I welcome corrections.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

You have missed the point of this again and your numbers are irrelevant.

As said, for Hive to be returned to the pool from down votes, it has to remove upvotes. If a post is voted to 10 dollars and has 1000 dollars of downvotes on it, 10 dollars worth of Hive is returned to the pool, not 1000.

For example, if I downvote your comment here 10 dollars - it returnsnothing to the pool as it has no votes on it.

Go back and rework your code to actually look at what has been removed, because counting the size of downvotes informs nothing.

ura-soul 3 years ago

You are correct that the downvotes remove nothing unless there is something to remove from their targeted post, yes. However, in my experience, the downvotes are not cast on posts where they will have no effect and the handful of largest downvoters are careful to adjust their downvotes to ensure that they don't waste their downvote pool achieving nothing. The net result is that from what I have seen, most downvotes do reduce payouts.

I am happy to adjust the code to be more accurate and to take into account actual reductions in the way you are highlighting, no problem.

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tarazkp 3 years ago

The last 7 days of posts received a total of 2078572 upvotes & 18174 downvotes.
The 5000 largest downvotes (with a total value of $10887 HBD) were processed.

These downvotes are equal in value to 3.5% of the $306912 HBD value of the pending rewards pool for posts.

That is the current rewards fund.

I am quite sure that your calculations are wrong. PArt of the reason is that you are only calculating half of the value - so, you are saying that the vote is worth for example "100", but forgetting that a post reward is calculated in HBD AND HIVE. This is important - but if you don't understand why, you probably aren't going to get your calculations right next time either.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

As far as I am aware, from my study of the global parameters on the blockchain - based on various sources of documentation (none of which are verbose or totally clear) - the figure you have pasted here is for the total rewards fund, including the inflation that goes to the worker proposals and witnesses.

The figure I have used is the one labelled 'pending rewarded vesting' which I have then split according to the percentage in the global params that denotes how much is awarded only to authors of content. I am open to being wrong in my use of these parameters because I have never seen them fully documented anywhere in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination - but I am not seeing that demonstrated in your comments here.

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digital-fortress 3 years ago

You want to thank aggroed and yabamatt for defending free speech? That is a lie. They have silenced and trashed my brother (palikari123) both publicly and privately for going on 3 years to defend corruption and fraud/cheating he was trying to expose in the stupid fucking game he was part of. They covered for their friends, who spread horrible, vicious rumours and lies about him deliberately to intimidate him and shut him up. They are covering for the money launderers that feed them. What an absolute disgrace this place is. Everything on here is based on the greed of a few power hungry scumbags, who prey upon everyone else and shut them down if they get in the way of their schemes. Good work in congratulating horrible disgusting psychos, who abused and harassed him everywhere he went secretly and then using their power and influence publicly to make him look like the bad guy.

Is this the type of free speech you mean and want to thank them for? You have no idea how angry and upset the entire family is over this, and the complete disregard they have shown for his wellbeing. They know what he has and is going through once again, but dare not talk about it in any way. Every attempt he made at speaking out, was met with silencing tactics, bullying and harassment to protect the special people who they were covering for.

You want to know what the result of the entire thing is now? All the bullying and harassment he had to put up with, has once again induced his cancer from all the stress. The second time in 3 years, and not one of those trashbags has said a word about it, because they are in hiding. They have so much dirty laundry, and they have shown him complete disrespect throughout his entire time here. He spent his time and money on this stupid ponzi scheme game like everyone else, but got his online life destroyed by disgusting people, who did not like his opinion on what was going on. Instead, they hire all the corrupt people in the game and reward them for being corrupt. Its a nice bribe system they have going here.

There is nothing I can do about any of this, because they have completely blocked and shut him down everywhere. Now I and my family have to clean up this mess and try and put together all the shattered pieces, because of their fucking greed and fraud. It's almost impossible, but we will not give up.

They are scum, who have no ethics and will sacrifice another human life and destroy it because of their pyramid scheme they want to protect. Shutting down his free speech is a part of the business model. But because of all the lies they spread about him, he could not say anything without being silenced and harassed on a mass level because of the perception they created about him.

