It absolutely is, because censorship is Hive's real driver of growth. Unrestrained taxation is a means of censoring people, which is why you do it. You do it to drive them off the platform because they can't tolerate the economic theft. It works, which is why the Canadian government seized bank accounts of people donating to honking truckers to end the Freedom Convoy.
Because you and your ilk censorially tax creators, Hive cannot resist censorship and Hive stake cannot be decentralized, but ~30% of Hive is held by 4 whales today. Were Hive able to decentralize stake across all national boundaries by allowing authors to be rewarded without taxing them onerously, and people able to post forthrightly, adoption would be widespread and global, and because Hive's servers are distributed all over the world, and Hive users are distributed all over the world, and there is no CEO of Hive to arrest and threaten with a broom handle, Hive could prevent the UK, Canada, or any other authoritarian shithole from censoring people.
But ya'll have a bird in the hand, so you milk it. Screw Western civilization and freedom.
lol, I do it cause they're taking a big part of the rewards pool by providing nothing of value in return + seeing their posts trending with no one here even leaving a comment makes the platform look dead.
If they cared about decentralized stake they wouldn't have been constantly selling off all their stake.
Muting you from notifications now as well, get over yourself and this narrative of "me wanting hive to stay small so I can get most of the stake", it's idiotic at best.
See, this is where you go off the rails. You aren't society. You do not value their contribution, so you should not curate it. However, you have the power to tax the curation of society so you rabidly apply that power - and this destroys social media by eliminating the subjective valuations of other people. You assume the role of a god that determines what is or isn't right for society. This arrogation to yourself of that power to tax is the destruction of social media, and of Hive.
Edit: further, it is this mechanism of author rewards that is what decentralizes Hive economically, and creates resilience to censorship from any polity or block of polities. You play that you do not understand this reality, but I am confident you are well aware of the consequences of your unrestrained censorship preventing growth and decentralization of Hive, and act to do so to enable the oligarchy to maintain plutocratic control because you're well paid to do it.
What you fail to grasp is that you far more highly value freedom and free speech than you do money, and you're cutting your own throat by preventing technological advance that Hive is from overcoming obsolete political systems that depend on gangs of armed thugs to enslave humanity to aggrandize overlords. Being a Hive whale doesn't make you an overlord, and it never will until Hive escapes the triad of crippling hamstrings that keep it from overcoming centralized control. I don't see any other mechanisms that could so overcome. Twatter, Telegram, and other Web2 centralized platforms can't do it, as Brazil and France have proved.
As long as Hive is centralized, plutocratic, and censored by unrestrained taxation - by you - it can't either. Hive whales with ~10% of their stake because they allowed Hive to become decentralized would profit immensely from allowing their stake to be diminished if Hive tokens mooned to a reasonable value of $100. Hive is a social media platform with a use case that is able to dominate the social media market (if allowed) and could eclipse BTC rapidly were that market allowed to flourish. It's hard to even imagine how much those whales would benefit from enabling Hive to rise to the $k's or $m's it would be worth dominating the global social media market, but cash is king, and a bird in the hand prevents enabling the value of the flock in the bush to be captured.
Ignorance is bliss, they say, and it's hard to see muting me as anything else. It's what I have come to expect from you and your ilk, so I am not surprised one bit that you refuse to even hear this criticism. It's very revealing of you, and demonstrates your insincerity and corruption clearly, however. Enjoy the fruits of your acts. You have earned them.
I scrolled down all the way on @davidpakman's profile from early 2022 to mid 2021.
Not a single downvote from me and hey, would you look at this:
Maybe you should take it up with @broncnutz why he was so bent on downvoting him to 0 constantly for what looks like half a year. If my assumption is correct that it's based on political opinions rather than content/effort/value to the platform, then I disagree with that the same way you might be. Downvotes/adjustment shouldn't occur based on opinionated disagreement of other things than the value the author may bring to hive. Even if you think they bring close to 0 value like broncnutz maybe thinks, I wouldn't personally 0 out rewards with very few exceptions over the 8 years I've been here.
So please direct your complaints somewhere else from now on, thanks.
I appreciate your diligence and factual reporting regarding Pakman's Hive presence. I strongly agree with the statement you make here that DV's should not apply for differences of opinion. However, I am attempting to make the case that DV's should not apply for any reason that isn't actually spam, scams, or plagiarism - or any similar crimes that aren't merely disapproval of how folks post content.
My understanding is that OCD has undertaken such campaigns in the past, so I addressed this with you. If I am mistaken, as your above statement strongly suggests, then I apologize that the tenor of my remarks and direct claims suggested you were responsible for such campaigns. I did not follow or support Pakman, when he was here nor before that or since, because I am not in agreement with his political views. It was just the first name that came to mind, and that is the only reason he came up.
