A new Hive dApp called Hive Alive is online and ready to help the Hive community to learn, balance, grow and evolve. For the first time we can visualise, track and respond to downvoting patterns on Hive.
Hive Alive allows you to visualise key data from the Hive blockchain – starting specifically with data on downvoting and reputation that has been missing previously from the Hive community.
You can now easily see who has been downvoted recently and find posts that you may think have been unfairly treated, enabling you to counter the downvotes. The aim here is to both increase awareness of the importance of up/down voting on Hive and to also empower the community to better understand the intent of other users and to defend itself against ideologically driven attackers.
Hive was born from a hostile takeover of Steem which then led to censorship on Steem – yet similar can occur on a smaller level against individual creators, sub communities and topics via downvoting – so we need a way to defend against this potential, no matter what form it may take. History repeats because we fail to learn the lessons. Layer 2 tokens allow niche communities to have their own space and effectively ‘fork’ themselves from the voting patterns on Layer 1 Hive – but for now, most of the voting action and stake is focused on Layer 1, so the community needs to focus on making intelligent voting decisions, which in turn starts with having access to the necessary data to know what is actually happening on Hive.
Note: the VYB Layer 2 Community does not allow any downvoting, so please go check them out and support their experiment if you like!
Background
As some may recall, I previously created a website for Steem called Steemocean that showed a full index of Steem users and examined their voting behaviour. I have now updated it for Hive and relaunched it as Hive Alive. The present version is currently focused on the topic of downvoting on Hive.
While there is a huge amount of possible data to show and connections to be highlighted surrounding voting patterns on Hive, this first version just gets the ball rolling by enabling us to see, for the first time, the details of the downvoting activity across the blockchain. This is important for many reasons, not least that Hive is intended to offer a censorship resistant space for the web, yet has a built-in ability to 'soft censor' content via downvoting.
The Untrending Report helps us find posts that have been 'Untrended' or removed from Hive's trending list by downvoters (and buried) after having first received community support via upvotes.
For most of Hive's history the downvoting seems to have been restricted to mainly responding to spam posts and plagiarism, which along with bid bots were the main justifications for introducing free downvotes in a previous Hard Fork. However, there have also been times where 'downvote wars' have taken place, causing both entertainment and disruption to the chain as whales or large groups of people came together to downvote specific accounts for various reasons.
While there is a legitimate need for downvoting in some situations, it has been a previous consensus that downvoting based on 'opinion' or disagreement is not something that helps the blockchain to gain mass acceptance or that cultivates good will and community spirit. None the less, there are no rules to prevent downvoting for any reasons whatsoever and so we have a potentially difficult weakness in the reward pool algorithm and thus with the daily operation and public perception of Hive.
Youtube and other sites pay 'some' content creators ad revenue (despite most never seeing a penny) and Hive's solution is meant to decentralise the reward process, via 'Proof of Brain'. The decentralisation of rewards ensures more people have access to rewards and therefore we find a broader range of quality content emerging from the community than is possible on sites like Youtube. The Web 2.0 sites such as Youtube heavily skew their content based on demands from advertisers and for their own political reasons - arguably this amounts to heavy censorship from Google/Youtube.
It can be difficult to gain support from the Hive community in the form of upvotes that can sustain sufficient rewards that in turn result in enough resources being made available to make better/more content in future. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to achieve consistent community support, including many followers and regular upvoters, are intended to then be in a position to build the quality and consistency of the content we produce and if we don't, our followers may stop voting for us. This is a decentralised approach that is based on subjective valuation.
The DPOS (Decentralised Proof of Stake) design of Hive, however, means that despite having strong community support, even the most rewarded/upvoted/supported posts can be zeroed with impunity by one or two large accounts who choose to do so. There is currently no cost to downvoting and so nothing to stop this from happening. In fact, heavy downvoting returns rewards to the reward pool which are then redistributed to everyone who is receiving rewards. Since this occurs in a stake weighted manner, the larger downvoters definitely boost their own rewards by downvoting heavily!
The Maths & Problems of Downvoting On Hive
Basic maths and awareness of human psychology says that since around 4% of the reward pool is currently redistributed as a result of downvoting and so therefore 4% of all post rewards come from previously downvoted posts, big stakeholders are going to heavily downvote to gain that extra 4%.
Since the incentive for some will be extra profits and not actually to downvote based on the merit or content of particular posts, it is likely that such self serving downvoting will be focused as large downvotes on well rewarded posts, rather than being distributed over many posts as smaller downvotes. Curation takes time and as a result we might expect to see minimal downvoting taking place as a result - however, the financial gains involved mean that we do, indeed, see a minority of large stakeholders repeatedly heavily downvoting well rewarded posts - regardless of the content and how much support the posts have.
