RE: Fixing Valueplan
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
I posted here and steemit extensively for years. I also witnessed what I think are a lot of the problems with this platform. It has tremendous potential.
Staking into the platform makes sense. What does the person get for their stake? Yet, they can downvote posts into oblivion because they are "not interested" if they have accumulated sufficient power. I've seen this stifle creators. Those same people stifling will then elevate their buddies. This creates kind of a vacuum where they get more and more powerful which makes it easier for them to stifle and control.
They will argue that you still have free speech. Yet they destroy the idea that if there are people who LIKE your content you can earn something. They can squash that earning.
For this reason I've argued for no down vote before. Yet there are some reasons it has had to stick around. Mostly fighting spam, plagiarism, etc.
The reputation system was implemented long ago to counter bot accounts. It actually works quite well for that but it too can be gamified.
I can tell you I would have stayed active here like I was in the past but watching people get censored/down voted for reasons other than spam, plagiarism, etc. would wear on me. I saw the accounts that do most of it rise to power over the years. They essentially have turned this platform into their own fiefdom and the rest are the serfs.
Even the creator of Steemit, Dan Larimer noticed some of the problems. He and I had some exchanges on the topic long ago.
This platform has some beautiful never before seen ideas. Yet this also meant that there were new problems we would have to learn to deal with.
There are potential solutions but since the stake is already consolidated into the hands of what seem like digital oligarchs I don't see a way to fix it.
A new platform learning from the lessons might be able to pull it off but there is far too much competition in other areas now so getting momentum will be very challenging.
I am very unhappy I missed your comments here, somehow unnotified of them. I only found them on a random search for something else.
I talked to Marky about this because he is extremely dedicated to such things, and he told me DV's do almost nothing to discourage them. Upon reflection, scams and spam don't make money on author rewards, so flagging them away doesn't exert any pressure on them. Plagiarism perhaps is more impacted by DV's, but that's a feeble justification for a mechanism that has been wreaking havoc on the platform before Hive existed.
I no longer believe there is any good purpose for flags. I don't think my argument matters, that all of our arguments against flags matter, because flags serve a very bad purpose very well. They concentrate stake. When Steem advented ~36 whales have mined up massive stakes and today ~36 whales control Hive governance.
That's what DV's do.
Blurt sought to fork Hive, but I have other issues with it. I'm not even sure where it went wrong, but I'm sure it did from interactions I've had with certain principals there. At this point I don't think forking off a new platform is what to do. Despite it is mathematically impossible, my gut tells me to continue to oppose DV's on Hive.
People get old, get sick, die, marry, and find other things to do. I don't think the 36 whales that control Hive are all the same 36 ninjaminers that forced @ned to take the money and run from Steemit. Maybe it's hallucination, but my gut tells me to keep making rational arguments to right Hive on Hive. You, @thatgermandude, and @xplosive all have the right moral, ethical, and rational views and abilities to coherently express them to do that and I wish you would more often. I am glad to find you still putting up with the crap to do so here.
I think what Steemit and by extension Hive did was a great start. It was the first of it's kind.
It is actually quite beautiful until you realize that the promise it uses to sell itself is tainted by this mechanism that can only result in gradual consolidation of power.
Those that happen to be in the right place at the right time and get to be the chosen oligarchs of the platform will tell you. Simply purchase enough power and it solves the problem.
Yet it doesn't. Such a large purchase would drive up the price so much that these powerful few would gain a lot of wealth.
They can then turn around and make sure that they retain the power.
They also will claim you are not censored on the platform while they arbitrarily will pick people saying things they don't personally like and claim it has no value to the platform. They will vote it down so the person can earn nothing.
Let's face it the ability to actually earn for engaging on this platform is one of the main things that truly set it apart.
If you take that away then there are better places to produce content.
I remember when HIVE was being forked and I didn't get involved. Some time later I found out all of my stake in Steemit had been grandfathered into HIVE. That was of course after I'd mostly divested myself from steemit. I had 20K+ Steem Power at one point and was in the top 100 most powerful accounts. All which I acquired through actually producing content and engaging.
After trying to fight this issue and seeing how the power was accumulating and being used I eventually realized it was a flaw in the platform that wouldn't simply go away.
