"When an account votes her, that is not a company paying her. Me being a curator does not make my account a business. When I upvote someone they are not my employee."

I suspect if you reflect on this more, you might be willing to concede there are business aspects to these operations. If there weren't Hive wouldn't be much of an investment. Buying a Toyota doesn't make you their employer, and that's the analogy I used. So, I agree you're not employing someone when you upvote their content, which you didn't commission and have not obligated yourself to do. But upvoting is analogous to purchasing their product, or to donating to a cause to encourage and enable them to keep doing it, if that's an analogy that works better for you.

"...if you upvote something, no one owned anything UNTILL the payout happens."

Well, in regards to that mechanism, that is how Hive is created, just like commercial banks create the money they lend borrowers. It's not swindling the rewards pool to create Hive by upvoting someone. It's the necessary creation of Hive tokens, without which Hive wouldn't operate. It's pure genius, and mimicry of the fiat debt based monetary system in which lenders create money by lending it out. I am in awe of Dan (and Ned, too, if he helped come up with that mechanism) for creating such an incredibly compelling way to enable social media to gain rewards without them coming out of the curator's own wallet.

"As soon as you work at all, the company you work for has incurred an expense."

Similarly, if you plunk down the purchase price of a coffee at Starbucks, they owe you a coffee. Or, if you put a deposit on an apartment, they are obligated to rent it to you and not someone else, even though it's not your apartment yet. So when a curator upvotes there is an obligation for the rewards pool to pay that much inflation to the creator. The curator has that function, to create Hive by upvoting. Downvoting does not stop that Hive from being created. Downvoting takes that new Hive and sends it back to the rewards pool - it uncreates the Hive pending it's being spent out of the rewards pool again by a different creator.

I have repeatedly affirmed DV's are necessary, and during the week in which posts and comments are eligible to be voted on, both accrue and only at the end of the week are they tallied up and the accounts reckoned. Whether or not DV's should apply isn't the issue. I advocate for some management of DV's, and you already observe some of the reasons I do, because they do create extreme responses from folks as if their wallet had been picked from their pockets. Because of the various reasons, or simple meanness, for which DV's can be cast, they are easy to abuse, and most people have an (false) image of themselves as virtuous, and all manner of societal disruption ensues. Sometimes that is absolutely necessary, as I have agreed always, but sometimes there may be better mechanisms to achieve the goal.

I don't disagree that high KE can simply not be something everyone on Hive has if Hive is to survive. But I am absolutely confident there is a better way to discourage high KE than DV's. You don't need the hassle of enforcing fiscal responsibility, and as I have pointed out before, it would be relatively easy to simply cause KE of ten to double the time it takes to power down, 20 to triple it, and so on, or some similar penalty that people would have the ability to read and understand before undertaking to suffer that penalty. Unlike being downvoted by you for what appears to them to be utterly arbitrary reasons.

I have made the point before also, that downvotes are not the opposite of an upvote. Just like the sale of a Toyota, or a donation to a a charity, the opposite of buying a Toyota or donating to a charity is not doing it. The opposite of an upvote in affect is no vote. While a downvote is opposite in effect from an upvote, it's affect is to reduce the earnings the creator receives, while the opposite of providing earnings is not providing earnings. A DV extracts the Hive earnings that has been availed the post, and that is what a tax does to earnings on paychecks. The mechanism by which DV's and UV's work is the same, their effect (one creates Hive tokens, and one uncreates Hive tokens temporarily), but their affect is not the opposite, because providing one's earnings isn't the opposite of decreasing one's earnings. The opposite of providing earnings is not providing earnings. Decreasing them is taxing them.

Because of the similarity in how DV's impact earnings on a post, I submit there isn't any thing closer to a tax that could be applied on Hive. But, if it causes you to be upset, like you think I'm calling you a thief by saying you're taxing people, then I can use a different term. I will point out that the definition of tax does perfectly apply to downvotes, however.

"1
"a
": a charge usually of money imposed by authority on persons or property for public >"purposes
"b
": a sum levied on members of an organization to defray expenses
"2
": a heavy demand"

--https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tax

"...If you tip someone, you already owned that HIVE..."

This is true, and this is the difference between creating the Hive using the rewards pool mechanism, and just giving away rewards you have that have already been created. There is a difference, and the tip comes out of your personal wallet, while the upvote comes out of the rewards pool, and does not decrease your personal stake. But each curator has a right to dispense the inflation from the rewards pool. That right to do so, to create new Hive, is codified in their VP. In the same way commercial banks have a right to create new dollars, codified in the charter they are granted by the political jurisdiction they operate in. Those jurisdictions claim a right to tax, and Hive grants the right to DV.

