There are many issues with Hive. The simple fact that you can earn directly, obviously attracts people that try to abuse it and game the system. However, most of this abuse leads to very minimal profit and gets too much negative attention. I don't know any other platform where people running giveaways would be downvoted or get a bad reputation. Over the past years I've seen many great giveaways being shut down. Sure, there are some cases where the post was basically the same every time. But there were many that were pretty interesting. One, players had to guess the number of active players on Splinterlands. That was shut down by a whale. I've also never seen a platform where 1 downvote can trample over 100s of upvotes.

This leads to bullying and abuse by these powerful people. Often, all they do is dish out downvotes without any explanation. This simply drives users away. There are also cases of abuse (much bigger than any "giveaway farm" or 0.001 selfvotes. Why even allow self votes if they are so severy punished?

In the past I have been a victim of downvotes from a disagreement on the Splinterlands discord (which shouldn't have anything to do with Hive anyway). I've also been a victim of downvotes because a Hive witness has problems with someone who voted my post and they wanted to reduce their rewards. So, because of a 2 Hive upvote I suffered 2 downvotes over 7 Hive together which hurt me and several other voters just to hurt someone else. I'm not gonna name anyone but anyone willing to check my posting history can see this.

Another issue with Hive is that it doesn't encourage controversial content. Who in their right mind is gonna make that type of content when that's much more likely to get downvotes mixed with upvotes? That's the opposite of every other social network where controversial content not only appears but it's even the bread and butter of some creators. There's also hardly any comments because comments are simply not encouraged. Comments are almost always only seen by one person, the author of the post, so why waste time making one to get one upvote (if lucky) when a regular post will get you more?

Speaking of other social networks, Hive is most similar to Reddit with touches of others like Instagram. It's similar to Reddit because of the upvote and downvote system. It differs from Reddit on the number of comments and comment chains, on the controversial subjects, and on the power of some users. Power is not only related to upvotes and downvotes but also on being known. The same post made by a new user or even a regular user will barely get any attention, no matter how good it is, while if it's made by a whale or someone well known, it will get a lot of upvotes. That's more similar to other social media. On Reddit, a great post can reach the first page, even if it's done by an account created just for that single post.