If this was ever forked again something would need to change. I can't tell you how that would work or what should change.
Same. I have some insights, as I'm sure you also do. I don't begrudge anyone any stake, but I do begrudge predation on me and society that deprecates that real wealth that our good fellows are. How to rein in such power that abused has blasted away ~1m users that organically came here and surmounted the onboarding process and learning curve to start providing content is going to take someone smarter than me to devise.
Curtailing the power of stake to do so is necessary. How to curtail that power isn't clear. What is clear is that HW isn't the way to do it, and it isn't necessary to read more than once the humiliation ritual they put people through to get off their blacklist to know this beyond doubt. It also is clear that some mechanism needs to exist to cause people not to prey on society here. The oligarchy has found a middle ground of 3k-5k organic users that enable enough content to be published to maintain it, that enables them to continue to attain to ROI from their stake. More users threatens their control of governance by distributing Hive stake, and fewer threatens to render the platform without sufficient economic activity to avail them nominal ROI to bother with it.
Valueplan is pretty obviously enabling kickbacks that increase the ROI of the oligarchy, because they're not screeching about lack of accountability despite eyewitness testimony to theft by fraud, wasting the funding on proposals that produce no benefits to the platform whatsoever, onboard no new users, recruit no new investors, gain no new listings, nothing. If I had $1M that someone was bleeding away I'd sure screech about it. Since none of them are screeching, they are getting that blood and feasting on it. That is obvious.
Hive won't exist in 10 years at this rate of bleed. I may not live that long anyway. Not sure anything I do or say will have any ability to change any of that, so I take such opportunity as I have to sound my barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world while I lean and loaf and take my ease, nibbling on 'Blades of Grass' as I do. From time to time fellow sojourners with meaningful yawps of their own give voice, so I thank you for it.
I think ultimately if downvote removing earnings could be removed that would help. Yet spam, and plagiarism should still need to be countered.
Ultimately whether someone DISLIKES a product or not should be irrelevant. When they walk into a store with their money they don't sit there putting black stickers on all the things they don't like. They simply spend their money on the things they WANT.
Everyone should be able to do that. Right now it has an anti-market mechanism of being able to make it look like demand doesn't exist simply due to the whims of the powerful.
It is taxation. Just as taxation can be either punitive or protective, both purposes are also sources of income for taxing authorities, governments that impose them. We see that on Hive we don't have much in the way of protective tariffs, and DV's are income taxes that are levied to suppress commerce or industry, and produce income for the government. The government of Hive is the control of the witnesses, and the majority of inflation issued from the rewards pool inures to the majority stakeholders that control the witnesses, so when DV's return someone elses income to the rewards pool, the majority of stake so returned then inures to that oligarchy that governs Hive.
This creates the perverse incentive of punishing commercial success as a source of funding government. Just as commerce and industry IRL would falter and crumble into almost nothing were a polity to enable unrestrained taxation to be applied by the captains of industry that had captured the government, like Ford taxing Toyota until Toyota had no income from it's commercial endeavors, which would drive Toyota from the market, we see the oligarchy on Hive doing the same thing, and our library of content, the commercial product that underlies our economy, is largely limited to accounts and products contributing to the wallets of the oligarchs that control Hive governance. This is why the oligarchy is perplexingly stable, despite the incredible variations in that economy, with bidbots and the fork affecting but little the fact that ~36 whales mined up stake to control Steem governance upon it's advent, and ~36 whales control Hive governance today. Such changes to that oligarchy have reflected the fact that stake is power to govern, and new additions to the oligarchy have been those that most loved money, which those that no longer are in there least attained it.
Given the common understanding of the love of money proclaimed in ancient aphorism, this is an indictment of Hive's government, rather than producing expectation a strong and healthy society will thrive under it. I am not surprised a plutocracy does not produce thriving pluralism and commerce when that plutocracy is availed the power of unrestrained taxation of incomes as it's source of governing power. I am surprised such plutocracy can persist at all, and we see that Steem was conquered by a single plutocrat. It's hard to foresee any other future for Hive, except being strangled to death by the avarice of it's governors.