Reward Pool Town Hall
Another month bites the dust
Today is Hive power up day and also we just recently finished the Hive @town-hall on Twitter spaces. Was a good talk. The main topic of conversation was a debate about removing the reward pool... which I am vehemently against doing. This shouldn't be surprising as many of the users who earn rewards from the pool have a very large conflict of interest. Still I'd like to think that I'm pretty unbiased in these matters, as that certainly is the case with HBD emissions (I don't earn yield there). The goal is obviously to create as much value for Hive as possible, and everyone has their own idea how to achieve that.
Two of the biggest arguments for removing the reward pool were downvotes and AI. Downvotes make people rage and put everyone on tilt, while AI just keeps getting better and will eventually fool Hive into rewarding content that was automatically generated for zero effort. Proof of brain is dead and votes are already not allocated in alignment with meritocracy, so why not just scrap the system entirely?
For starters my main argument against such an earthshattering transition would be the inevitable hard landing that resulted from such a move. Frontends do not have access to an open source algorithm for sorting and curating content like WEB2 does. A lot of the sorting is a direct result of payout and diminishing returns based on time. That's how the trending and hot tabs work anyway. Removing the reward pool leaves frontends exposed without anything to replace the void.
Another argument I made is that downvotes are a self-correcting problem. We know they aren't a problem because if they were the network would move to correct the problem. Trying to rally consensus to remove the reward pool because of downvote drama doesn't make logical sense. Either that consensus doesn't exist (which it doesn't in reality), or the consensus does exist which means the network has more than enough stake to counter every downvote issued. Both of these scenarios result in a flawed argument. That's a layer-zero off-chain issue on an organizational level.
Artificial int
I find this argument to be extremely flawed as well. What if I created a game on Hive and used AI to create 95% of the game? What if the entire frontend was AI generated and only pieces of the backend were actually coded by a person?
What if I made a ton of money off of this product? Is anyone going to care how it was made? This idea that it's "not fair" to use AI is honestly pretty weird. It's a tool. Is it not fair to cut down a tree with a chainsaw? Real men swing their own axe? Same vibes. Luddites approve this message.
What the AI argument does point to is that content on Hive might be overpaid. We, as a network, might be overpaying our employees and not be getting enough value back in return. Is that actually the case? This is very hard to measure, but if it was happening to the point of scrapping the entire heart of the platform it should be very easy to show with on-chain data.
I'm not seeing that kind of data, just like I'm not seeing it with 20% yields on HBD. I think too many people are employing "this sounds right to me" logic without any hard data to back it up... and the burden of proof is on the users who want to radically change the network, not everyone else. The status quo is the status quo for a reason. Something about not fixing what isn't broken.
Let's see what else.
Khal mentioned several times that he believes ad revenue is the key to solving this issue. Then none of the reward allocations are subjecting and are objectively based on network traffic. I can't say I fully agree with the logic considering ad revenue and data collection are the exact type of WEB2 business models we've striven to get away from, but it is a very good point to say that objective rewards are much better than subjective ones (for one because downvotes become irrelevant in the face of objectivity and there is no 1-week delay).
There was also a very good point made about jumping the gun.
Everyone knows that crypto runs on a cycle. Why try to make such a radical change after already just surviving the bear market? Would we really be having this conversation if number was going up? Just like the HBD debate I have to conclude that these are bear-goggles discussions that only come up due to our emotional reactions of volatile price action. It's certainly not fun to still be trading 90% below peak after Bitcoin just went x2 over the last year.
On that note I'd point out that our blockchain has been around since 2016, and up until 2020 the floor value of the token was basically 10 cents. We've cratered to that 10 cent floor multiple times over the years. That did NOT happen this last time around the block. The local low is 25 cents (briefly at that), which is huge if that's now our new floor. Nobody seems to respect this in the moment but it may end up being a pretty huge deal as we move to greener pastures.
Second layer?
I also take issue with the idea that we can just move rewards and emissions to the second layer. Again the logic just makes zero sense to me. Either the content we are rewarding has value and should be rewarded, or it doesn't. There is no wiggle room here. If they don't have value then no we can't just shuffle them off to some other token and expect them to carry on with a failed business model. These concepts lack consistency and contradict themselves. Make it make sense.
Killing future innovation
A couple years ago there were a LOT of users who thought HBD was a completely failed experiment and needed to be scrapped entirely. Where are those people now? They vanished because we basically fixed HBD with the stabilizer combined with Hive >> HBD conversions. It works pretty great now for anyone looking to swap less than a couple thousand dollars at once.
I'm a pretty firm believer in the idea that this exact same concept is going to extend to the reward pool. Someone is going to create another way for users to generate value on Hive. That new "content" that's getting created, whatever it is, is going to be a lot more valuable than blog posts, and then poof all of a sudden this entire conversation ends because it became exponentially more sustainable.
Again: consensus for this does not exist.
Okay, so you think we are rewarding too many accounts in developing nations? All these accounts are doing is powering down and selling. The obvious question to ask here is pretty simple: why are we collectively upvoting accounts that do nothing but powerdown and sell? And if the answer to that question is because a couple whales decided to... then why aren't we downvoting those upvotes and nullifying consensus?
The painfully obvious answer here is that the consensus is clearly aligned in the way that it is for a reason. Again, the reward pool is one of those self-regulating beasts that does what it does even if it steamrolls over a couple people in the process. I honestly don't even see how it would be possible to get the consensus to remove it when all the biggest participants know they could just change their strategy in the face of an actual problem.
No one is changing their strategy... so I have to assume that there isn't a perceived problem in the minds of the very people who's job it would be to change the code. Although I suppose I certainly could be wrong and more high-profile users will begin to chime in on this issue. I'm betting that's not going to happen but who knows. This discussion would have to get pretty wild over the next few months/years in order for such a transition to even be possible.
Conclusion
Hive, like many cryptocurrencies before it, is a lifeboat that many are clinging to in these times of economic uncertainty. Yes, there are a lot of distressed sellers out there. This is what happens every cycle... and it happens because we all go full on greedy-goblin mode during the bull season.