For most of the existence of the USA there was no income tax. Even more interesting, wages aren't defined as income. Income is ROI on passive investments. Wages aren't income, and shouldn't be subject to income taxes. The Constitution forbids income taxes, in fact, and the income tax is not lawful, not a power granted to government by the Constitution, which is the only lawful source of governmental power. Income taxes aren't lawful because they're not apportioned in a way that is equally divided amongst all citizens, but are progressive and take more from people with more income, but boy oh boy am I straying from the topic!!! LOL I'm just working up to justifying my stance that taxes are theft. I'll consider that done, and move on.

Anyway, I'm sticking to my understanding of DV's as taxation, and you are welcome to agree with me and be right, or continue to be wrong as you prefer ;).

The important issue is that Hive code is causing the social disruption by not providing clear guidance to users on what is or isn't cause for DV's. The discouragement of high KE could easily be managed differently, availing users forewarning they would be penalized for high KE. This code isn't random. BT writes it. Whales vote it into application by voting for the witnesses that run it. There's considerable discussion of these things going on with consensus witnesses, BT, and whales behind the scenes, or there'd be more public discussion of them on chain, and some of the things I've touched on here are some of the reasons why they are privately discussed. DV's overwhelmingly benefit the whales. Because the whales extract the majority of rewards, every DV gives them another crack at capturing rewards that slipped past them. Because minnows dare not flag whales (for reasons that should not need to be discussed) DV's come from whales almost exclusively, and this makes whale upvotes even more valuable because it makes minnow votes less valuable.

The benefit of the governors of an institution is not necessarily the benefit of the institution. The Machiavellian machinations of a bureaucrat scheming to increase the budget of the agency they administer nominally benefits that agency by increasing it's power (corrupt bureaucrats slaver for bigger budgets because they then can dole out more funding, contracts, and etc, which enables them to get more kickbacks and graft). The DHF enables the same thing, and I think it's being just as abused as corrupt governments without even the flimsy barrier of GAAP - Good Lawd I get off track easy!

The point I was making is that what's good for the governor isn't necessarily good for the government, or for the governed. Misaligned incentives cause a lot of harm to Hive, and DV's are a particularly poignant source of these social harms, even when the reasons they're cast are good reasons, and they work to achieve rectification of rewards being earned that should not have been because of plagiarism or circlejerking, and etc. Hive code should better impose incentives automagically, and prevent larcenous profiteering too. The reason it doesn't do at least some of these things is that it would prevent whales from doing them. It costs money to create sock puppet accounts. Whales have that money and the expertise it takes to make them. There used to be an account called @sherlockholmes that researched botnets creating webs of circlejerking and it was effective at ferreting them out and getting folks to DV them on masse. One day the sherlockholmes account just quit posting, and that was that. I suspect it was treading on whale toes. At least one whale has told them some years ago they had more than 10k accounts. I know their stake allows them to claim free accounts through some mechanism I don't know much about because I have to buy any accounts I want. Accounts are generated according to some algorithm based on stake and you can just claim them for free. So, as long as this mechanism has been operant whales have been claiming new accounts like mad. I think that's where all the 'new onboards' LEO claimed it brought in came from, because none of those accounts ever started posting and commenting on the chain when I checked them. I think one of them was being used as a sock puppet to mine the Vibes contest, run by LB who got funded by Valueplan. I think recently there was fraud discovered on that contest, kickbacks to judges of the music or something. I didn't look into it because I already dealt with LB about Valueplan fraud, and am well aware of their disingenuity and refusal to provide receipts.

"I had multiple instances where she left me a comment and it basically reminded me to downvote her blog. If she just left me alone in the first place I may not have even remembered to downvote her."

LOL This really supports your claim that people overreact and cause even more problems. I don't disagree at all with you about that, either. Human nature isn't to be godlike IMHO. We're more like hungry mongrels fighting over scraps.

But most folks use an autovoter, and this neglects the human touch you uniquely employ interacting with other people. I am adamantly against automating human interactions. I deeply admire and appreciate you manually interacting, including DV's. Hive is a place for people to interact. It's social media, and that's not obsolete or an error. Social media has become the biggest financial sector in the global markets, and it grew to that point in about ten years. All economic activity is for society. The really valuable thing in every business is people. Without people nothing at all has any value whatsoever. Everything valuable is only valuable because people value it highly. People interacting is the point of social media.

You get it.

