The issue of fairness, especially when it comes to compensation for work, is an interesting question. I think everyone has a different opinion of what is “fair”. For many, fair would mean that a doctor that saves someone’s life would be compensated far more than someone who can kick or hit a ball. And yet athletes make exponentially more than that doctor. But athletes are the holder of a scarce resource that many people find has value. This includes me as I pay to watch athletes while I do not pay to see doctors do a life saving operation. But if someone did want to pay to see an operation or wanted to donate money to a hospital, I would say “Cool. I hope they get joy from that.” Perhaps a better example would be the fact that I pay to watch professional basketball but would never pay to watch soccer (futbol). Again I would never stand outside a soccer stadium and scream “Booooooo you’re giving too much money to soccer players! Now there is less left for basketball players.” But that is what sometimes happens on hive. People downvote because they don’t think others should like something as much. To me, that is just very odd. Different people see value in different things. I tend to vote for things on hive not because of a person’s demographics but because I want to reward behavior I think is positive. I reward people who try to be creative and who do not plagiarize, do not write things that pull others down, and write things some regular people might find interesting. I then vote people who leave comments as I think that is a cool thing for people to do. It especially helps little people just starting out. Maybe someone disagrees with that. But that is what I value. In the real world I’m allowed to direct my attention where I want while others do the same. But with downvoting here, a person can very easily say “Don’t direct your attention there!” And if they have enough of a stake, they can overrule my desires. That is one of the things I do not think is fair. If a person with a large stake likes something different, it is very understandable that they would vote on something different and assign a bigger part of the reward pool to that. They have a bigger scoop so they give a bigger piece of the pool. But it is simply bizarre (emotionally) that they can also use that bigger scoop to take away from what I think is deserving. For me, that is the hardest thing to explain to a person who might consider investing in hive. “You can vote on what you really like and want to see more of. But a person with a bigger stake can say ‘no. You can’t value that as much as you did.” Although the reward pool may work logically, that reality is emotional and unpleasant for most humans. The “I can’t like what I like” is a huge way to scare off regular people. This becomes even more important when you factor in the fact that curation rewards are impacted. “I need to vote 11 times a day to keep ahead hive inflation. I found 11 things I liked. But someone with a bigger stake did not think I should like them that much so they negated my curation rewards. Now I can’t earn hive for liking what I like. Yeah that feels unpleasant. I’m out.” And to be clear, I 100% understand all of the logical arguments for how the reward pool works. But the vast majority of human beings, operate on emotion and/or logic. If logic were the only thing that mattered doctors would be paid more than basketball players. So if we ever want to attract “regular” people to hive, we have to stop gate keeping and saying “you can only use hive if you only think about it logically.” We have to accept that emotion matters.
The "viral" algorithm that reinforces early momentum and early downvotes is skewed with large stakes being centrally directed. This is true for Hive blatantly, and is true for other platforms via bot farms or campaigns. What is needed is to let the stakeholders curate value and let the users tweak their feeds with how much they care to have stakeholders' input.
This would not be such a difficult feature to implement from what I see. There may be resistence, though, because rectifying this unbalance would cause a big shift in curation from users whose feeds would include posts that are currently suppressed.
Such a feature, though, would restore Hive's promise as a haven for free thinkers. I think @blocktrades had scoped out something similar a while ago with a short post series. I never saw it implemented.
As long as it isn't used maliciously I don't think downvotes make this place worse.
I usually like to compare to facebook/youtube/x to Reddit as the formers have all removed dislikes/downvotes, the latter hasn't. The platform I find most interesting is usually reddit because it has filtered a lot of the "bad content" away and only what the majority have liked is visible to me.
It's difficult to compare because we use stake here and there's also way too few people doing active downvoting so there's never any real conflicts or cases where certain posts get rewarded more after a downvote occurs because of the downvote. We're just too small to see it come to fruition properly and to then decide if it is good the way it is now or if it needs fuether changes.
“ As long as it isn't used maliciously I don't think downvotes make this place worse.” is this based on logic or emotion. Logically downvotes serve their purpose. Emotionally they drive people away.
“ We're just too small to see it come to fruition properly and to then decide if it is good the way it is now or if it needs further changes.”
We have had 9 years to grow. I realize I am a very small sample size. So small that this is not scientific. But I have not met a single person outside of Hive who I told “You earn curation rewards for voting on what you like. But someone can come along and negate that vote with a downvote so you can’t be sure you will get that curation.” This is where every single conversation stops with the other person saying “no thanks”.
I’m not saying downvotes don’t have their purpose. They are essential for stopping illegal or immoral posts. But using them to adjust rewards and to shape what people can and can’t vote on (if they hope to maximize their return on investment through curation rewards) goes against basic human nature. Humans as a species are not fully logical creatures.
and when I talk to people they ask "what stops someone from just voting yourself 11 times per day"
Another point is that there's way more malicious upvotes than downvotes. This is something that may be hard to grasp for some but it happens often, certain stakeholders want to overreward certain content/authors based on their own interest over the interest of the platform/majority of stakeholders.