Of course, many downvotes are justified in my eyes and probably in most other people's too - but many are not. The Untrending report gives us an opportunity to easily find examples of heavy downvoting that are not motivated by any breach of (generally recognised) community standards and where it seems likely that the attempt to suppress accounts is taking place in a way that actually breaks proof of brain.
Fragile Proof of Brain
Much of the downvoting is justified and rationalised by pointing to the ideal of 'proof of brain' and saying that the high rewards on certain posts are excessive given the quality or content of the post. The 'subjective valuation' that powers Proof of Brain is meant to result in quality posts rising to the top and their creators being the most rewarded. We should then end up with a network that is run for and by top quality content creators (or at least that is heavily influenced by them). This was an intelligent design baked in to the original Steem blueprint.
However, just as downvotes can be used to try to improve the quality of 'Proof of Brain', they can actually be used to break Proof of Brain too. When downvotes are made not based on genuine assessment of posts, but for personal reasons or even ideological suppression of ideas - proof of brain fails. In these cases we end up only with 'Proof of Wallet' and the network recreates the problems of Web 2.0 that many people came here to try to escape.
This could create an environment that is really not much different to the censored one we see on Facebook and Youtube - except it has been rebranded as being decentralised and sold in a way that claims to represent evolution. Clearly we need to ensure that Hive lives up to the promise of Web 3.0 and this takes community action to do so.
We cannot have real decentralisation as long as the majority of people don't get involved in key parts of the system that empower decentralisation. We can't call a network decentralised if there are only a handful of people engaging in key areas of it.
POB is further affected by upvote patterns being based not on the content of posts but on other metrics that the largest curation groups apply for their own reasons that sidestep the entire concept of rewarding posts because they are subjectively good. Rewarding posts based on the number of comments they receive is something that totally breaks POB, since it rewards users who have active followers more than others, but this is not something that results in quality content gaining traction.
The Untrending Report
The Untrending Report shows that only a small percentage of the votes on Hive are downvotes and the majority of their value comes from only a handful of accounts - so a key balancing aspect of Hive is currently being dominated by a tiny number of brains.
While commentators such as @theycallmedan over at @3Speak have said that part of the answer is for us all to issue more downvotes and to normalise them (while not abusing downvotes by 'nuking' accounts - as currently occurs) - we also need a way to counter any major downvotes that the community disagrees with.
This is the main purpose of the Untrending Report on Hive Alive. Tools have been provided to help you to easily identify posts that you want to upvote to counter any downvotes that have been made and you can send tips, delegations and upvotes to them directly from HiveAlive (just sign in as usual via Hive Keychain).
The top 3 small tables provide quick summaries of the biggest downvoters, most downvoted authors and also show the biggest downvotes occurring a short time before posts are due to pay out ( a tactic used to try to hide the downvote and reduce the chance of someone countering it with an upvote). The main table then follows, which provides extensive data about the top 5000 biggest active downvotes from the last week.
If you really want to support your favourite content creators on Hive who are being downvoted then please consider sending them gifts directly as Hive/HBD transfers (as occurs on Patreon and numerous other platforms). Some of these people are victims of political attacks due to their activism and have issues receiving donations (see Julian Assange for reference) – so anything you can give them directly, bypassing the Hive rewards pool, will help them.
Delegating your Hive is a next level way to help content creators – you can do this via HiveAlive too – just choose an amount to ‘loan’ to the recipient and they can then use your Hive Power to upvote on your behalf until you cancel the delegation – whereby your Hive Power is returned to you automatically.
Conclusion
Downvoting is a deceptively big subject since it draws together so many elements of economics, psychology, politics, tech and so on. This initial version of the Untrending report (and other reports on Hive Alive that will be added over time) goes some of the way to providing what is needed to help to evolve Hive and to help build an atmosphere that is attractive to new users and feels good to existing users too.
Hive Alive will continue to be upgraded and new reports added, so check back regularly to take your understanding of the Hive community to the next level!
Related Links
For more info on the downvoting situation that led to me creating The Untrending Report (hint: most of my posts have been zeroed and downvoted by hundreds of dollars for several months – mostly by the same 2/3 people) – please see these related (and mostly zeroed) posts:
@ura-soul - When Is a Censor Not A Censor? The Wider Implication of Downvote/Cancel Culture on Hive.
@ura-soul - How Many Of My Upvoters Are Actively Using Hive? (Addressing Downvote Cancel Culture on Hive
@ura-soul - Your Comments On The Cancel Culture And Zeroing of Viral Posts on Hive By Curangel.
@kennyskitchen - My Most Successful Post in Years (Promoting Hive) Was Just Downvoted by Curangel for Over $200 Right Before Payout
@3speak – Discussion of Downvoting Issues with 3Speak team - (2nd half of recording)
@ura-soul - The Dynamics of DPOS & POB Pitch Money Against Freedom in a Constant Brawl for Decentralisation Over Centralisation... But We Will Evolve!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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Note: Witnesses are the computer servers that run the Hive Blockchain.