Profiteers don't care. The just want to extract some money from the rubes on Hive and spend it in different company, on hookers and blow, presumably. Some of them are whales and witnesses on Hive. They're human beings too, but they will extract the last profitable Hive token from this platform and leave it in their rear view without regret, moving on to the next best thing to mine.

"It’s just random people on the internet with HIVE. The only time I am aligned with whales 100% is when I joke with them I’m waiting for my cabal offer."

LOL Many of them have known each other for years. They're not unacquainted with each other. They are all different people, and there are subsets of them with specific interests in common, but they all have one thing in common and that is between them they have a majority of stake, and this creates other common interests, in prudence, and ROI.

"That’s the only big thing we have in common..."

That, and the ability to DV with impunity.

They don't discuss anything, that might alarm the plebs fighting over scraps, on chain. I, believe it or not, have had a cautious suggestion to join in (because I'm so troublesome. But I know how it would go. I'd get 50 Hive some illegal way, and then I'd be blackmailed into leaving forever. I've seen it happen to others, and I have got in a lot of trouble fighting corruption on the ground IRL. You know you're over the target when the cops beat the shit out of you and tell you your kids are next if you don't STFU). You aren't going to get recruited into anything sketchy because you demonstrate your sound principles, and if you were it'd be off chain where any discussion about it occurred covertly. Your moral and ethical principles are safe here on chain.

"If downvotes were really a tax I think you would lobby to get rid of them not say they should be used in certain cases."

Maybe I should go back to that, but I don't think taxing plagiarists is wrong. It's a good tool against people scamming rewards, and it's in hand. Blurt AFAIK isn't problem free, even though it doesn't have DV's. It clearly has other mechanisms, such as gas required to post, that suppress spam. RC's are potential to do the same thing on Hive, but Marky has pointed out they're too cheap RN to use that way. Since DV's work well on rewards scams, I am not particularly taxed about (pun intended) splitting ethical hairs for such uses. A wink's as good as a nod to a blind man. But I think they shouldn't be employed for disagreement over rewards, KE, or any kind of opinion, political or otherwise, nor are they any use against spam or scams phishing for paydays via other mechanisms than rewards. Code can provide specific, and understood in advance, tools for those purposes.

If all you have is a hammer you treat everything like a nail. There are better ways to build Hive, as I have suggested regarding KE and powerdowns, and RC's to discourage spam. I am very cynical. I have lived a long and well defrauded life, betrayed by people I would take a bullet for, and because DV's enable whales to get more of the rewards pool, I suspect that's why we don't have these other, more appropriate tools to counter problems DV's aren't well suited to. Also, being substantially staked means that whales are the DV'ers. It's a power exclusive to them. I can't flag you substantively, but you can me. It's hard not to like having such power when you have it. I will note that none of the whales, even Marky, whom I mistreated, have flagged me. Them that did aren't here any more. So the oligarchy has some moral and ethical standards, they just like me too much to flag me, think my profile pic is pretty, are wary of giving me a reason to post about them specifically and in depth, ad nauseum, or just pity me too much to add to my misery. Same with consensus witnesses that aren't whales. I have given them all opportunities to flag me, and aside from one here or there, they have exercised admirable restraint.

"I think it’s ok if we “lose” members sometimes. They could always come back. A lot of times they do come back. They could give their account to a family member. It’s not like their account got deleted."

All true. And some scum just need to be tossed.

"Have you ever tried onboarding a real life friend?"

Yes, and it hasn't worked. I have a couple side accounts that I created for them that aren't in use, because one account is more work than I can handle.

"I have nothing against auto upvotes..."

I do, but I'll hope you even get this far on this comment, and save that discussion about sacred humanity being devalued to the level of toasters for another day. Just to be honest here, I get autovotes, even from dead people (whom I miss very much, and every notification I get they upvoted me causes me to miss them again). It's not going to get me to change my use of the platform, and I can understand a great many reasons people do it, but people automating social interactions are robbing themselves and everybody else of far more than they're gaining.

I dunno about karen's account being able to get below 10 KE. Never had that issue, so I don't know how hard it is to fix. I've done the best I can to get you guys to work together to do good for the right reasons, and I don't want to make our friendship about her, downvotes, or anything else but good people enjoying good company in good times, so I'm going to step out of that discussion for good reason. I also know folks here with KE in the four figures, which I don't know how they managed, but they're smarter than me and better writers too, so it's not all that surprising I don't know how they did it.

I've been writing this for a couple hours, so I'm gonna get some sleep. Gnite.