People don't forget the lifeboat that kept them from drowning in icy waters. There's a lot of gratitude and goodwill built up around us. The people we help today will be the builders of tomorrow... at least that's what I'd like to think anyway. Without the reward pool we lose all of that good faith while opting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That's my take anyway.
Does feel like we need to get our act together. There is no guarantee that number go up. My main hope are the smart contracts coming soon. And we definitely shouldn't touch the reward pool just yet
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I am VERY curious and interested to hear where you feel dollar value to pay out content comes from if not ad revenue on a web3 chain/application?
Ad revenue does not have to mean risking privacy and data collection there are very real alternatives to creating anonymous profiles now that could serve as a web3 solution to privacy issues some feel web2 has.
A second layer would make sense IF it generated revenue to pay out the content and rewards. This is how shit works in the real world lol value and money doesn't just come out of thin air. It has to be extracted from somewhere especially when everyone still directly ties crypto value with USD value.
I'm just skeptical of this adaptation into WEB3.
Simply the act of tracking bandwidth and clicks exists on an inherently centralized level.
It can't be verified by multiple separated nodes.
When someone says they're going to profit-share ad revenue it's just them making a promise.
Maybe this could change in the future with new tech but for now I'm not seeing it.
That's a very valid point about trusting the app or person/people running that app that they are simply promising to pay it out. I suspect that's how it's going to have to be for a while until the application gets large enough that it would run it themselves in house. IN which at that point it should be fully transparent and backed up by transactions on the blockchain etc.
No it doesn't. The real world is horrifically broken, and millions of body pave the path to that truth. Crypto is an attempt to break away from that plutocracy based on inhuman and inhumane psychopathy endemic and inherent to institutions, like government, church, and corporation that have centralized wealth and power by sacrificing billions of people and healthy society on the altar of profit.
Social media has proved there is a greater power inherent to society by becoming the dominant industry across the entire market - despite financial rewards being centralized and enabling the affliction of propaganda and indoctrination via the advertising model. Hive hasn't devised a sound mechanism to fix the bugs despite the innovations it introduced via the rewards pool and curation, because it retains too much of the financialization that reduces wealth and power to hierarchies IRL. Keeping ads to a second layer is smart. Restricting advertisers access to that API and keeping those sharks from our governance token is critically necessary, not only to our extant oligarchy, but to our potential to evolve through tweaks that can unleash the power of social media to take Hive to the moon, where it should be.
Those tweaks will necessarily defocus the rewards pool off oligarchs, because society can't blossom as the bottom of a pyramid. Curation rewards will have to go because they derange the curation of content and misapply rewards for pecuniary interests rather than broader social values of which money is a minor subset. Purely plutocratic control of governance will have to go because that is why the extant oligarchy must prevent Hive from mooning lest they get gobbled up by the circling sharks, lost in the glare of a new Sun that outshines them financially, as happened to Steem. I suspect bonds can be a part of these tweaks, perhaps offering higher interest rates for longer lockups, whatever the market can bear, and some other consensus mechanism than stake will be necessary to secure governance from sharks. Frankly, after Steem, that is long overdue already.
It is only the absence of a suitably competitive bonding mechanism that can emunerate stake nominally other than curation rewards, and the will to power, even if over a mound of ashes rather than a vibrant society, that have prevented wiser men than I from devising these tweaks and implementing them.
Ads aren't the way. That way lies behind us, and we can see what it wreaks on society by the million examples of derangement of society extant. That's just financialization, which doesn't lead to greater freedom and decentralization, but to less of each.
If all Hive dapps dont implement ad revenue you cannot sustain a creator economy.
The top 10 most paid authors on Hive made ALL TOGETHER a total of 5000 USD in November. 😂
Thats laughable. And we want big youtubers, creators with followers to come here?
We need ad revenue. Anyone else claiming otherwise doesnt understand how creators think.
You may need it. I don't. The reason there is so little economic activity on Hive is that >1m users that bothered to sign up and start posting have abandoned the platform, most before Hive existed. There's ~3k people here posting now out of ~2.5m accounts, and most of those accounts are owned by whales or abandoned. How many are AI sock puppets no one knows.
Where'd all those organic users from 2018 go? Away, because this is where the money goes:
Found the problem! More money coming in from censors...er, advertisers, won't help if it all just goes to the whales.
Well obviously, since Im refering to the creator economy, a total of 0 ad revenue should go towards the whales or any curator account.
And this?
What about it?
The implication I get from that post is that Leo is gathering data on the market to be advertised to. Not something I have thought was happening on Hive before now. Certainly implied by @antisocialist to be a new and troubling occurrence.
That's why I don't use Goolag, Meta, or X already. Well, besides they censored me, and etc. I won't put up with it here either.
I'm doubting it's all that new.
I just had cause to find it now.
Odds are they have been doing it all along.
I dont see any difference between gathering Hive transaction data that Dalz or Arcange is doing and gathering advertiser data.
Its all public, put up willingly.
The only issue I have is if the user that has his data sold isnt profiting from it. That I dont support. That, I stated in the original comment.
This is not true. Advertiser data is sold, not published freely, as Hive reporters do in the hope of users providing upvotes in appreciation of their efforts. No one I know of has publicly revealed that Posh, Sting, Peakd, or Leo are collecting the tracking information @antisocialist blocked. That data being collected was an apparent surprise to @antisocialist, and to my knowledge isn't published anywhere on the blockchain. If I am wrong, please show me where it is.
I note you have forthrightly stated you very much desire advertiser money, and while I am vehemently opposed to that noxious influence on Hive, when we state forthrightly our policies we can openly discuss them and learn each from the other such that we may agree after hearing others' viewpoints, or at least respect and come to terms with one another if we cannot.
But please do not falsely claim that advertisers will publish the data they collect freely, because they do not, and demonstrate a long history of keeping that information proprietary and selling it to the highest bidder as a business asset they own. Misleading people about fundamental aspects of advertising may seem or feel like it can help your cause and persuade people to agree to tolerate advertising and the influence of advertisers on Hive, but it will not be true, and advertisers will prove it false quickly, which will turn allies into enemies with alacrity, causing dissension and perhaps alienating people to the degree they will hold enmity that will not be slaked except by your bearing costs grievous and dire.
