Imagine this story... perhaps it sounds familiar...
You create your content. You put in the effort, engage, and devote a lot of your time to building your blog and gathering readers. People upvote, share, and finally, you've created a gem! A strong article. The SEO of the domain where you publish skyrockets, attracting new users to the platform. You look at the counter. Your post shows $200 from hundreds of readers! You're happy, wondering how to spend the money you earned after months or even years of work, and you go to sleep satisfied. You wake up... look again... $0?! What happened?! Nothing extraordinary. Someone who doesn't like you and has a lot of money invested in Hive simply downvoted you.
Why? It's simple! Because they want that $200, all that activity on the platform, and your efforts to increase the value of THEIR stake, not yours. They want YOUR work to benefit THEM and only THEM. After all, if YOU cash out those tokens on the exchange, not THEM, the value of THEIR stake will drop by a few satoshis, not yours!
Does it matter that the value of their stake stays the same or even grows because YOU, through your work and dedication, make the platform stronger? That YOU attract new investors and new users to the domains connected to the network's frontends?
No, it doesn’t matter. Your efforts and activity that keep this whole enterprise running, ensuring other users return, engage, and use the network, thereby increasing its value, mean nothing.
Oh well, just accept it. In the end, you're just a slave working for investors for free. Nothing has changed, just like in web2. Nothing at all! Surely, you didn’t think that web3 on Hive was anything more than a slogan to deceive you, right? What’s wrong with you, man?
You got angry and wrote what you think about it? That was your last mistake!
From now on, not just that post, but every subsequent one you write will earn exactly $0. Worse yet, your reputation shrinks until it hits negative values. From that point on, your entire blog becomes invisible, and everything you publish appears as hidden!
This is how Hive users are robbed of their work every single day, enriching a few at the expense of many with the help of a rotten feature that the creators of this network implemented from the very beginning:
"The Downvote Button"
And all this under the banner of a platform that advertises itself as decentralized, censorship-free, web3.
The scam behind this idea is simple yet clever. For a place on the internet to thrive and make money, it needs users. For users to come, there must be interesting activity, people, engagement, reach, and utility. But how do you convince popular authors and influencers from other platforms to start using your tool and not pay them?
Simple! For those we don’t want to pay, we just take away their payment under the pretext of "protecting the reward pool, abuse, or spam."
This is how Steem was created and later Hive. A place where the earnings of authors and users are controlled by a small group of oligarchs, just like in any other centralized web2 corner. The difference is that the scale of abuse and demonetization has reached a higher level, with no rules or regulations left. Profiles are destroyed without warnings or a chance to seek justice. What’s your problem? Nobody “deleted” anything. The content is still “available,” right?
The Downvote Economy is a clever and brilliant system in its simplicity. The psychological effect is simple: if you want to earn, behave, write, and think the way we want, or we’ll destroy your account and reputation, and your reach will collapse. Did you earn "too much" in our opinion? We'll "adjust" your earnings, and if you resist, you’ll have it even worse. Play along with our tune? Then we’ll let you earn a little and maybe even withdraw it... but only during a bear market, not the bull run.
You’re not allowed to "ruin" the whales' token price!
It’s no different from deleting posts and banning accounts on Facebook. The only difference here is that your data supposedly can’t be deleted and remains your property. Great. Except that even though it’s still your property, being downvoted and shadowbanned renders it as useful as keeping it in your drawer or on a private disk
The difference is that if you haven’t published your work on Hive yet, creating your own blog elsewhere will get you more views, better SEO, and attract more users there.
This way, you’ll earn more from your content in places where there’s no censorship or downvotes, like Blurt, where you’ll receive payment from people who truly value your work. Your earnings won’t be erased by someone looking to profit off your creativity or someone who dislikes you or your content. The decision will be in the hands of investors who appreciate your work, fans who bought tokens to support creators like you, and people who see value in what you do and share.
Real web3 is not just about data ownership, fast transactions, and thousands of apps signed with your key. Above all, it’s about:
- decentralized finance,
- the impossibility of controlling the flow of money from one hand to another,
- no centralized supervisory structures,
- no possibility of censorship,
- and unrestricted opportunities to use the network, its reach, and express yourself and your views, based on what interests people and what they find right, not what’s deemed acceptable by narrow groups of technocrats, bankers, and "philanthropists."
You won’t find any of these qualities on Hive, so if you were looking for them here, save yourself the trouble.
Enjoy the ride, those of you who love being manipulated by this system. For everyone else, I invite you to Blurt. Let’s build a network together where web3 isn’t just an empty slogan to lure the naive.
Regards,
From an active user of these networks since 2018, now a Blurt Witness who saw the truth and decided, together with others, to help fix what was broken in the network we all beloved!
It's hard to find sympathetic support when you dump what was given to you.
IF you care enough to clue me in to your particular case, hit me up in sting.
In the sense of what was given to whom? :D I don't know if I understand your logic correctly? Are you trying to convince me that I'm supposedly rejecting "the hand that feeds" or something like that socialist nonsense that keeps socialist society feeling guilty that supposedly some "enlightened leaders" give to them and they are not worthy of taking?
You don't have to do anything in "my case" I can take care of myself. You could rather do something about others who were fooled by the nonsense that is being propagated on hive and spread this article so that it reaches as many people as possible.
It says anti socialist for a reason.
Socialusts use govt's monopoly on force to coerce compliance to their rules.
No different than any other authoritarian.