However, I have undertaken to support accounts that are today serially DV'd to zero by donating 25% of my author rewards to those users, some of whom I have not agreed with at all, or only occasionally, because Hive needs free speech. I know you are an active curator and have undertaken to provide you reason to support even folks you disagree with if they are being DV'd, and to not DV anyone for any reason other than spam, scams, and plagiarism.
Thank you for your considered responses, supporting your statements with probative evidence, and your generous time.
I respect your decision in sharing your rewards with those being what you deem to be unfairly downvoted. That said I don't personally agree that downvotes should only be used for the things you mentioned, downvote mana exists for many reasons, you can see some stakeholders using it in a healthy way on trending often (for example @smooth). He adjusts the rewards a tiny bit, even if just symbolic when he believes posts are overrewarded.
I'd argue that's healthy and people should get used to some downvotes as long as it doesn't escalate to drama and retaliation, etc. I also appreciate some who try to reason their decision to downvote certain posts, for instance based on the value they believe that content or author is bringing to the ecosystem and others seeing the reason and where a post lands in pending rewards can then decide to increase or also decrease the rewards further.
What I don't like is when people take it personally and start acting out based on it and take it too far. It usually makes both parties look bad and the platform in general. There's still a long way to go but I fully believe an ecosystem like ours needs both upvotes and downvotes as without the other they can be abused on their own.
All sorts of philosophical attempts to change human nature have done the same, and failed equally. Hive user retention is demonstrably abysmal, and this is why. Hive utterly fails to enable folks to get paid for their content because economic suppression of the subjective valuation of society of that content is censorship, and this mistaken philosophical attempt to change human nature simply fails to meet human needs.
Hive's premise is that creators can be rewarded for their content by peers. DV's, and particularly DV campaigns that zero out returns permanently - which continue today on Hive - utterly belie that premise. It is hardly conspiratorial to note that 3 dozen accounts have maintained a majority of Hive stake for seven years and oligarchical centralization of governance is the result of 'adjusting rewards', which is simply punitive taxation and censorship that drives people off the platform.
It doesn't matter how convincing you sound, how reasonable and logical your arguments seem to you. The market has rejected them, and until that BS is abandoned Hive will remain financially centralized and fail to enable free speech that has never been more desperately necessary as censorship eliminates free speech across the West.
The fact is that upvotes and no votes are opposites. Curation is the opposite of no curation. DV's are identical to taxation in effect. They produce identical results commercially, utterly repressing economic activity, preventing growth, and centralizing assets. Enabling unrestrained taxation by any and every party on Hive completely and for absolutely sound reasons cripples the social media mechanism and obliterates forthright speech.
These are the demonstrable results Hive has achieved in seven years of operations, and refusing to adapt operations to market responses is the quickest route to the end of Hive.
Hive makes it possible for people to receive "blind/auto" votes due to its feeless nature. You're suggesting that posts that no one sees/no proof exists that anyone is consuming, should blindly get excessive support because a few whales want those accounts supported excessively in comparison to others and in terms of share of the daily reward pool.
We don't have a viewcounter on most front-ends but I've never downvoted posts to lower the rewards without doing my due diligence to check history of the account's engagement levels on their posts, viewcounter whenever it existed (3speak, peakd) or checking their websites, other socials to see if links to their hive posts exist in any shape or form. As I mentioned when we first started discussing this, Pakman for one did attempt to get involved and was quite active in engaging with people engaging with him. I doubt I downvoted this account to begin with.
There were however other smaller "influencers" receiving massive votes as well where I saw very little "activity" other than cross-posting and speaking up first when some small downvotes occurred. Reading your other comment now I very much disagree that I downvoted excessively to the point where I zero'd out rewards except for a few times where I maybe lost my temper due to lies or purpose assholery.
Let me check to back up some of those claims above since you keep going on about this.
I appreciate your intent to be factually based. However, you're simply not noting the reality that DV's are taxation. They're appropriate for spam, scams, and plagiarism, because those are essentially criminal acts that require censure. The code allowing DV's for any reason, or none at all, deranges the very basis of social media and has produced the abysmal user retention Hive has experienced, literally worse than any other social media platform of consequence.
It needs to end, so social media can actually experience censorship resistance no centralized Web2 platform can produce. Twatter was actually forced to be censored by Starlink because those are centralized, and Telegram now has to deliver IP addy's to law enforcement for the same reason. Hive can't be extorted in that way, but because of unrestrained taxation Hive is even worse than either of those Web2 platforms.
You don't need to approve of speech to enable social media to prosper. Speech you vehemently disapprove of is critically important to free speech. Same with me. That's the point of free speech. The point of social media enabling free speech on Hive is that creators can be emunerated directly for their speech, and flagrant punitive taxation utterly prevents that potential from being achieved, and this kills the Hive.