Any issue you have with what you describe as tracking should be brought up with the frontends.
I have no problem with anyone using anything I do on the internet to create monetary value if I too benefit from it.
I am here willingly, knowingly existing.
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Those (misguided) folks in favor of killing the reward pool, where do they propose the HIVE goes instead? Themselves?
gah you just reminded me I forgot to mention certain topics like killing the reward pool kills account recovery because there's no reason to stake the majority of your stack.
One of the ideas pitched was just to allow yield farming through staking... so instead of being able to upvote others everyone would just be upvoting themselves... which is like wtf there's no way that could be better.
Pity I couldn't make it.
Ad revenue is a scourge on digital society.
One of my arguments against this is that there has to be the potential to own part of the network, without having to buy in directly. Even small amounts should be possible to earn. However, as we go forward, earning from content will have less significance percentage wise. I see the sellers as future regretters. Second layers are like businesses, I want to own the marketplace and by extension, a piece of the businesses it hosts, without risk. - Hive is the marketplace for all businesses upon it.
Society is far more than just a market. It is reducing Hive to a market that renders it more vulnerable to financial monsters that be out there. It is what keeps an oligarchy entrenched in control of governance, and prevents the society of humanity from taking advantage of rewards to blow Hive up beyond what centralized social media have become, despite they lack that potential to add significant financial incentive to the bulk of society, which Hive inherently possesses.
Society is a vastly greater thing than a market, and we are blinded to the forest for focusing only on the trees on which money grows. There is a tyranny of stuff that is oppressing society, and keeping Hive down, that breeds inequity and inhumanity, and we should seek to better disburse and disperse rewards in order that the rest of the trees are fertilized and the forest of societal values fully blooms and bears it's overwhelmingly powerful fruit.
It is all a market. Life in society is about trade - money, ideas, love. It is sharing with each other, being vulnerable, supporting at the personal level. At the stranger level, that trade comes through value trade.
While you correctly note that there is this give and take, most of what is most valuable to us as people isn't quantifiable financially, isn't part of that market, and that market is overvalued to our loss of other, more valuable aspects of society on Hive.
Specific financial mechanisms on Hive completely supplant more valuable aspects of society, particularly governance and only a little less so curation, through the imposition of stake as a metric for value.
Why do people think this?
Proof Of Blind [MINDLESS] Votes.
Because of auto voting circle jerking nepotism etc.
I can't say I agree but we all know it's not a perfect system.
Just cause it isn't perfect doesn't mean it's broken, though.
Yeah I mean preaching to the choir really
I think one of the main points is that it "will be" broken in the future because of AI and whatnot and we need some kind of plan that's not going to cause the transition to be a complete shitshow... but again I'm just parroting the argument I'm not the one making it.
Them that profit from bugs want to break it more. That's an inherent flaw of centralization, and the centralization of stake renders Hive governance vulnerable to that flaw. For them that benefit from it financially, it's not a flaw but a feature, and they want more of it.
Top authors, and I mean the literal top few on Hive dont actually earn much at all.
Top 10-20 on Hive earn something like 500 USD a month each.
And half of that is in HP.
The author side of the reward pool is basically just a Hive faucet to distribute the token to as many people as possible. Not as many tokens as possible, but rather to as many people as possible.
This idea of circle jerking nepotism is such a silly discussion left over from Steem.
Those guys making those claims are basically arguing about coffee money.
Epitome of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Many, I think, are bamboozled by AI's prowess at composing prose - entirely plagiarized, because it isn't intelligent and doesn't actually have any comprehension of it's composition, but merely sorts human compositions - and misapprehend that people are the real authors of the thoughts AI has plagiarized and rearranged.
I think people incapable of writing that well are incapable of grasping that AI just plagiarizes competent writers, and gains the appearance of competence, which is what is behind all plagiarism by people, too.
Same for art.
Ah this topic has made its round again eh? It’s amusing because it’s often people with hundreds of thousands or more of hive trying to push for that. I think it’s a load of shit myself and if they want to try it, feel free to spin up a side chain and see how much of a ghost town it will be. Get the hype train going - how amazing a new chain is going to be without a reward pool!!! No downvotes!!!!
How did Blurt turn out? Hmm.
Discussing topics is important and good because we can weed out the foolish ideas from the valid ones. You just don’t inherently fuck up a main network with these silly ideas. Have at it somewhere else and see how it goes. If it works people will come to it.
If these people were serious about it they would get their own network rolling.
As far as I can tell, the people pushing for removing the Hive reward pool have a very small stake overall.
Blurt isn't able to implement nominal mechanisms to attract investors, but that's not because of the lack of downvotes. People misunderstand downvotes as the opposite of upvotes, and they're not. The opposite of an upvote is no vote.
Upvoting Toyota is buying one. Not upvoting, not buying one, is the opposite of buying one. A downvote is comparable to taxing Toyota and decreasing their profit off their product. Downvotes, or some similar mechanism, are necessary to eliminate spam, scams, and plagiarism, but should not be applicable to valuable discourse and societal interactions otherwise. Wages aren't income and income tax shouldn't apply to wages. In fact you can find definitions of income to that effect, but, just as Hive demonstrates, those that benefit from the tax burden creation IRL too.
That is a burden Hive will need to shrug off before it can ride the power of social media into the orbit it should be in.
I appreciate your perspective to bring a bit of temperament and humility to an otherwise sometime belligerent rant. We have a good bit to learn and develop here for sure.
This is a false equivalence, as it is a shared pool of resources. Upvotes are not coming from an individual's pocket, they are coming from a shared wallet.
That's immaterial to the impact on the creator. Spending their upvotes on a creator is comparable to buying a Toyota, and not upvoting is comparable to not buying a Toyota. Downvoting a creator is decreasing the income they get from their product, like taxing Toyota reduces their profit from selling their product.