Without witnesses there is no Hive blockchain or DApps such as PeakD and 3Speak... You can really help Hive by making your witness votes count!
Can we get reports on the biggest, tightest circlejerks?
Positive voting is a much bigger issue than downvoting, excepting the nuking for 'reasons'.
I'm guessing upvote circles take much more than 4% of the pool each day.
This report and this report were very useful to me.
I'd also like to see just how much the top few accounts actually take out because of the impact of voting more than 1000mv.
Thanks for duking it out, the crab bucket needs you.
Hehe, yes, I will look at upvotes too in the near future. That's high on the list of priorities. Thanks for the links, I remember those reports, yes - there isn't anyone doing what paulag used to do - I'll bare that in mind :)
Could you also add or display how rewards are separated by beneficiary? A community account for curation may set beneficiaries for the posts they created which current tools only register as if the account receiving the votes are the sole recipient even if rewards are distributed to more accounts on a single post.
Account X could get a lot of votes but rewards are split between multiple accounts as beneficiaries and this may lead to false impressions for people not looking into that minor detail.
What would be the aim of creating a report like that?
If I have a curation account that I self vote on, not trying to break it down to rewards received by set beneficiaries on the post is misleading. If some large community curation accounts vote on their own posts, the rewards don't go toward the curation accounts (depending on proportion set) they go to the curators that made up the curation compilation or whoever put in the work to make it happen as an incentive.
Accounts like ocdb votes on itself, but most overlook that the beneficiaries of those reward don't even go back to ocdb but to the curators that put in the work. And this goes for all curation accounts that set their curators as beneficiaries.
Ah I see, ok - I hadn't noticed that they were setting beneficiaries in that way. I'll bare that in mind when I get to making reports that are relevant.
The funny thing about this is that OCDB also goes and intentionally downvotes other communities and curation groups, that also beneficiary out their rewards... Without any justification or explanation.
I think they recently downvoted their own post too? but that happens rarely as well. And they also didn't provide any reason why they downvoted their own post.
one day we will find ways to use upvote bots and Ai to analyze posts and find which users are actually bringing in the most new users, which content creates the most new better content, meta curation etc, metadata curation
This doesn't require AI, just time/resources invested to create the code to produce the data. I can do it myself but not when I have near zero rewards from Hive. I put about 2 weeks of nearly solid coding in to create HiveAlive and that was using the framework of the old site (SteemOcean) too, which saved time. New reports will take less time to create, but still costs me time and money that I can't get back from Hive currently - despite having significant community support for 5 years!
Make that proposal.
Maybe that's worth a go, yeah - coudn't hurt!
Bring on the bots!
Especially in manufacturing.
Bring on the FALC!
The 1000 MV thing doesn't apply any more. Rewards are linear.
I understand without the exponential boost to vests that the small fry won't see a boost to our rewards on the scale of the whale experiment, but our slice of the pie will still be made larger.
1000mv makes a still difficult hill to climb less steep.
500,488hp is a more attractive goal than to have to buy millions to compete equally in the pool.
Adhering to this limit might attract folks more modest in their means as the goal is more realistically attained.
As things are, how many people do you think can afford to get into the top 35 accounts?
I bet there are more that will be willing to risk 1000mv than 10k mv.
I haven't found somebody to give me the rake of those top 35, but the more the price rises the less likely that any of them will be unseated.
Anybody with 900k usd to invest would be irresponsible to not know this number, imo.
I do know the whale share is getting larger, the whales are not getting diluted by the inflation.
Maybe what they take from the pool is irrelevant, but somehow I doubt selling their votes wholesale, ie delegating for profit, that their rake from the pool is inconsequential.
They wouldn't bother if the return wasn't worth the time.
So, yes, I do support a whale class with the self discipline to leave some more for others.
It's a feature, not a bug.
To clarify, Smooth is saying that there is no 1000mv factor in the rewards algorithm on Hive.
Yes, I'm asking that the whales observe a 1000mv voting limit, much like the whale experiment, except voluntary.
You can pull numbers, how much do those with more than 1000mv pull from the pool each day?
HIVE!D
Here's MY x-mas report...
For the Record: I am looking to PAY for a report which shows ALL of 2021 downvoting done to @frankbacon by Hivewatchers AND Other GuiltyParties in Witness position. I require this report to show Damages to a court, based on perameters set forth in a "Certain" Witness Proposal. The job pays fairly based on a negotiable BLOCK agreement.
High Reguards for being ALIVE bruv.
✊😎🥓👍
Thanks for your support!