I and my family now hold all of these people personally responsible for allowing all of this to happen in the full knowledge of what was going on, and allowing it to continue and reach this point. This place is a total disgrace and run by a group of frauds who only believe in their own power and greed, and now they have destroyed my brothers life, or what little there is left of it.

After all the time he spent here and the effort he put into defending others free speech, its disgusting that he was treated this way.

I/we wish the worst upon them all.

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kennyskitchen 3 years ago

You present a lot of personal opinions of people, and the situation of your friend, but in general when making claims against people, it's best to present evidence...

Do you have screenshots, video, comments threads, posts breaking it down, etc?

Not only does this comment not include any specific claims against them (what exactly are you saying they did?), but it also includes no evidence of anything.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

@palikari123 has shared various screenshots from discord conversations and elsewhere over the years of what he has claimed. It's hard to know from the outside, exactly what has gone on - but some of it is clearly accurate at least.

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kennyskitchen 3 years ago

Interesting. Looks like palikari123 edited all of their Hive posts to be empty, and the digitalfortress account has never made a post or comment besides this one here...

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ura-soul 3 years ago

looks like he deleted his discord account, so i can't link to the previous comments and screenshots he posted.

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digital-fortress 3 years ago

He did not delete his chat account because I still have access to it. Some people told me they cant message him. SO he must have done something to the account for that to happen. I dont know what he did.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

OK, thanks for explaining - please wish him well from me and the others in the truth space in PAL. I know he was/is very angry with some people but genuinely, they aren't the ones in the room I participate in and that he sometimes visited.

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digital-fortress 3 years ago

PLease ask those corrupt bullies why they just threw me out of the peace and liberty chat group. You still think they beleive in freedom of speech?

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digital-fortress 3 years ago

Look at what they just did to this comment and account. SO much freedom of speech.

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digital-fortress 3 years ago

My friend? How dare you, you insensitive jerk. I said it was my brother. Now how about instead of you coming here and insulting me in a time of my brothers disappearance and sickness from his second dose of cancer, show some fucking respect and compassion for his situation. I wasnt asking for your opinion. I also wasnt trying to sit here and prove anything, that would take forever. And yes Me and my family are angry as fucking hell and have no time to entertain your personal request. I just came here to leave a remark on this blog because there was a message on his bot service with the title that I saw. Yes its the first comment I have made from this account for that reason.

Instead of demanding I sit here and prove 3 years worth of abuse from different people which happened mostly in secret, from people who held a high amount of power, how about you ask why the coward CEOs have never once showed their face in public to discuss this, but instead blocked him everywhere and threw him out of the chat rooms to protect the rich and powerful in the game. Not only in the game, but on this blog site too. Not that my brother wasnt a big owner either, but he was up against an entire organised gang of arseholes, who cheated him as well. They have completely covered this up and protected the garbage from it all. But They are all still in the chat rooms, and also have moderator powers and are paid players of the game. Maybe you think its not possible for those type of people to do anything like this. I thought you all questioned powerful people. I thought you all understand how power works and how people abuse it.

Fucking hell, the disrespect is unreal.

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sn0n 3 years ago

@hextech loves witness votes! Although I do know we had a previous issue with as they are called in this thread, small downvotes (legit, it's a small witness value wise, not much of a downvotes), that's in the past, end behind us now. We would love support of our witness as we begin stage 2 of our journey, bringing another full api node to fruit. @deathwing has been a role model for small witnesses like us in figuring out how to scale up and support the platform the best we know how.

As for other issues brought up in this post,... Well... I'll defer again to my previous shill of https://personal.community/ a static site hosted on GitHub pages, which now has keychain support for logging in, voting (we only support 100% upvotes for now, it's on the Todo list to change) and new posts / comments. And it's open source... Client side js... So all you really need is the site downloaded (or saved as an app to desktop using the install website features on your browser) and connecting to a full api node, like deatwhings... You have a full broad view of what's on hive... And I've taken liberties like.... Removing vote values.... Or how many people have voted on it... And (to soon have an option) no filters. So the right and left wing nutjobs can do their unicorn dances around fishing poles summoning whatever juju suits their needs... it's a free speech thing no? But the important thing here really is having free speech right? Or is it the gimme my monies greed goblin sneaking his gold hungry nose around the corner of your subconscious?

