The problem, like I have bleated about many times before, all comes down to auto votes. If people used votes to upvote what they'd actually read, then no one could have any complaints.
Due to auto votes, many people play to the gallery and just churn out anything to get that daily or twice daily vote. The principals behind auto voting is sound, the application, due to 'human nature' is terrible.
At the end of the day, like it or not, this is a stake based community and I choose to accept that fact by my being here although there are many things I wish were a little different.
You mentioned @acidyo and @smooth. No one complains when they hand out big upvotes which in the case of @acidyo particularly are manually curated, every time and I can't think of anyone that hasn't at some point benefitted from his OCDB but get a big downvote and all hell breaks loose. Reward distribution matters because it encourages new people to join and have realistic expectations.
There isn't really an answer except that if you don't like something, then move to a place more in line with your personal beliefs, except no one will do that as it's doubtful they'd be rewarded as they are here!
Finally. at the end of the day, many people need to remember that it's thanks to a handful of people that Hive even exists and instead of whinging and feeling abused because of a downvote, try changing their pathetic, entitled attitudes into a position of gratitude for what they've had!
Hi, I disagree with your idea here for reasons that were demonstrated in my post on this subject. I specifically asked my upvoters to comment as to whether they manually upvote or not. Many of the larger ones came forward to say that they manually curate and manually upvote - reading my posts and upvoting them because they like them. This fact was completely denied by the downvoters because it was inconvenient to their narrative. So, no, auto upvoting is not the cause of the issue - it is often just a convenient cover for other reasons that aren't expressed by the downvoters as they know they would lose face if they did actually state them publicly.
In your specific case, I'll take your word for that but in the huge majority of auto voted accounts with huge rewards they absolutely don't get read. I could give you an example right now where someone with huge auto vote on each post actually reposts mixed in old content and because no one ever looks at his posts, no one ever noticed or if they did, didn't care as they were reaping huge curation rewards.
The use of votes is simple and based upon PoS upon which this blockchain is founded. You understand balance, so surely upvotes and downvotes provide Hive with balance?
You cannot have proof of stake without both and a personal choice of how to use that stake. Whether you agree with their use of stake or not is unimportant as you also have the same choices as they do.
I know in your case, I believe they are downvoting more to do with content than reward which I wouldn't generally agree with but again, that's me and although I have a right to express an opinion, I have no right to demand how anyone uses their stake.
I am sure there are a lot of accounts that use auto upvotes (or even manual upvotes) to farm the reward pool and I agree it is a problem for Hive. I also agree that it is probably a problem that requires human involvement and that downvotes are the main tool currently available to resolve this on Layer 1. However, obviously this leaves us the massive grey area and potential shitshow where power is focused into the hands of a few people to 'police' this issue, yet without them really having had to pass any tests or demonstrate any capacity at all for understanding, ability to research or to be even handed. In real life, police have some semblance of oversight and if they really go too far they get arrested or even killed in retribution. On the blockchain, none of this happens due to the design of it all - so all we are left with is what we have - a mixture of ill will, annoyance and strategies to fragment - combined with posturing of greatness and of 'serving the community'.
The bottom line is that the more complicated a topic is or the further it deviates from 'convenient narratives' that are commonly heald by people - the more they are likely to experience cognitive dissonance and want to shut down the information. This is universal in humanity and is a huge problem. Courts are designed to try to address this in 'the real world', by having all of the evidence brought forward and to try to reach an objective outcome. Again, we don't have that on Hive - we just have a handful of people shaping the narrative as they see fit. This is neither something that facilitates Hive's 'censorship resistance' selling point, nor proof of brain.. Well, it is proof of the existence of a brain, but not necessarily proof of any excellence, as is the entire point of the POB experiment.
Balance is accurately defined as 'no part or aspect overpowers any other'. So Hive does go further than a lot of networks to achieve that - and that is great. However, POS also involves inherent imbalance in the shape of everyone having different resources available to buy more stake. In the case of the current downvoters, most of the downvoting is coming from two top 20 witnesses who receive contstant large payments from the blockchain, almost regardless of what they actually do on Hive ... And also an employee of the Oil industry - one of the largest abusers of the environment known to man - also known to be heavily involved in massive corruption and illegal wars. While you can argue that the maths of POS are balanced, clearly the inputs in the form of access to resources is not balanced and not based in POB either particularly. This is just a result of how the world is and without radically redesigning the Hive layer 1 reward pool, the only way to create real balance where individuals don't feel overpowered is for every person to use real empathy and social skills to interact and create harmony. So far, the downvoters have to varying degrees, done the complete opposite - with some of them preferring to try to be seen as a wild west gun slinger than someone who has understanding of balance.