This is awesome, thanks so much for the continued innovation of this platform. This looks like a great new app for analyzing how to grow an audience here.
You are welcome, thanks for the feedback and support too. I will continue to develop data tools and reports that help creators to grow, absolutely. :)
Transparency is always good.
Unfortunately this post will likely be downvoted(irony).
Sure.. because the guy who just spent 2 weeks solidly coding to a total cost of $1000s without any guarantee of seeing any financial gain is 'only in it for the money'. Meanwhile the downvoters show no obvious sign of anything other than playing cards.
I've been accused of that.
4 years of being here I think I earned less than 1500 Steem/Hive lol.
I'm really taking all the munny ;)
well, at least i'm making loads on the money i haven't been paid here since word of hive alive has spread. lol
You will hit the moon sir!
Made you look.
With the malicious people and the mean spirit of most of the people involved with downvoting and this claims of white knighting is really driving the community apart. And running off many honest real.content creators.
This behavior has been getting worse.
Hivewatchers got a false report about me and one individual blanket banned and blacklisted me with no cause no Investigation and also banned a innocent account... It took the community and the hivewatchers themselves to object to remove it and give me a reprimand.
I'm no Angel. I'll accept the reprimand.
But the hivewatchers group does huge amounts of help to the blockchain. And need more funding and community support.
If you are bad... And get nuked... Well the community needs to know this information.
If a community member gets nuked for little or no reason... We need to have a community group and community support.
I approve of this. Great idea. The worst of the worst can be highlighted for why they are getting hammered....
And then community members that have messed up a little... Can have support.
If small things go on there needs to be a process. Which wasn't followed in my case and others....
If one false report can have resources misallocated... Others have happened.
We need more community involvement. It's plain and simple. We need funding for community leaders and strict term limits. However honored leaders need to get nominated Into a pool of talent to support the Legacy of the leadership.
Great work. And hopefully you will continue growing!
Thanks! Ultimately, those with the most stake are going to be tempted to act like monarchs, even when the power has been 'delegated' to them by the community. Decentralisation should really explore the opposite of this wherever possible imo. That being said, we do need organisation to achieve common goals. If the community makes clear it's intent and needs, then there can be an organised meeting of minds rather than random butting of heads.
Motives it all comes down to motives and who wants to really be a part of the future.
Is the future going to turn into an authoritarian crazy lockdown world or are we going to embrace freedom and liberty?
The great law of peace will continue to grow. All human beings have the right to speak their hearts and be free.
I just now we have to fight to maintain those rights and liberties. As human beings will continue to do for the rest of human history.
Yes, ultimately this is about free will vs. suppression of free will. The former is life and the latter is death. The principles at play might not seem so grand when applied to a few accounts on Hive, but in truth, they are the same principles that apply when governments ban the right to process (as happened in the UK recently!) or activists are murdered by oil companies. The same personality constructs empower all such situations.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A lot of people when they are given the chance to have power go crazy. It is just too much for most people. When they get the crazy thinking that they are entitled to this power... Things start to shift and end up extremely badly.
However with so many good community members fighting back... I have a lot of Hope for our blockchain.
I know what you mean - people often have a lot of unrecognised or underaccepted emotional imbalances based in lack of self acceptance that has them constantly trying to 'beat' everyone else in any way possible. This can manifest as exceptionally loud people who never listen to anything but who just keep talking or it can be the powermonger money obsessive on Wall St. - or it can be those who start literal wars, killing millions without a second thought.
Unfortunately, the flipside is that these people can generally only operate because the mass of people has been brainwashed to reject personal power as 'bad' - partially as a result of looking at the powermongers and being fed the idea that if they hold personal power that they will be just as much of a problem for humanity. In both the case of the powermonger and those who abdicate power, it is a lack of self acceptance that is at the root of the dysfunction.
This is a very valuable dApp! Thank you so much for developing and sharing Hive Alive with all of us. What happened in the POB community is unfortunate and reminds us of your typical web 2.0 behavioral patterns. While studying the "Untrending report" I was really surprised to see @nainaztengra's profile come up at the top of the 'Most downvoted' list. I've been following her articles for some time now and her pieces about spirituality, yoga, traveling and life in general are of good quality. Utterly strange ...
Thank you for the support @kriszrokk.
I have stopped speaking about this as I do not feel there is anyone who can bring value to this. Also I see that the ones who get downvoted are most of the time fighting it out alone, specially someone like me, who is always into minding my own business.
Yes I do get big votes, but I do not go and ask for it, for. People must be finding some value in my blog to give me good rewards and this is not about a month or two. I have been here on this platform for 4 and a half years and I have diligently done my work here with utmost honesty.
May be the topics I write on are not much valued here. In between I was getting downvoted every day for almost 2 months and the reason was a tiff between 2 people, which was clearly coming out. When I questioned I was told it was about reward equal distribution, but then again this does not apply to all and it probably applies to some guinea pigs like me.