I was just offering to help spread the word about your mistreatment, but I don't recall your case.
The crowd upvotes/downvotes for its own reasons, this is the game.
No rewards are 'yours' until payout.
And that's the point. It's sick because it leads to what I described in this text. And no, it's not a game, it's life. Publications are real and reach real people. And building a blog and gathering readers is work and selling your skills, and people invest REAL money here.
By the way, MMO games (if we follow your train of thought) that involve persecution and intimidation of some players by others are banned by law in most countries and in most servers of mmo games.
If you think that life is a game, I suggest you seek help from a therapist and stop playing games ;P
Nothing is changing until more stake decides things are changing.
If one doesn't like how the hive is managed, power up moar hive.
No one says we have to be here.
It's just a ride.
the point is that if there is no balance, the higher stake always decides in the end and disrupts the balance for good. It is enough that you conduct a thought experiment that user @dotevo from blurt gave me:
I will develop this experiment further in comment:
That's all on the subject. Even if you treat it as a "game", it is a broken game because it is completely unbalanced.
https://blurt.blog/@dotevo/smyich
Yes, you are correct.
The ninjamine is still blowing out the balance of the math, I agree.
But, the only way past this hill is over it.
Or, succumb.
I'd like to see the n2 come back, that can only happen when enough stake is on both sides to keep the balance from getting blown out as you describe.
The n2, and better curation, could come back if 'the whales' respected a vote cap, but greedy folks gotta greed.
This seems like a false statement, how can anyone stop you from powering down and or selling during the bull market?
Technically no, practically in the same way as in the screenshot from the comment:
By intimidating you that if you do this, he will downvote you :P Of course... you can ignore it. But if you have built a blog and you associate something more with it - for example, you sell a product as an influencer or some service, then you do not want this and such intimidation can be effective.
@prydefoltz @trucklife-family @anassharkawwy
Despite the passage of time this remains an underappreciated post, and it is proved correct by the flags flown on it.
Consider the upvotes I cast on it, and the impact of flags on my curation rewards. GTG has zeroed out every comment Khrom has made, as well as the OP, and I have upvoted all of those, as well as everyone elses comments on the OP. For all the comments GTG did not zero out with flags, I will receive a curation reward as a result of my upvotes on comments. But I will not receive any curation reward for my upvotes on the OP, nor on comments GTG has zeroed out, because there is nothing to share from a comment or post that extracts zero inflation from the rewards pool.
GTG does not just eliminate author rewards Khrom would receive from the OP and his subsidiary comments. GTG has eliminated my curation rewards for upvoting Khrom's OP and comments.
It is plainly obvious by this mechanism that whoever originally has the preponderance of stake can maintain that majority by the use of downvotes to suppress the flow of inflation from the rewards pool to anyone downvoted. Then the entire flow of inflation out of the rewards pool only inures to those not downvoted. 100% of the inflation from the rewards pool will flow out of the pool. When DV's are applied to selected accounts - and this is why GTG, HW, Marky, and etc., all flag every comment and post on an account. They are not acting to incentivize good behaviour. That would require only one DV on the offending content. Because they are actually acting to maintain centralized power of an oligarchy on Hive they choose accounts and then completely cut those accounts off from inflation issued by the rewards pool by zeroing out every post and comment.
From the perspective of maintaining the weight of stake of majority stakeholders, this is the strategy that enables that majority to be maintained, selectively excluding accounts from receiving inflation from the pool and decreasing the number of accounts acting to receive inflation from the pool. They reduce the competition for that inflation by this means, and then the inflation issuing from the rewards pool can only flow to the rest of the accounts on Hive, and by mutually upvoting with socks they direct that flow to themselves.
Antisocialist says in comment below:
That is simply impossible, mathematically. The oligarchy would have to sell that Hive for it to be available OTM. They clearly observe stake accumulation and ensure that it cannot grow through receipt of inflation from the rewards pool by selectively excluding 'enemy' accounts from receiving any by zeroing out their posts and comments.
As long as DV's can simply zero out all posts and comments made by an account at will, the extant oligarchy can maintain the majority of stake, and control the code by controlling the consensus witnesses at all times. It is mathematically impossible to power up Hive and overcome the advantage of stake weight when DV's enable zeroing out every post and comment.
The claim that Hive is decentralized is false. The claim that Hive resists censorship is false. The claim that Hive is Web3 is false. Hive larps as Web3, but the DV mechanism enables the financial rewards to be directed to the extant majority stakeholders, and that maintains centralized control of platform governance.
Thanks!
At the very least, to remain visible, if your here for laying down your own message, or your here to sell your product, I would set my posts and comments to null and opt out of the rewards pool. This will ensure to an extent your visibility on the platform and prevent them from shadow banning you.
On peakd you can set beneficiary on your comments. I set mine to null because themarkymark, and his gang are starting to DV me.
Since I first joined steemit a year after it's release, this has been going on and it is still happening daily.
This doesn't mean you can't earn. There is second layer tokens that pay you in hive. For example, PIMP, COM both pay you in liquid for having stake. It's passive income but requires investment, it requires sufficient stake.
I'm already on blurt, you know me under a different username ;)
I'm not giving up on hive, because I want to spread my message and connect with other people. I'm Looking for recruits for a cause that we can agree on.
I want to say much more. But I'm out of time for now.
See you on the other side.
hmm you may be right here, although every downvoted post by them only shows that what I say is true ;)