If you guys really wanted the front end of your dreams, censorship resistant and with whatever verbose text piles tickles your fancy, download one of the apps that doesn't filter trending by vote value,... That's a old Facebook psych tactic that sucks us in for those dopemine hits.. anyways, that dab hit me and I'm getting distracted with my thoughts as I try to chicken peck with with 2 thumbs on my phone.

Oh yea, witness vote @hextech, @deathwing and Aaron Swartz was murdered. Sorry, the internet made me do it, it broke packages and made the news or something.

3 votes

acidyo 3 years ago

RIP Aaron Swartz, legend.

deathwing 3 years ago

"... He wasn't originally seeing downvoting as being a problem for free speech on Hive ..."

I would like to drop here and mention that the sentence structure here is a bit out of context. This line implies that I am seeing "downvoting as a problem for free speech on Hive." now just like my comment the other day, To clarify, I still don't know that downvotes are a problem for free speech on Hive. I see downvotes as a mechanism to adjust the rewards on the post. Just like how upvotes are, and again, as specified, I do support downvoting in most cases. Since as I mentioned, downvotes are just there as a rewards mechanism. Just as people can upvote to increase the rewards on a specified post, other people can downvote to reduce it.

Just as a normal community member. Anything that improves inclusivity, as well as better support to Hivers, is my goal, I am a developer and a sysadmin, so my goals are mainly aligning with development as well as the stability of our chain. As a witness, I strive to uphold these principles. I am open to changes as long as we can see viable returns from those changes, preferably positive. Hive does not have a leader, we don't have a CEO. We all chip in to various improvements that Hive can have in the future, improvements that come to fruition thanks to the workings of different people in vastly different fields.

To reiterate my comment(s): https://peakd.com/witness/@deathwing/re-ura-soul-r5iry9

ura-soul 3 years ago

I should have clarified the comment you quoted here by inserting the word 'ideological' or 'opinion based' in there.
I was under the impression from your words that since you appreciate that opinion/ideological/unexplained downvoting causes psychological resistance moreso than the excitement of upvoting does and that people literally avoid Hive because of the situation.. plus because they perceive it to result in the ability to target specific ideas for suppression and that the word 'censorship' contains 'suppression of (growth of) ideas' within it's dictionary definition.. that the ideological downvoting represents a perceived and potentially real problem for free speech on Hive.

This, I was under the impression, is part of why you supported the idea of experimenting with lower free downvote thresholds in order to determine if they improved user experience, retention and the other KPIs for Hive.

Since people are accusing me of twisting your words here, perhaps it would be good to clarify further.

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deathwing 3 years ago

"... you appreciate that opinion/ideological/unexplained downvoting causes psychological resistance ..."

I am quoting what I responded to for the "psychological effects" of being downvoted.

"Technically, when you see a big red "you've received a downvote" notification from an app you're using, that might end up in a negative psychological effect, which might cause the person to lose enthusiasm to continue doing whatever they're doing on the platform. Is it because free downvotes exist? I don't think so. Even before free downvotes, even though it could be less than now, people did use the downvote feature."

In the next post, your reply:

"[downvotes returning the reward to the pool] ...and this means that the downvoter will gain a boost on their own posts as a result of the downvoting."

and again, my reply:

"From my observation, a lot of people who downvote quite regularly are "curators", in other words, they focus on curation and/or other aspects of Hive as opposed to writing posts themselves. So I don't think they downvote specifically to increase their gains."

Regarding experimenting with free downvotes, my main point was the "data" -- I am not a statistician, I don't know how free downvotes affected and how their effect would be should the number be reduced. The data is interesting to see and I would love to have a simulation of it. This is again, my quote from my initial reply:

"Tests and data (potentially simulation) on how things would turn out if free downvotes were reduced to 1/day would definitely be useful. I don't know and can't really estimate if it will cause any substantial changes (both positive and negative) but it's nice to see nevertheless."