Lately my 2 posts were downvoted and brought down straight from a value of $185 to $20, I wonder why did he leave $20 also. From which one post was about "What's your Hive Story", probably that's a gift from @curangel for being a committed member of Hive.
The downvoting thing has no rationalization, it's all about the personal clashes of the whales and their personal likes and dislikes.
Another thing may be they do not want that ordinary people like me should thrive here.
Honestly I have given up on this matter as the ones making the decisions are only controlling this, so there is no point. I will always be given some story.
There are many who consistently earn good rewards and I will say why not, what is wrong, after all we have also worked so hard to build this reputation for ourselves.
Power with good sense will make the community thrive else we should be prepared for a fall out again is all I can say.
I do not write any technical stuff as that's not my forte, whatever is my area of interest I will continue writing on that. I have received ample support from my communities and the platform and with those good vibes I keep moving and ignore the bumps on the way.
Thank you @ura-soul for bringing this up, atleast someone is talking loud about it. There was another one girl, I do not remember her name as it was long time ago, she had raised her voice very loud on this subject and I saw her getting thrashed by whales later on. It was such a sad thing that there was hardly any support that she received and everyone asked her to get quiet.
I would call this hooliganism.
Going through Hive Alive tool. It is a very helpful one to understand these patterns. Will look forward to some more analysis which are unique.
It's absolutely hilarious to see peeps here bitching about Facebook, YouTube & Co. while deploying the exact same behavior. I've been observing and studying the dynamics on this platform as it's a fantastic vessel that captures the human psyche and enables illusion to flourish even more. Then again, this is Kindergarten level and you shouldn't dwell on it. Not worth your energy.
Follow your intuition and do your thing Nainaz. Yes, you've got my support.
Enjoy the Festive season with your loved ones.
Without looking into your posts in great depth it sounds like you are experiencing the same problem as me. There surely can't be anything more likely to repel new (and existing) Hive co-creators than the understanding that if they get successful they may be zeroed out! I have yet to meet a single person who supports the behaviour of @curangel and @azircon here - even the people who disagree with my COVID19 posts generally publicly state that the downvoting is too extreme, especially if we are not going to ruin Hive's free speech reputation.
I think your description of the downvoting patterns is mostly accurate. I presume that Curangel has never given you an explanation as to why they are nuking your account beyond 'you have too much rewards'. I notice that I only see the big downvoting on your posts from the last couple of weeks, which suggests to me that they got annoyed with @kennyskitchen and the abundance tribe's voting and simply targeted whoever has the biggest payouts. This has the unfortunate appearance, at the same time, of shutting down the biggest posters on natural health topics on Hive - which will only fuel information warriors to engage the situation even more. This is part of why I said that the downvoters are slowly digging themselves a hole as public perception of health is rapidly changing and will be dramatically different moving forward.
Wishing you success and if you want to join forces to help this topic then let me know - you can reach me in discord or Beechat.
Can you please share your discord ID with me or you may message me nainaz.tengra#2622
Sure, I have sent you a friend request in Discord.
You are welcome, thanks for your feedback. With such decentralised and community driven software, the community must engage in all ways possible in order for their will to be enacted.. Any gap in the connection between people and outcome is an area which can be dominated by a few accounts - which is what is happening here. More focus on curation by average Hive users can make the difference here.
That's the thing. Value is subjective. This is why I believe downvoting should be reserved for rule breaking of some kind like vote farming or plagiarism. If you don't like something, don't consume it. It's none of your business whether someone else likes it enough to give it a vote. They deserve every genuine upvote they get. I believe that the practice of downvoting for the purpose of curation has caused a lot of good content creators to leave the platform in the past. And by good, I don't mean content that I like or would consume, I mean content that drew new users to the platform and delighted some users here enough that it was profitable for those creators. Once it became unprofitable due to targeted downvoting campaigns, those people left, and probably most of their followers with them, along with any newcomers they would have continued to draw in. If we want to present ourselves as a free speech and censorship resistant community, curative downvoting is certainly damaging to that reputation.
Perfectly stated, thankyou!
very nice man!! cant wait to check this site out, and poke around on it.
Thanks - let me have any feedback and I'll aim to get fixes or new features in asap.
well done! It's the price of a decentralized blockchain that we have to do the things we want to see ourselves
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 23/83) Liquid rewards.
100%!
I agree with your thinking...Balance is everything.
i like that name hivealive.io sounds like a proof of live like voice.com was sorta, maybe upload selfies, use @edenos prove identity in web of trust lol
thanks, yes - it does lend itself to being used for identification of some kind - but it's also meant to be a space to use to inject life into Hive in as many ways as possible. :)
It’s really weird I kept thinking I didn’t see any posts from you then I saw I had somehow muted you in error. I’m almost positive I didn’t knock the button. Is there some kind of bug? Maybe I did though.
