Hive Downvote Rewards - Quick History Recap - Thinking Out Loud

    The road to mass adoption of this platform poses a significant challenge in terms of more veiled or ambiguous forms of reward pool abuse.

Artwork compliments of @overkillcoin. Too bad we're gonna need a need a new one w the rebrand! I paid good money for this! 😭

    As the platform grows and attracts more talent, it necessarily follows that it will most certainly attract the "wrong" type of talent... Or I should say rather it is the right talent pursuing the wrong things. Yes, I understand this is subjective and may vary much according our own individual judgement according to the values peculiar to our worldview.

Not to derail myself on some sort of philosophical tangent but suffice it to say that not everything is black and white but instead morality can enter into various shades of grey.

That being established. It is not impossible to establish consensus through Hive. It is as simple as upvote, downvote or neither. However, in the current state of negative curation, consistency is difficult to be maintained for myriad factors most notably the social stigma.

How can this be alleviated? Enter Hive Downvote Rewards

Lone wolf flagging only goes so far. When we flag as a team, we are emboldened to do much more.

Some of you remember the golden days of anti-abuse as I call them. This was a time that Utopian had launched their antiabuse category which had fostered the growth of a vibrant community of willing negative curators. A post such as I am writing today would have easily made $30 worth of Steem Technical Units (STU - @dragosroua can tell you all about that!)

This resonated with the vision I had for moderation that is decentralized. One consisting of many eyes of various stake to be employed. We came from a variety of backgrounds and social circles which reduces the tendency for an organizational bias to exist. I will concede that most of us are English speakers in @steemflagrewards but we had taken measures to encourage more global participation by adding language support channels as you may note from the following screensnip.

I had even considered a DAO Proposal to establish billets for multilingual moderators but, not to put the cart before the horse, I just explain the HDR concept.

When I was a newcomer on this platform, after some time as a fly on the wall so to speak (observing but rarely participating), I learned of the blockchain feature that we used to refer to as the flag.

It's intent is to curate content that was perceived as overvalued in the downward direction. It struck me as odd that there was no mechanism to incentivize it's proper use thus I sought to create one. Now, I was no stranger to coding but I did have no knowledge of the languages used to interface with the blockchain via application programing interfaces accessed via robust libraries maintained by individuals like @holger80 (Beem creator). Actually, the first bot we created was using the old school Steem-Python library IIRC.

Let's just say that it was a dinosaur compared to what we have thanks to the advent of Beem. It was thanks to @flugschwein that a database was integrated, a skill that I have since assimilated. Later, @reazuliqbal helped us create the voting bot to support the antiabuse community rewarding downvotes.

As some of you may know, I am an system engineer by trade and often all that is needed for me to learn is to take apart something that has already been built so I can understand how the parts work together as a whole. I must confess one thing.

I am NOT a software engineer

Much of the technical work I've found myself doing on the blockchain have taken me outside of the comfort zone of my own technical expertise coming from the operational side of the house of IT.

My job isn't to develop systems but rather maintain them. For once in my life, I was creating something novel. I don't think it would be embellishing to suggest that we were, in fact, pioneers in a brand new thing that is community incentivized content moderation. We used the "wisdom of the crowd" to achieve something I believe was quite remarkable.

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After the chain split, we had a lot of our support go away as they became disillusioned with the "Sun situation". This took a significant toll on me and I lost motivation to continue on in this work. It was in part because I perceived signals that it wasn't bring properly appraised and perhaps it was not. It took me some soul searching to grow to learn a lesson. That lesson is the good we do for others is still good even if it isn't appreciated.

Our community downvote initiative was invoked for over 40 thousand flags on the blockchain against spam, plagiarism, vote selling related abuse and more. I want to remind at our peak we had about 100k SP to reward flaggers. With relatively little, we did much.

Anyways, this isn't my pitch so to speak. That will come later. I have a few ideas that I believe you will like that dawned upon me last night. However advanced our concept may have been, I know our system or implementation had been clunky in the past which should not be surprising considering my background. The ideas that dawned upon should render that truly a thing of the past.

You're not gonna want to miss this. I guarantee it.