"In conclusion, I believe we can both agree that there are a lot of data that needs to be analysed ... However, our solution lies in the future. With a proper, preferably free (or minimal costs) L2."

Your paragraph starts with "In short, while he wasn't originally seeing downvoting as being a problem for free speech on Hive" this to me, looks like I completely changed my opinion on "downvoting being a problem for free speech on Hive." I do like to think that there is a difference between "supporting the reduction of free downvotes" and "looking forward to the data analysis." As I also wrote in my quote, I do not think it'll differ greatly, but with proper data that we can observe. Just like any other addition and removal in terms of features and settings on Hive, it can be put into community discussion for everyone to discuss.

Nevertheless, just as I pointed out in the aforementioned conversations, the end goal is always Layer 2. The solution for a lot of different problematic topics on Hive can easily be resolved with Layer 2 apps in the long run.

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deathwing 3 years ago

I would also like to reiterate after reading @tarazkp's comments that, I initially mentioned that if the issue is viewership (i.e. downvoting causes people to be muted and/or make it harder to reach trending/hot) a potential solution is building a frontend that ignores all downvotes. This way, no downvote would affect a post and therefore, viewership issues would be resolved.

If the problem, however, is rewards... Hive rewards are never promised. Just as how someone may support a post on Hive, other people may dislike it. Henceforth the notion of upvoting and downvoting. If either side disagrees with the other, the solution is again, very simple. Buy Hive, stake it. Get more Hive Power, counter it. Some people call this "talking with your stake" and I find that quite intriguing.

This is for Layer 1, when HAF rolls around and Layer 2 apps start to increase their paces in terms of development (not to mention additional foundation HAF is going to provide) these aforementioned solutions will no longer be necessary since, in the end, I believe that the "social posting/blogging" aspect of Layer 1 will shift to Layer 2.

These are also included in my previous comments.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

I agree that layer 2 offers a way to handle this situation and once layer 2 becomes more established, layer 1 may look drastically different, with the reward pool much reduced as people leave it to move money into layer 2 communities.

For me, the issue is both content reach/discovery and also rewards. POB is specifically designed and sold to join together post reach with rewards. Content creators in Web 2 (let alone web 3) are used to being able to monetise content in order to power their content creation efforts and this is part of why the reward pool is largely directed to content creators, by design. I shouldn't need to point this out, but it seems that some people like to warp the situation to suggest that anyone who suggests creator rewards are important is some kind of scrounging excrement. Youtube is what it is, in terms of size, in no small part due to it's focus on paying content creators and Steem was designed to capitalise on this idea too.

In order for POB to function, it requires that content creators are both visible and rewarded - based on community sentiment. In the early days of Steem it was agreed that whales would not drop heavy upvotes (or downvotes) that much (or ever) in order to give POB a chance to reflect genuine community consensus, but that has fallen away now - so that those involved have decided that pure stake is more useful to Hive as an indicator of community sentiment than is the actual voting patterns of large numbers of people. This has caused the age old dynamic of money vs. people to surface here and people are polarised as to which is the 'right' approach. Typically, those with the most money choose 'money' and everyone else chooses 'people'.

Despite how it may look to those who don't know me personally, I am actually in the camp of 'doing what is best to grow Hive' rather than 'doing what is going to get me the most short term rewards'. As someone who is specialised in both systems engineering and business/marketing, plus specifically in social networks, I am very aware that public perception is fundamental to the success of any social network and that actually people are more interested in social dynamics than they are money earning potential, overall - when it comes to adoption of social networks. However, since Hive absolutely merges these two things, the money aspect here automatically knocks into the social dynamics, meaning that the way that money influences the social dynamics on Hive is a fundamental factor in it's growth potential.

All of this is leading to the relatively simple point that we can't successfully disconnect post discovery/reach from the rewards and economics of the system. Not only are they totally connected at the blockchain level, but people are tired of being exploited on Web 2.0 and they are not generally going to accept being told to use Hive UIs that simply ignore downvotes in order to accomodate whales who profit heavily from their content generation behind the scenes, but who are actually downvoting them constantly for their own reasons. People do regularly scoff at this idea and mock the idea of participating in such a system.