I'm not 100% sure but I vaguely remember you muting me months ago, but I could be wrong.. I definitely didn't post any country music, which is the most acceptable reason to mute someone imo.. 🤷
I do post some triggering things for some people, so it could have been that, though I suspect you are generally able to handle it. I'm not sure I've heard of a muting bug - that would be quite serious on a 'free speech' platform (the silicon valley sites are known to unfollow people in bulk behind the scenes to stifle support for some pages).
Lol I’ve never muted for opinions I’ve only ever muted down voters, nothing offends me aside personal insults lol
Oh well that's good to know! I will definitely never accuse you of being a country musician then. haha
I like some country 😏
Oh well, nobody's perfect.. it's not meant as a personal insult, I'm just trying to protect future generations from all that slide guitar and romanticising over rodeos. lol.
No as I was commenting on your posts a week ago, I don’t think I ever muted anyone before this month.
Maybe I knocked the button in error it’s just strange.
going to check it out looks like a great project, also referring to POB I've never understood it's influence only that POB was on HE and does good to be there. Never used it actually
@ura-soul
With due respect, Can you please elaborate why these Knights are downvoting? What do they get? Atleast not money and they make some enemies on the way too. I remember I only downvoted few people in my life based on plagarism and they still hit my profile with downvotes whenever they remember me again or I sponsor my post for 1 day. @ura-soul I have a request to know try to think neutral. If you are making a plateform with your heart and soul and fighting holy knights, please also look into ways you can support them. No one is 100% wrong. Humans are right and wrong together. Give me good reasons of both sides. Covering one side is not neutral.
First, they get quite a bit of financial gains from these downvotes, as all rewards removed from posts by downvotes are added back to the rewards pool, thus given to the top posts on trending (and their curators - who happen to be the downvoters)
I'm really confused by all this talk of knights and evil and covering sides? What the heck are you talking about?
What he has created is a tool that allows anyone to track downvotes easily - something that most certainly hasn't been easy to find for the last 6 years.
I could be wrong but I don't think that's how it works, as you describe it. The downvote would deduct potential rewards from what was downvoted then disperse them indiscriminately across all posts including posts that had been downvoted, comments including yours as we speak, post with only one upvote nowhere near trending and so on. One cannot direct where the downvoted rewards go after the rewards have been downvoted. It's equally dispersed across the entirety of the platform. It's not directed at specific posts or wallets.
So if someone is out there downvoting away instances of reward farming low effort drivel or asinine behavior, that money goes back to everyone, not just those who downvote. Equal percentage across the board.
Those with largest capacity as upvoters are also the largest downvoters, by default. So the rewards that the largest downvotes return to the pool are highly likely to be redirected toward the largest upvoters - who are also the downvoters in enough cases for this to be relevant.
Sure, those with more stake stand a chance to earn more with their upvotes. Percentage stays the same across the board. Upvotes also affect the balancing act, pulling rewards away from posts with pending potential rewards yet to be paid out.
Like one big spider web. Pressing the vote button, up or down, is like a bug landing on the web. That action sends ripples throughout the entire web, shaking a little bit of dust off here; dust that has to settle anyway and eventually lands, there.
See what I'm sayin?
All the votes affect the outcome for everyone - yes. However, since downvotes are 'free', in the sense that they don't have any cost to the downvoter, they can either be used as intended - to prevent spam/plagiarism/bots - or they can be used to downvote purely to maximise personal gain. This is a huge flaw in the system and yet it has always been hand waived away as being too insignificant to be relevant by whales (who are big downvoters). Marky claimed recently (just before HiveAlive went live) that no-one makes more than 0.1% gains from downvoting - yet HiveAlive has shown that the actual amount is closer to 4%-5%. If you are a whale that is trying to maximise your returns, an extra 5% is surely attractive! This also applies to non whales, but their impact is very small compared to the whale downvotes, in the sense that whale downvotes offer a massively centralised reduction in rewards for whoever is on the receiving end. If you have a quota of downvoting to get through, it's much more efficient to just nuke a few accounts that you invent reasons to justify your actions (to yourself) for.
In simple terms - downvote quotas being set by some here may be the issue.
Maybe just show me the gains. Pick a name from those downvoting and show me the 4-5% gain.
Well he said he acknowledges the need for downvotes on posts for plagiarism and spam but haven't seen him use his stake to support/downvote blatant posts that do fall under those categories.
Sounds like acknowledging some cases downvotes are warranted but not necessarily contributing to the solution of normalizing downvotes.