Upvotes and no upvotes are the opposite effect on a creator. One provides rewards for creating content, and one does not. Downvotes decrease the rewards, just as taxes decrease profits. It doesn't make any difference at all to the creator whether the funds come out of the rewards pool or are tips out of the voters pocket - except downvotes cannot come out of the voters pocket. Downvotes can only take from the creator/upvoters and send to the pool.
Another mechanism that shows that DVs aren't the opposite of upvotes, but are the equivalent of a tax on production.
Quite wrong. It doesn't take from either, because neither has it. An upvote is a draw on the future distribution, and hasn't been created yet, which is why it can be negotiated. It belongs to no one, as it doesn't exist.
Terms and conditions are that there is a seven day window to negotiate between users with stake. It isn't until the tokens are created and distributed into a private wallet do they become owned.
You're dodging and weaving away from the point with admirable agility, but DV's are like a tax, and not the opposite of upvotes. When DV's decrease the value of the content to the creator is, again, immaterial to the creator.
If I work for wages that are paid bimonthly, does it make a difference that my wages are only taxed when I receive my paycheck? No. It only matters that they decrease my paycheck when I receive it.
Not at all. Whether you are doing it intentionally or out of ignorance, you are displaying a fundamental lack of understanding in how the mechanism works.
So, I will reiterate.
Until payout, the content has zero financial value in terms of HIVE earning.
There is no salary on Hive. There is no contract. There is no guarantee of earning on content. Essentially, it is like a piece of work where viewers negotiate its worth for seven days. After seven days, the worth as defined by staked users on Hive gets paid out directly to the creator, and that value in HIVE becomes theirs, to do with as they please.
Your assumed understanding and portrayal of how this works is flawed.
You dance around the point without purpose. It doesn't matter there is no contract. DV's counteract upvotes. They reduce the value of the work of the creator. That is their point. That is how they eliminate spam, scams, and plagiarism. It is ludicrous to claim they do not, which you appear to be trying to do.
Censorship is any suppression of speech. That is it's longstanding definition, and it is laughable and blatantly deceptive to claim otherwise to anyone capable of using a dictionary. As you reveal no interest in forthright discussion, I will cease engagement with you on this matter, as I have no interest in duplicity, nor pretention to mockery you affect. My pay isn't mine until I cash my check, and anyone that has worked for wages for any amount of time will have experienced wages being withheld contrary to agreement. The rhetoric about emuneration is meaningless and without financial value.
It is the pay that has value, and DV's are comparable to a tax on production of creators on Hive, whether you are loathe to admit it or not, your attempts at duplicity and dancing around points of fact notwithstanding.
Enjoy your day.
AGREEEEEEEEEED. Too lazy to write it all myself, so thanks for doing it for us all.
This has grown into quite a discussion LOL but I like reading the comments on it!
Is it not possible to disable the downvote feature without any impact to the reward system? Grey it out so it cannot be used. What is the impact of doing so?
Unfortunately if we turned off downvotes a lot of users would just start allocating 100% of their upvotes to themselves and scams would run rampant. I'm not sure if it would be the disaster everyone makes it out to be but other networks have tried doing this and it never works out very well.
Interesting. To me a downvote system can only bring negative energy. There is no upside so it must only exist to serve fear and/or control in a system that purport to be better than a centralized system. In fairness, every Hiver should get an equal vote whether it should be disabled.
Lets find out if we are like other networks that failed, if that is what you are suggesting. Besides, no pain no gain. It's a simple thing to remember and it's am embodiment of success in reality. Including many lifeforms. Part of natural growth and well being, unlike calculated wars.
If you cheat on my system you get flagged and privileges' are suspended til you respond to admin.
So the part you say doesn't makes sense, is that the fear of abuse by dishonest Hivers? Meaning, technically there is nothing stopping us from disabling the feature. It's a political decision?
A system that rewards based on subjective opinion is unbalanced if it doesn't contain a way to take rewards away based on subjective opinion. Is it better to have an unbalanced network to avoid all that drama? Many have come to this conclusion, and all the networks with this concept in mind have failed pretty hard... and there have been multiple iterations.
As stated in the OP the real solution to this problem is a layer zero one, meaning people get together and decide was is appropriate and what isn't... and those who wield too much power and cause too much drama are put in check. As also stated in the OP, no one is actually working toward this goal, so there is no consensus that this is even a problem in the first place.
When all the biggest stakeholders are signaling that there isn't a problem combined with the fact that none of the other platforms that "fix" the problem are successful... that's just very telling and should not be ignored. Again this is a problem that can be fixed by working inside the system so it doesn't require changing the core code to some other model that we already know doesn't work.
The most important word is subjective. I don't place a lot of value on an opinion unless it has strong supporting facts defending the reason for such opinion.
I have read many posts and thought hard about this reward system and I keep coming up with the the thought that by upvoting I am acknowledging the effort made. No judgment. I leave my setting at 100% and I play until I run out of gifting resources or another task needs attention. I show up every day and I see unrealistic payments for an opinion. When I look at the why, I learn about voting bots. In a way, that's #TooFuckeh to me but being a player and following the advice of Albert Einstein, you just have to learn the rules of the game and play better than someone else. The game of life. !lol
On this, I am reminded of a local Acadian saying. "Worry pa, ta brain." Ironically my nephew called a few minutes ago and we mentioned that phrase in response to the drama he was facing with his Dean at Dalhousie University.
Sound like an unwritten Term of Service. So the system is accepting that Whales rule the ecosystem and never mine building stronger symbiotic relationships with other versions of a Hiver trying to earn a living in the same ecosystem?
From the many years of being in the affiliate marketing world, I have seen many cheaters. Some of these cheaters would make significant amount of money from collecting commission from many sites/program all using essentially the same underlying code. I eventually came up with what I call, Member Quality Scorecard where members earn MQS points based on their activities and attributes. Essentially, a member is an object with properties and ability to execute certain function. An OOP Model. So I am very interested in learning as much as I can about the pros and con of Hive reward system. So far, I see getting rid of downvote as a low hanging fruit to influence a positive change with the majority of Hivers. Not based on wealth but character.