I am just doing what I can to advocate for system design and community cohesion that makes the best use of the reward pool from a growth and marketing perspective. Having been on the receiving end of heavy ideological downvoting now for months, I can appreciate what so many people here have been telling me for years in private - that the downvoting can be a huge problem when used in ways that are not optimal for growth (a polite way of saying it). I see reducing the amount of free downvotes as being a simple, low cost way to explore solutions to this (a quick fix) that may actually work. This has never been adjusted in all the time it has been active and I think it is high time.

3 votes

tarazkp 3 years ago

I initially mentioned that if the issue is viewership (i.e. downvoting causes people to be muted and/or make it harder to reach trending/hot) a potential solution is building a frontend that ignores all downvotes.

I have mentioned this for the last 4 years I have been around this particular conversation of downvotes and censorship, including visibility - none have done it.

Upvotes aren't very good at gaining visibility anyway - unless upvoted into Trending (that most don't read). What is good for visibility is having accounts that have built trust and followership themselves, share the posts with others, on and off the platform. Also, creating the type of content that people want to engage with often and keep coming back to day after day to see what else is interesting.

If the problem, however, is rewards... Hive rewards are never promised.

Precisely. It is in negotiation for 7 days and it is not "owned" until the blockchain automatically pays it out into a wallet address, at which point it is "owned" and a person can do as they like with it.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

none have done it.

This has been done on Hive via Vybranium.

tarazkp 3 years ago

As I said when I heard the other week. Finally! Then the complaints about second-layer tokens not having value started.

As I have said many, many times - Not earning Hive as reward has nothing to do with censorship. All the information is there - you just have to build for it, rather than expect others to do it for you.

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ura-soul 3 years ago

I have explained many times, but you may not have read my words. The dictionary definition of 'censor' as a verb includes:

: to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable

source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censor

The definition of Suppress includes:

: to inhibit the growth or development of

source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppress

The purpose of downvotes in the context of the reward pool is to inhibit the growth of the post (and the account that made the post) - ergo, downvoting is suppression, by design.

If you object to content based on it's message rather than because it violates legal rules on copyright or other such reasons, and you downvote it, then according to dictionary definitions in English, you are participating in censorship. Many people don't pay attention to the etymology of language and so often don't appreciate the full meaning of the words they are using. This often results in pointless arguments that last years because people don't realise they are talking about different things.

When downvoting happens for ideological reasons, the growth of the account involved is limited in terms of reach and economic ability to grow in terms of content creation and production quality. Hive currently allows people to downvote to make that happen and I am just pointing out that according to the meaning of the word 'censorship', this activity is censorship. I am also pointing out that from a PR and marketing perspective, this activity hurts Hive .

People generally want valuable content generation, which includes intelligent debate and engagement when people disagree on important topics. The irony of certain individuals downvoting without comment or engagement and then even having the audacity to say they are downvoting due to a lack of engagement from other people is not lost on large numbers of observers who may not comment publicly for their own reasons.

ura-soul 3 years ago

It took me a while to reply to you here as I wrote a long reply that got deleted by the UI, then many people contacted me and then I had to sleep ;)

I wrote in my original post here:

In short, while he wasn't originally seeing downvoting as being a problem for free speech on Hive, after explaining the less obvious details he added support for experiments to reduce the amount of free downvotes available to Hive users to his support for free speech in general.

So I was highlighting that it sounded from your words that your desire to see data from such experiments was in part due to an interest in free speech issues. If you are saying, through later clarification due to my misunderstanding, that in fact you do not support the reduction of free downvotes - even if the data shows that this can be achieved without harming the ability of the network to fight spam and plagiarism - and you simply want to see the data for some other reason that won't influence your thinking on downvoting policy in future.. Then that's something I would appreciate if you would spell out, as - being as clear as I can be - the vote proxy here is for witnesses who are open to adjusting this policy on Hive, should data be produced that suggests it is a practical and valuable idea.

I notice that Azircon dropped his vote for you, presumably simply because I voted for you and because I am interested in a data driven decision to reduce the amount of free downvotes. I will leave it to observers to determine exactly what this means about Azircon's intentions for Hive.

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