Under the current system on Layer 1, you are correct in terms of actual legal 'rights'. It would have been nice to think that people with large stake would have sufficient social grace and awareness of business, economics and marketing to make more balanced decisions. In any case, we will let the market decide by opening up Layer 2 solutions and letting the stake go where it's owners want it to. I am excited to see what happens to Hive in coming months as this plays out.
Just cause you asked them in one post and knowing you all are connected through Discords etc doesn't mean they've mainly been manually curating. You literally tagged them all as well, naturally many will come out and say it was manual to help you and your narrative out. Considering the lack of engagement in general most of these authors the same curators vote it's hard to imagine it's all manual votes after having read the posts but not taken an extra minute to leave a comment which they literally are incentivized to do since comment voting exists as well.
Autovoting is a big reason to farmy content, lazy curation on same authors constantly and overrewarding because the votes are often the same no matter what the content because they don't read them. You can't dispute this fact. You also can't keep trying to defend it as "they just want to support them because x/y when most these authors do is just cross-post their content and the voters close to never tip or use recurring payments to want to actually support and the content to continue to occur out of sheer interest of consuming it on Hive. It's just blanket statements for wanting said upvotes to continue to get a big chunk of the reward pool for a niche that is very small on the internet in general and only now is gaining more traction due to all this covid misinformation, monetization and fearmongering from spinning articles and posts from reddit and other places in your own words just to make money. Naturally this is your main reason for doing it, knowing jamesc and xeldal are supporters of such content and expecting to maximize their influence on the rewardpool without any disagreement in the way and when that happens you all lash out as proven time and time again.
I don’t really understand why I need to explain (as I’ve tried to acid) why people get more upset about downvotes. It feels more like an attack and it’s a very strong reminder of how little power smaller stake holders have. It’s also scary to think that all your rewards can be erased by a single person when you worked so hard to gather support.
As for autovotes, I don't see them as much of a problem when they aren't excessive, as some of them are. Same way I feel about downvotes.
I’m very appreciative to all the people who help keep this place running. I haven’t demonized anyone here. I just think that there is a better solution than just “people can do what they want with their stake”.
Downvotes came about as a solution to people abusing that kind of mentality, so we swayed far in one direction and now we are swaying in the other. There is probably some way to make this much more comfortable and fair. At the very least I want just want to encourage more communication and understanding when people are unhappy about it.
That's not what we're saying, if excessive downvotes are used on content others deem worthy of some rewards people should step in and counter it, even if it means a cost on their ROI. I've seen that happen as well and I've taken part in it, especially on retaliative downvotes and personal ones due to disagreement of something other than rewards. I also understand that big downvotes can cause a lot of drama and controversy and I'm personally more for smaller ones that disincentivize autovoting and overrewarding both the author and curators but the sad part is that most of these content creators turn against Hive and most things they've said in the past faster than I can make my mind if I want to step in and counter some of those downvotes. You'd think that after years of being rewarded it would take a while for them to accept that some big downvotes are occuring but it's not that bad as each and every post isn't that important to get rewarded considering they've been rewarded for hundreds of not thousands of posts before, but I guess it's all about the rewards so they don't have the patience to wait it out even a week to see what would happen if they just ignored it and moved on with their posting. Instead they instantly turn against Hive and how things work here and go all drama and "how hive will fail", "i'm going to tell everyone how bad Hive is", "censorship" and stupid shit like that. It's embarrassing. So yes, I'd rather add my downvotes on top of such authors than attempt to help adjust some of their rewards upwards after such childish actions.
This is the best I've seen you say it.
Childish actions. Yeah. They are sometimes. 90% of adults are still children, us included I think 😛
I totally agree with everything you say here man. And I almost feel bad pulling you in to have this debate again. I know you deal with a lot of bullshit and bust your ass for this chain. I only hope you can understand where they are coming from when they get angry and you can stay calm and sympathetic yourself. It's a lot to ask but great power requires great responsibility and all that.
If all the downvotes were always this reasonable and patient about these disagreements i doubt this would be an issue. When I see the 100% downvotes that come in a few minutes before payout I can only feel it's a malicious move and that's one of the things that prompted me to write about this. That and the fact that eventually I want to see more of an effort to create mechanisms to decentralize influence a little bit more than where it is already.