Well, maybe I am missing something. If a whale downvotes me what is the probability of me recovering based on my own merits. After all, I am just getting started and I too share opinions that may trigger a downvote. If I was a Whale in this system I would respond differently than the little fish I am. In fact, I did hear a Whale saying they receive a few downvotes from time to time and it has not been an issue. !lol #TooFuckeh a Whales sensitive to the bottom feeders. Not!
Can you elaborate? You means, as the Whales get together because they represent all stakeholders in this experiment. Knowing the root cause of a failure in a similar blockchain is valuable information for sure. However, their failure doesn't mean we will fail.
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That's not the community. Perhaps note how many users have fled the platform for a more relevant metric. Hive's user retention is amongst the worst in the industry of platforms that have survived as long. The oligarchy that sucks the majority of stake out of the pool is well pleased by it's ROI, but an examination of user retention tells a vastly different story, and it is not the oligarchs that create the content that makes Hive valuable. It is the users that aren't remotely as satisfied as the oligarchs.
Edit:
Is the essence of society, of the wisdom of crowds. That is the curation that matters, not that undertaken for financial gain. THAT doesn't reflect the wisdom of the crowd, merely focuses financial resources where they already are unbalanced.
This ignores that negative energy is inherent to the universe. Spam, scams, and plagiarism exist and without a means to counter them, have rendered the platform unusable in the past (before Hive forked off Steem).
Edit:
Who? There is no admin on Hive. That's decentralization.
From a Metaphysic view the universe, as all things, its a matter of balancing negative and positive energy. And since we are responding to mostly an emotional measure, you would have to build a set of metrics to measure the various responses from Hivers knowing if they just had a bad experience on a UI they may give a false response. !lol
The provided link is an interesting read. On the vibration side of things, in one of my career, I worked as a machine doctor. I help build a condition monitoring system where the machine vibration told us when we should address an incipient problem. As it turns out, many people operate as predictable machines. Meaning, by collecting some data you can measure which way they are more likely to lean on particular issue when challenged. Considering the impact from high profile influencers and how most people are followers, extra efforts are needed to get a good measure of an underlying concern in a system.
Spams, scams, self voting and other similar concerns can become more noise than genuine concern. Hard to use a big hammer to combat this because circumstances vary greatly. A lot of factors comes into play. Including ones belief system and most important, how you evolved from an experience that was mostly negative.
https://metaphysics.com/protecting-oneself-from-negative-energy/
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Not at all. Spam, scams, and plagiarism aren't matters of how we feel, but matters of fact. You may respond out of emotion, but if plagiarised it isn't your feelings about it that make it plagiarism. It is when DV's are deployed because of feelings, rather than facts, that they become problematic. It is necessary to censor spam, scams, and plagiarism to enable Hive to function as a platform. Censoring stuff because of how one feels about it is no less a threat to the platform than spam, perhaps even greater.
In my experience and from reading, 70% of the time, decisions are emotional and not logical. Logic comes out after the decision has been made to defend or justify an emotional response. You have to implement measures, techniques and use tools to avoid biasing from built in filters.
If someone's posting is an issue then call them out publicly. That way, we can all learn from the process and not have to depend on Whales to be the protector of the ecosystem. Rich people with power are often the destroyer of systems. Elon Musk and twitter comes to mind.
Hive is a pure plutocracy. You take the words out of my mouth.
100% of the time, 70% of the time spam, scams, and plagiarism are matters of fact, and our incompetence to tolerate them isn't a matter of how we feel about them. The platform has become unusable because of spam in the past. Phishing and other scams are constant attacks on our number. I have personally lost ~400 of my tokens to someone that got my key. Plagiarism cannot be allowed on a social media platform. It's actually illegal to help people profit from stealing other people's stuff, not to mention it replaces society with cuckoos.
It may rustle our jimmies, but that's not why these problems have to be prevented. They literally destroy the platform regardless of how we feel.
AI's can make good admins. !lol
Just because we are on a decentralized platform should not mean a system is incapable of administrative or support services.
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That isn't at all apparent from the commercially available products on the market today. Even content creation attempted of late, a far cry from business management, or administering Hive, has been so ham-fisted that Sports Illustrated has been embarrassed into deleting the AI authors it has been using to provide content.
Maybe with a great deal of development and careful separation of financial metrics from societal, such administration could be crafted with FOSS AI, but it isn't available today. The whole point of decentralization is that people aren't subjects, aren't chattel to be compelled to compliance with the whims of management. DV's are nominal to dispel spam, scams, and plagiarism, if our deployment yet suffers excesses of censorship by an oligarchy too self aggrandizing to loose governance and enable Hive to deploy better metrics of value than money.
Better an oligarchy than overlords. I vastly prefer mere flagging and some financial deprivation than literal banning and the censorship being as complete on the platform as double tapping to the back of the head IRL.
Blurt.com is the result of that.
Why is posh token tracking me in sting?
Why is peakd letting poshtoken track me in sting?
Why would I bend over to get tracked by leo when it's not me getting paid for the data I create?
Even were they to use 100% of revenue created by me to buy back leo, that wouldn't benefit me as leo is nowhere near my sell price.
It would benefit those keeping the price low by selling at whatever the buyers offer.
'The plan' around here is looking more and more suspect the longer these issues aren't addressed.
Is it any wonder that more than 1m people have called bs and just left?
It looks to me like LEO is striving to further centralize the platform in order to aggrandize themselves at our expense, just as the current oligarchy does in other ways. Stakeholders intent on any kind of ROI from the free content creation the userbase - even as miniscule as it is today - provides may have to act to limit LEO's abusive parasitism or face the demise of Hive.
Pie in the sky.
It sells, so why not profit from it?
It's just good crapitalism.
If you notice, the people that don't have to worry about where their supper is coming from have a different viewpoint than most of the rest of us.
Forcing this viewpoint as the only 'relevant' viewpoint is holding hive back, iyam.
Because it will destroy the platform.
I agree that this is utterly antithetical to the purpose of the platform. Some few fat cats running the world, or running Hive, kills the goose laying the golden eggs.
From your lips to the very pinnacle of power.
Too bad the insulation will keep them from hearing it.
Have you asked about this in Peakd, Sting, or Leo circles? I'd be interested in knowing whence and when this came.