@aadamada
With due respect to all parties involved, I wanna ask why none of those people are working on automatic systems to detect image reuse, tag wrong used, auto plagarism checkers, repost checker, and source not given. I will support this if they also help me in my work. Why I must go to people and tell them their post have leo tag without finance involved? Why I tell people splinterlands quest rewards are not equal to LeoFinance finance category? I go to manual to profiles and guide them about image sources? If there is no replacement by bots then I have to protect hive manually as much as I can. If they want transparency then first make bots that will do these basic warning things. I need my answer from @ura-soul about how he is going to help stop this? Why being biased on one topic and completely neglect other? Let's make this alive front-end great by having equal development share about the things that others think we need.
Because nobody has built what you are asking for, some due to a lack of time, other due to lack of resources.
There is no need to ask permission to build these things, one only has to do it, or pay for it to be done.
There was @cheetah but running that costs a lot that it was unsustainable. The sentiment of bot comments being seen as spam and most of the automation enabled requiring funding to run.
There is no doubt we have to move towards automation at some point. Its just a question of how to reduce cost, how to increase hive fund and how to attract more investors. In short: I still believe we can't neglect this problem at hand and should figure out new ways to solve it.
If I were the lead designer of Hive I would look at integrating some automation of this stuff at the blockchain level, completely removing the involvement of any black-box and non opaque bots and software/groups. I don't currently have the ability to affect such things because I am not a top 20 witness - but the more people that support my witness, the more I can do in that regard.
It will take more then that. To get the support
This kind of work requires constant ongoing maintenance and improvement in order to run and create. The costs are relatively high and I do not have the resources available to cover them. If I were not being downvoted to zero, I would actually have the funds to start thinking about running such apps. The top 20 witnesses receive hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just from being a witness - setting aside their other projects. They also have a large say over what gets funded and doesn't get funded in the worker proposal pool. I suggest starting by asking them your question directly, since they are much better placed to help you than I am.
Ok 👌 Let's assume that you become a top 20 witness. Remember that if you will have funds in future you will fight Plagiarism as much as you can! Deal?
No problem, without the ability for people to demonstrate true uniqueness, proof of brain really falls apart.
There is already a vast amount of stake invested in fighting spam and plagiarism, my stake is better used to support content creators who seek to make use of Hive's censorship resistance to publish information that can help society and individuals to overcome the onslaught of mind control and manipulation constantly spewing from the highly centralised oligarchic corporatocracy.. among others.
You get 2.5 votes a day to be a member of the anti-abuse duty followers, it costs you nothing, but, so far, you have chosen to not play the part of the heavy.
Very few of us want to spend our days exposing, and expunging, liars, for less than nothing, but that is what has to happen for your stake to have value.
Just watch what happens to them other chains, eh?
They don't want to be the heavies, either.
We have the opportunity to be a fount of abundance, probably should support that, iyam.
Even if it means being mean to some people who can't color within the lines.
Games have rules, or there is no game, only a struggle for survival.
Currently, I think, you are on the wrong side of this.
Though I agree we will make more friends with honey than vinegar.
Come on over to the dark side and help keep the conversation on the tracks?
I think you might change your opinion once you have seen what is there.
The rewards made available via delegation to the numerous groups fighting plagiarism and spam make them massively more able to do so than I am able to match. My time is better spent achieving the goals I have set out to achieve with Hive and I don't have a problem leaving plagiarism combat to those who are rewarded for doing so - however, there are issues that need to be addressed in that scenario which I am helping to address here. My stake is not really big enough to make much of a downvote dent, but if a curation group is setup that shares my values then I might consider joining their downvote trail. That being said, as with all trails - I would never recommend anyone to join a trail without regularly checking on what it does.
I personally suspect that reducing free downvotes to 1 per day might be enough to bring greater balance - but ultimately, if people are going to 'abuse' downvoting, similarly to how people 'abuse upvoting' and they refuse to stop voluntarily then without a hardfork of some kind or everyone moving to layer 2, it may be necessary to set up counter downvote trails.. This would be highly inefficient, but that is part of the problem - the 'pool protection' is highly inefficient and open to biases at this point - systemic design changes are massively more effective when done right. Doing the systemic redesign effectively, requires significant amounts of experimentation, which is another reason why low cost layer 2 projects are essential.
Here is one.
Here is one with more people in it.
Great, that is what most folks in these rooms are doing now.
Got that covered, too.
These are all long term initiatives made possible by people who care.
I look forward to you joining the conversations.
You will find like minded people there, several think layer 1 rewards need to go.
I don't share that opinion.
I think we need to adjust the crowd to the rules, and not the rules to the crowd.
It's a life long affliction.
Thanks, yes, I am due to work on @freezepeach's code at some point to improve it's functionality. They need as much help as the community can give. I will try to find time to engage with the groups you linked, but I have needed to clone myself to get everything done, going back 20 years.. so have limited time!