I'm already really impressed with the progress we've made up until now and you were right a few times when I was wrong (I'll always remember I fought you on 50/50 curation and it ended up having a positive effect)
Thanks for responding and I feel like I understand where you are coming from a better now. I really feel much better after reading that. I wish the downvoted could feel that but I think their suspicion of larger stakeholders doesn't allow them to. Oh well.
You probably mean in the last day as a few minutes before payout they would have no effect. I don't agree with downvoting on the very last day but then again not too early either as then they love calling it censorship from trending or whatever. Truth is downvotes aren't incentivized at all and only come with an unending amount of drama if you attempt to explain them and other retaliation and bad things so it's not like you sit there waiting for the best time to strike, more like you take some time to find those posts you feel could use less rewards and happen upon an author once a week or once a month so you just hit whatever overrewarded posts they may have then. There may be people who place them on autodownvotes at a certain time which isn't that bad either unless someone beats you to it and you end up taking too much. There's been a few times I've downvoted certain posts and another downvote landed on it after turning the rewards to 0 so I've had to unvote but it's hard to notice these things so we could use better tools for it. There's been some talks about incentivizing downvotes with some sort of rewards but that's going to be difficult as receivers of downvotes will look for any reason to call them foul, even now they like to say it's so you get more curation or post rewards even though they're spread literally with the whole platform and maybe at max make a 0.001 hive difference on your returns.
Let's see if some people come up with some better solutions, I've been a proponent of people experimenting with this on l2 but not too impressed with most l2 tokens to date. Most seem like moneygrabs where you have to buy in or the owners receive a ridiculous share early on.. as if they didn't learn anything from Steemit...
I definitely jumped the gun when I first looked into the social side of Hive. I saw someone fighting for free speech against the "oligarchy", I was on it! After learning more, I understand now that this was a knee-jerk reaction. I've found all kinds of efforts on here that I didn't realize existed and they are run by the "oligarchy." I will be ending my proxy and redistributing my votes based on who is doing the most for Hive as I did originally before jumping on a proxy.
A lot of people just don’t know what they are doing or how any of this stuff works. I was like that for two years. I think There are even second layers that are just thinking “it’s easy, why not?” I mean I almost considered it for cross culture but I don’t have the time or energy to manage that and I think most of my team doesn’t have the particular skills or know how for it.
Also in general, There is a lot of mistrust for large stakeholders and people feel like it’s so hard to get into certain peoples good graces. DPoS is a complicated power dynamic. It’s sometimes difficult for poor and rich people to be friends in society. It’s even harder when the rich people can give you a piece of the inflation with a vote. All kinds of strangeness. I’m not complaining. I love this place. But it’s new and imperfect. We are still figuring it out.
Sure but many of these have been around for years, it's not like I'm judging newcomers for overreacting to downvotes. Not that many get downvoted either, it's a very tiny percentage but they are loud as fuck for obvious reasons.
Excellent point!
In my opinion, autovotes are the most flammable issue which fuels with more ferocity these polarized and hated debates between willy-nilly downvotes and over rewarding blind upvotes.
Blind autovotes even behave in such a pernicious way that even authentic quality content creators and great authors refrain from posting more often than they could simply because they are well aware that they are targets, recipients and beneficiaries of blind autovoters with high HP and consequently they penalize themselves for it. Since they actually wouldn't want to be seen or accused as abusers of that automated singular privilege.
And therefore, it is their true followers, their fans, the consumers of their interesting, entertaining, captivating and unique content and the rest of the community within the ecosystem who miss out the opportunity of enjoying their peculiar contributions more often.
@nathan007 btw I really like acid's response below. It's the best response I've seen from him on this debate although I'm sure he's made it before because I know he talks about this a lot. If other downvotes had this attitude I don't think there'd be many issues on this topic.
There are a lot of misunderstandings around the issue so I think we just all need to be aware and on the lookout for misunderstandings and try to fix them. Everyone.
Thanks for the reply btw
@selfhelp4trolls They are both very genuine guys, let 'em sort it. Their levels of debate and intelligence are far above my paygrade!
It is a really difficult thing to find consensus on, but the big SP auto voters who only care about curation rewards and who don't actually 'create' anything are the overriding issue, of that I truly believe and that's where the focus ought to be.
It's very, very good that so many people care however :-)