It comes out of the console, f12.
I have asked, but have no answers.
That lack of forthright information and apparent unwillingness to state publicly with alacrity what is being done and when it started does not bode well for the prospect of allowing advertising on Hive.
Presently I will not tolerate it on the layer 1, and will not use any layer 2 it is allowed on, because this is exactly the treatment I expect from advertisers, and why I do not have accounts on platforms where it is allowed, except I do so deliberately for purposes I will keep confidential.
As an aside, I recommend everyone make dummy accounts on such platforms with ersatz identity information and pretense at policies of disparate nature, in order to gain insight into how advertisers treat different kinds of people and policies, and to enrich their data with noise to render their analyses of less worth, decreasing it's value in the market and reducing the incentive for them to surveil and track us.
Agree with every word, especially the conclusion.
I don't get the premise that we need to remove the reward pool: HIVE was set up this way to distribute the token and get it into as many hands as possible. First: this is working; Second: this mechanism is exactly what allows us to build new economies.
We are still in early stage adoption so we have no idea of the potential of this model but already it is possible to earn rewards and an extensive passive income without ever posting.
It's much more about creating value, building things that people want and that doesn't have to be about code, it can be about community.
As other commenters say, it's good that these ideas are explored but there are already solutions to the apparent problems: 1. Change how you vote 2. Try out the idea on the side chain.
Hardly. Retaining <10k users out of >1M that have signed up is not how I define working.
Do other social media platforms retain people any better? It's probably hard to calculate fully, because when people leave places like Facebook they often also close their account, so it won't just sit there like it would here.
My intense interest in this issue peaked when onboarding did, some years ago, but the information I gathered at that time was our user retention was abysmal compared to other platforms. Given our current userbase, it is impossible that isn't true, as we have retained a fraction of 1% of folks that signed up and gave Hive a shot.
I think the long keys are a big put off for many. There must be a lot of dead accounts on here where the owners didn't save their keys properly first time around and started another. I know three currently active people who did that. 😆
I guess we also aren't really that similar to Facebook, despite the many comparisons I used to see when I first started here. It's improved on the usability side a heck of a lot, but still not as user friendly as the social media platforms people are used to.
It was certainly an interesting discussion. I appreciate @r0nd0n starting the conversation. Even though I'm not on board with nixing the rewards pool, I do think his idea about transferring the value of Hive to Layer-2 communities with tokens is an interesting one. I'm having trouble picturing how it will work, but it is an interesting thought. I'm dead set against advertising because any rewards system based on ads will ultimately put the power into the hands of advertisers to determine the value of content. When that happens, it will inevitably lead to censorship.
One thing I think many people are completely off-base about is that content value is based on meritocracy, that somehow the best ideas expressed in the best way by the best creators should receive the most rewards. That's an impossible metric. I'd put my writing skills up against anyone on Hive any day of the week, but that doesn't mean I should have the most HP. I respect what others before me have built, even if I don't always agree with it (and, believe me, I don't).
Hive doesn't really have any problems that other platforms don't have. In a bear market, people bow out. In a bull market, people jump in. We saw that with Steemit and now we're seeing it with Hive. Are people leaving over downvotes? Probably, some. Are people leaving over curation trails? Maybe, some. But some of these people could also be leaving because they just don't have the drive it takes to build their accounts. Has anyone conducted exit interviews?
The one criticism I hear the most from ex-Hivers, people who have come and gone, is that the only people making bank here are the whales. I don't agree with this perception, but it IS a perception. Whether we want to do something about that perception is another question.
Like you, I'm open-minded enough to hear any proposal about changing the way Hive works, but I'm against making big changes unless there is a good reason to do so. While I've heard some interesting ideas, I have not yet heard any great reasons for making the changes. I do, however, like the idea of communities being the primary place where value is determined. That can take place with L2 tokens or in any other way a community decides they want to make that happen, but HIVE can also be a store of value, a measure of value, and a medium of exchange.
Yes and I have seen flaws in systems that makes a perception a reality for all intents and purposes. !lol
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It can happen, that's for sure.
100% agreed. It already does, through opinion flagging.
There is a wisdom of the crowd, and meritocracy is a thing. However, I don't reckon that is synonymous with plutocracy, and agree that somehow expecting curation to precisely effect such perfect synchrony with talent isn't realistic. However, that doesn't excuse circle jerks, or the derangement of curation by curation rewards and farming ROI, that create dramatically different incentives and reward plunder, rather than reflect societal values other than money. Mike Tyson once said that Don King would sell his momma for a dollar, and that's not the incentive structure we should maintain on Hive for content anymore than Tyson wanted to suffer it in boxing.
Until we can devise a rewards mechanism that isn't money, a governance mechanism that isn't money, I dunno how we can better make the mousetrap. I am happy better minds than mine are on it.
I have had carefully collected metrics explained to me in detail, and have been forced to accept that, at least at that time, whales took ~90% of rewards. I don't personally care about money, as I'm here for something far more valuable: free speech. However, many people do care a lot about money (I don't blame them. I've just seen how easy it is to steal, so prefer to hoard goodwill, which is immune to theft) and are greatly discouraged by the skewed distribution here.
I have come to acknowledge that not only does that skew favor an oligarchy here, but that the current structure of Hive governance being a pure plutocracy renders the suppression of distribution critical to the survival of Hive in an environment where IRL capital could gobble the platfrom for pocket change, as Steem proved. Hive can't grow without attracting sharks that will entirely consume it by assuming governance unless and until we secure governance from the influence of stake, which I haven't come up with a plan to do, and doubt extant stakeholders will ever allow.
While Hive slowly dies it's a fun place to learn from other folks, and rant my screeds, so I enjoy it while it's here. It's a tenuous foundation of greed on which the platform rests, and I have no confidence in it's long term survival. I believe some slight alterations could change everything, but the wrong ones will just give it to sharks worse than our oligarchs. The devil we know is better than the devil we don't, and we can look at Steem for proof of that.
Thanks for the great response. There is a lot of wisdom in this post that I appreciate greatly.
This is beautiful.