Hi,
Well, Knights tend to be appointed by some made up claim to divinity etc. lol. The major downvoters here have accumulated Hive Stake through high witness rewards over time, bidbot usage and perhaps the success of Splinterlands - among other things. So I wouldn't personally use the word 'Knight', but setting that aside... You would need to ask the downvoters why they are downvoting - but in my own case, I have not been able to get much of an answer beyond 'we disagree with you being paid rewards'.
As was explained in the post and by Kenny - downvoting returns rewards that had been designated to be paid out to certain posts, via community upvoting, back to the reward pool. This means that the reward pool is now larger than it would have been without the downvotes. Currently between 4% and 5% of the rewards that go towards paying for EVERYONE's rewards have been made available as a result of downvoting. Since Hive's capacity to issue (or downvote) rewards is based on the Hive Power that accounts have staked, those who have the most power to downvote also have the most power to upvote and direct rewards to themselves, their friends/colleagues and also sockpuppet accounts which they run to make it seem as if they aren't abusing the reward pool. This means that the bigger the downvote, the more that those doing the downvoting directly benefit financially from the downvote.
Other than that, if you look through the lists of which posts are being downvoted most often - you will see that outside of the accounts/posts which can objectively be said to be scamming and plagiarising, there is a thread of other content creators being constantly downvoted heavily. In general, these are accounts which provide political/social commentary that is anti the mainstream narrative being spun by MSM and gov via 'accredited' 'scientists' (typically heavily financially incentivised to slant their statements in a particular direction). This has mostly begun post COVID19 as far as I recall. We would need to have direct comments from the downvoters as to their thinking here - but we have seen zero from any of them in this regard. The most that I have seen is snearing, snarky comments that seem to rely on the logical fallacy of appeal to authority (and a variety of others too).
Any loss of respect and 'friendship' (from people they mostly never meet via the internet) is minimal in comparison to the gains made in profits and other agenda goals that can easily be identified from comment threads on chain (at least is 'minimal' from the perspective of certain personality types).
Yes, this is one of the main reasons why the vast majority of downvoting (value) is coming only from a very small number of large whale accounts - they aren't concerned about being counter downvoted because they can intimidate most people. Some of these people went from running bidbots that ruined the network previously and which actually led to the development of the current system of free downvotes. Did they decide to just shift away from one sociopathic behaviour to another? I am not a qualified psychologist so clearly I can't appeal to my own authority here - but by all means, analyse and think through the situation for yourself.
I have provided a neutral platform that provides insight into the blockchain data in an unedited way. Anyone doing legitimate curation without biases or political agendas can benefit from it's use.
This is a big subject and will take hours of text to cover in detail, I have already written blogs on this but will write more as time permits.
@ura-soul verifyyourbrain don't have downvotes but still it can stop farming. Let's see how no downvote heaven results will be. If it will only decrease and decrease in value then you will notice the need of holy knights. With time and neutral research maybe you will be able to understand the value of downvotes.
The outcome of a 'no downvote' policy is determined by the willingness of people to participate in it, combined with the quality of the admin team's work and perceptions. If they do everything that's necessary to maintain ethics and to protect the rewards pool in an biased way then it can succeed imo. By having a clear moderation policy, there is at least a chance that the result will be better then existing solutions - but, yes, it's all being run by humans at the end of the day - so it's all possible! ;)
Perf on https://hivealive.io/untrending is bad on Android Chrome and eventually locks up.
oh ok, i did test it on android and it was a little slow for me but useable.. i can look at paginating the big table to make it load more efficiently.
Yap the big table seems to be a bit heavy.
Yeah, I will paginate it tomorrow if I get time.
It is a wonderfull source of data.
Those tables will help me greatly in selecting, who I will support, and who I will IGNORE in the future (in places where downvoting is not allowed
Thanks! Let me know if there is anything that you think/feel is missing and I'll see if I can add it in.
I have heard of this dApp for the first time. I believe that such dApps makes people keep connected to HIVE. Thanks.
Yes, engagement requires connection and understanding - the blockchain is only as transparent as the websites are that use it.
This is good news!
On an unrelated note, I guess I really need to rebrand @aliveprotocol 😭
I love how much development is happening on hive right now!
Hive to the moon!!!
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Hey @ura-soul,
Do you mind supporting the HiveBuzz proposal for 2022 so our team can continue its work next year?
That would be much appreciated!
https://peakd.com/me/proposals/199
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Hi @arcange - I sent you a message recently in beechat but didn't receive a reply. I haven't been able to locate you in Discord, so I don't have a way of contacting you - I'm happy to discuss support your proposal and some other issues in private messages if you let me know how to do that. Thanks
I'm not using beechat. You can contact me on Discord or Telegram
Great, thanks.