I completely agree with this. I think the goal of capitalism should be to create as many opportunities for as many people as possible. To do that, there must be guard rails. A capitalism without guard rails leads to a plutocracy where those with the wealth and the power create rules that benefit themselves and no one else. This is a concern that many of us have. The solution is not simple, but is something that all of us should want for the benefit of the entire blockchain's long-term survival.
I think it's important for the rewards mechanism to be money. Otherwise, what's the point? The governance mechanism, however, is a different matter. When money and power are synonymous, only the powerful will have money and only those with money will have power.
I think it's important to allow whales to reap the rewards of their years-worth of effort. I do not envy them nor do I hate them. They're whales because they saw the opportunity and took advantage of it before others did. Nothing wrong with that. But a good whale should want to give something back to the community. He should want a fair playing field.
Free speech is every bit as important as money.
That is a big danger, of course. Steemit exploded because its founder sold out to someone who didn't care about the community. That could happen on Hive, but in a different way. Someone with a lot of wealth could just buy a large stake and run over everyone. Will it happen? Maybe not. But it could. And I do understand that concern.
Amen. I'm in absolute agreement.
I erred in my haste to respond. There are two different kinds of rewards we are referring to in regards to posts on Hive, author rewards and curation rewards. Author rewards should be money. That is the basic premise on which the original platform, Steem, was created, and replaces centralized ad revenue with decentralized author, or creator, rewards for producing content, which pay creators instead of platform administrators, directly for their contribution that benefits society.
Curation rewards, however, are not only unnecessary in the form of money to drive upvotes, as myriad platforms without any financial reward for upvoting content have shown, but when financial rewards for upvoting content exist, the incentive for curation becomes pecuniary interest rather than the various values that are more fundamental and valuable to society than money, and in the last seven years we have seen absolutely egregious examples of utter tripe dominating the trending page, as the financial benefit from upvoting content became the overriding reason to curate. It is curation rewards I meant, and should have specified, that must NOT have financial reward, and will better function as organic recommendation of content to others - the true definition of curation - based on the subjective values of members of society.
I was raised on an island in Alaska, foraging for my supper from my earliest youth. I have lived quite well without money from time to time. However, without the benefit of the sage advice, counsel, and warnings of danger from my fellows, I likely would have died many times over. The forthright speech of our peers is an existential need, not merely a benefit or mechanism to ease commerce, as is money. Without free speech we cannot be free. Money is of trivial importance in comparison.
People have been building timber framed structures for ~500kyr, according to recent archaeological discoveries on the border of Zambia. That predates our species, H. sapiens by hundreds of millenia. While we find the prospect of building a home or structure without money today almost unthinkable, it is very doubtful any kind of money existed half a million years ago. It is demonstrable that people can successfully undertake commerce and complex construction without money, therefore.
We can't survive without the forthright speech of each other. If I can't warn you of the lion behind your back, or discuss the foundation of a structure you build, or hear your advice regarding treatment of neighbors, because others demand we do not say such things, the myriad, uncountable hazards that threaten our lives and felicity will count their coups in human lives and suffering. Free speech is inestimably more valuable than mere money.
Very well said. I can't argue with that logic.
Regarding curation rewards, I have often thought that rewarding people for their upvotes can lead to definite issues in culture. If someone likes a piece of content, they'll signal that without obtaining a reward. It's in our nature. But to offer the reward for the signal will likely lead to false signals. People will be too eager to upvote a piece of content they may not otherwise have updated. I think that is true. So, I see where you're coming from. Thanks for clarifying.
I think we're in agreement on author rewards. Curation rewards are a different category and perhaps should be analyzed more granularly to determine a fairer and more just way to encourage curation without tying that encouragement to a financial reward. I don't know what we'd replace that mechanism with, but it's worth pursuing, I guess. I'd at least like to see a proposal that establishes an alternative.
I like that premise... And, I would implement the same premise with the "downvote issue"... Looking at people talking about downvotes like a thing that is "set in stone" hurts a lot... Why it is impossible to find a different approach to things that downvotes are served for? Are downvotes really so perfect solution and we can't do better?
For me, it looks like we have moved the discussion in the wrong direction... If AI and downvotes are the problem, we know that we can't change the first, but the second... We implemented it! We can also change it and create a better solution for plagiarism, abuse, etc...
And another thing regarding the rewards pool... Everyone talks about authors "milking" the pool, while that's a mission impossible if there are no CURATORS who UPVOTE them... Again, we shifted the problem from irresponsible curation to authors... Why? Is it an easier solution to implement it, that's why?
I don't want to go into the layer-2 tokens at all as that makes no sense at all... HIVE doesn't have a layer-2 infrastructure that can do that at the moment... IMO, all H-E tokens are heavily centralized and that's an even bigger WildWest than a whole crypto...
Thanks for sharing your views! It's important that we can share them!
There's a lot of good thinking and wisdom here.
Not broken for whomst? A shortcoming of Hive is that it's a plutocracy that benefits stake, reducing society to a venue for stake, rather than the reverse. Society is the basis for the success of social media, and social media is the dominant industry in the world today, having dominated the markets since it's advent only a few years ago. Hive isn't matching that economic performance, in fact is lagging terribly, for reasons, and that is misaligned rewards that benefit few oligarchs with large stakes because it is a plutocracy like the legacy financial system.
It's not optimized for crypto, as you've noted about bonds.
Simply not being eliminated from the market doesn't mean it's not broken and vulnerable to being destroyed, as Steem proved. The oligarchy doesn't consider it's broken because they are the beneficiaries of the bugs that require them to abuse flags to keep it small enough to be beneath the notice of the shoals of sharks circling the little ponds looking for little fish to gobble up. As long as Hive is a pure plutocracy, that vulnerability will continue, and the oligarchy only gobbles up the majority of the rewards pool because Hive is broken in the way it is.
Perhaps your thoughts about bonds and crypto hold the key to fixing what ails us.
Thanks!
The oligarchy:
Yeah?
Edicted is the oligarchy?
Taskmaster is the oligarchy?
Lordbutterfly is the oligarchy?
Trumpman is the oligarchy?
Bozz is the oligarchy?
Tarazkp is the oligarchy?
Again you are one of the numerous users to fall victim to the "it sounds right to me" mindset.
Your words make perfect sense to me...
But the actual data provided proves the opposite and it continues to be ignored.
Perhaps this is the real epidemic: people insisting that the system is broken and ragequitting the network when it's actually working exactly as intended.
Whales are not taking the lion's share of the reward pool.
Why must you keep insisting that they do?
It's not even up for debate.
You aren't measuring all rewards, merely author rewards, nor comparing that take to the entirety disbursed, because it neglects curation rewards, the 10% the witnesses take, the 20% interest on HBD in savings, the DHF, and other financial mechanisms that direct rewards from the pool.
It's easily shown using @arcange's published charts that an oligarchy holds the majority of stake on Hive, and that oligarchy has maintained that majority because the disbursal of rewards from the pool maintains that proportion. Back when I did look into it, whales took ~90% of the rewards, but that was before Hive was minted.
Author rewards aren't the whole story, not since Kingscrown was the highest earning author, IIRC. Examine stake and a different tape will tell the tale. Some ~70% of transactions on Hive are JSON, and only ~25% are votes.
The number of whales on Hive is very stable. I don't think it's varied by 10% since the Ninjamine.
The proportion of stake they hold has been pretty stable too.
I think whales hold less of the total stake on the platform today then they did when I joined in 2017, but it's a slow rate of change, and they still hold more than the rest of us combined. That's the oligarchy, oligarching. I'm not at all envious of their stake, nor disparage them one satoshi of it. I disagree stake is an effective metric for governance of society, and don't think we need to debate whether or not curation rewards bias curation by substituting pecuniary interest for myriad organic social values that are neglected when prudential obligations are necessary to manage substantial stake.
However, the number of authors on Hive is far less than the number of accounts.
Maybe 3k people posting compared to ~2.5M accounts. Most of those accounts are either abandoned, held in reserve, or sock puppets, and almost all of the stake of those accounts actually is owned by whales, because they have the most ability to claim accounts, and some of them have well in excess of 10k accounts. The actual proportion of stake held by whales isn't just over 50%, because almost all the accounts on Hive other than the whales are owned by the whales too, and it is ineffable how much more stake those whales own than @arcange can put to their accounts.
It's the noxious influence of stake on governance, and curation due to the need to attain ROI prudent financial management requires, that has caused so much censorship, promoted bidbots, and tripe on trending. That is why I so strongly support savings accounts with nominal interest to replace curation rewards, because free speech, and it's curation, is far more valuable than mere money. That's also why I vehemently oppose being rid of the rewards pool, because the social media potential of Hive will vanish with that pool if it goes, and that potential has never been given rein that could enable it to attain it's proper valuation in the largest sector of the global financial market, social media.
That substitution of pecuniary interest and imposition of prudent financial management on curation have been why the Hive social media platform didn't outcompete advertising supported platforms. Turns out the ROI mechanisms for content creators, the authors you are amongst and listed, on Hive are less emunerative than those on centralized platforms that don't pay author rewards at all. That's why >1m users have abandoned our decentralized blockchain social media platform, and only we few are left.
That's sad. However, fix those problems and Hive will moon. The problems are so egregious that they may be facile to fix. 3 year bonds with 100% yield? I dunno. Better minds than mine, like yours, are on it.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ad revenue.
You let them advertise on your platforms - You get ad revenue.
They decide that they dont like your platform - You stop getting ad revenue.
Its as simple as that. Never be over-reliant on it and consider it a sure thing.
Hive is not a traditional media company. There is no central publisher and no advertising department, because where advertising is placed, it is placed between the editorial content.
Since Hive also has no editors, but rather content creators, each individual should in principle be able to authorise or refuse advertising placements on their content account.
In a traditional media company, the editor has no control over how much ad revenue the publication they work for generates. They receive a fixed salary for their work. The media company receives any profits generated by advertising.
But how is this supposed to work for Hive? If Hive advertises as a social media platform and the content creators provide the meat by publishing posts, and the visibility of adverts is achieved through this, then someone would have to offer a participation model, wouldn't they? Since the Hiver does not generate a fixed income. But nevertheless has to be seen as part of the whole editorial content.
Advertising is only worthwhile for those who want to advertise and pay for it if you have a large number of people. Where you can see in exact numbers and data how many active eyes the platform has daily, weekly, monthly and what other characteristics the readership/viewership has such as their age, gender, likes, dislikes etc.
Since the number of 3000 circulates as "active users", advertisement is nothing of interest to any company, I'd say.
When did youtube start broadcasting ads?
Obviously the fix isnt just ads, ads need to be a part of the overall shift in mentality on Hive starting with dapps that are currently happy with DHF payments and arent working to attract any new users.
Where on twitter are you doing this?
Funnily I think we should be adding more ways of adding income to posts here on the chain than finding ways to remove them. If we can turn Hive into something the average creative can pursue full time, then the people will come. Removing methods of generating income on the chain just turns this place into one of the many existing (now existed) failures of web3 that tried social and died within months.
When people are rewarded as a way to appreciate the. for toiling in the ecosystem, they get inspired.
You've made some fantastic points and I fully agree with them. I'll also add this:
Something that used to be talked about a lot early on, which was believed would give Hive (Steem back in the day) more real world value and attention, was it being used as a currency for every day life purchases. Although many people tried to create market places for it, they largely failed, until recently. If what @mattclarke told me is correct, businesses in Venezuela have opened accounts in order to be able to accept Hive as payment. I believe I also read something similar about a business in the Philippines. These are third world countries, yet they may very well be the places that bring Hive to the use point that was dreamed of where the first world countries failed to because we just don't have such a need for it here...yet.
https://peakd.com/@hivesucre
These guys are absolutely rocking it right now. So many businesses and individuals getting involved.
The Venezuelan communities are coming together in amazing ways! We could learn something from them.
Seems when you have no other option, investigating crypto becomes worthwhile.
This is why I'm unconcerned about CBDCs. The worse the official options, the more readily people accept something new like Hive/HBD.
What's happening in Sucre can't be undone, by anyone.