After a recent confrontation with a "web2 influencer" who so graciously followed me before sending me a dm on Twitter with a "hi and a price list of her tweets and "influence"" it got me thinking a bit more about what attention has become on web2. I'm not fully sure how we got here but I think crypto was a big part of it and the ease of payments that come along with it.
It's all become muddied down. Attention on web2 is now covered in a veil of fakeness, how thick that veil is is hard to determine but most people don't even think about it blinded by the numbers. I remember this one time some Redditor did an experiment where he posted a short video on one of Reddits biggest subreddits at the time r/videos, the content of the video was pretty much him just explaining what he's doing, which was buying Reddit upvotes on certain black markets for the video itself. He was so sure he was going to get to trending that he mentioned it in the video that was now trending how he did it and that it works and that it wasn't even that expensive.
Hundreds of thousands of views about a video just uncovering how easy and cheap it was to get to trending on Reddit. Sure you can say Reddit admins may have strengthened their fake upvote detection system since but they're not the only one improving. Where there's money to be made...
It brought me back to this particular influencer, now I didn't bother researching much and going through her account after basically telling her to fuck off, but I've seen similar accounts in the past, many of them tied towards crypto startups/nfts and how they operate. They either create a new account, buy a ton of followers and likes for their tweets or they buy older accounts with already a lot of followers and possibly buy more. This gives the sense that these accounts have demand, they have attention and you can benefit from that attention by paying them a little to drive their traffic towards your project.
It is what it is, right? Well, the real issue I wanted to talk about was something that's always going to exist with web2 and I've also talked about in the past but it has become even more obvious now after Elon took over Twitter. One of the things he made public was that employees at Twitter used to make deals themselves to sell people verified blue checks before they changed the meaning behind them. Imagine that.
Imagine people, companies, charities, projects, etc, that let's say were decent. They were doing the right thing, applying for a blue check and kept getting denied or told the wait time is just too long, they don't have time to get to it, etc, etc. Of course some were quite big, too big to ignore so Twitter made sure to bluecheck them, after all Twitter profits off of having giant projects officially use twitter and the check protecting both the project and the users of Twitter. But what about the others? Did they keep it scarce on purpose so the demand would increase? Did they keep it scarce so that the demand could be monetized by people desperate enough? Or was it just constant negligence and a few rogue workers seeing an opportunity to make some money by "letting them skip the queue to bluecheck them for a price".
Point being here, these databases are all private. If nothing scandalous and huge occurs that'll drive everyone to look there, many in control/power get away with a lot of things. I don't for a second expect that things are different over at Reddit or any other web2 platform.
I remember another story by a user that was super popular on Reddit, some biologist or something who was always there at the right time replying with the right thing and cashing in big on that useless imaginary reddit point system called karma. Eventually some people got suspicious and skeptical. Was this guy such a genius and expert in the field or was he using wikipedia/the internet and getting lucky with his timings and appearances? I mean keyboard Wikipedia warriors are nothing new, people like to pretend they're so clever and amazing on the internet and especially on platforms similar to Hive where they're given enough time and chances to research things before they type them, compared to say talking to them face to face or in real time. It's one of the things people like to lie to themselves about just so their internet persona looks better, I could bet that there's way less "I don't knows" out there than people giving you facts they've just googled and calling you a dummy while at it cause you didn't know.
This biologist got greedy, though, and it often reminds me of one of the fallacy's with people who try to sockpuppet and use multiaccounts, they think it's easy and they'll manage to fool everyone else but when they least expect it they often do the one mistake that gives them away and ruins their reputation for good. I'm not 100% sure on what the story was, but his username was called Unidan so you can probably research it, I'm not going to just to make it sound like I remembered it fully, but the gist was that he was in a debate with someone else and they noticed some odd activity around him. Not only would his comments often and consistently get upvoted quick, but others he was debating against would get downvoted, even in statements were they knew they weren't wrong so they wondered if it was just Unidan's fanbase reacting to protecting him or if the wisdom of the crowd was failing for other reasons. I think eventually an admin decided to take it upon himself to check activities surrounding the involved debaters and noticed how a few accounts would automatically not just then but had a big history of upvoting Unidan. He later came forward and admitted to having ran many alt accounts he used to "highlight" his responses with to give them a "headstart", etc, and I guess it got away from him and he started using them to also "silence" his "competitors" for attention in comment sections and debates. Unidan was banned.
The thing that stands out to me from this story is not that I'm surprised someone did this, but that he got away with it for so long. He was one of the top popular users on a multimillion daily/hourly active user platform and he had to really abuse it for people to bother looking into it. What does that say about web2 in general? What does it say about others who easily could do the same thing, either with a few bots, some black market activity or heck even manually logging back and forth on a few alts to boost their own attention. Who's going to check that activity constantly if it's not that big for people to suspect anything on? Does Reddit have millions of admins able to look at the database for the activity? Do they have sophisticated technology to determine if certain votes are real or fake, check through the activities of each account to determine if they're real or bought? Do they bother when they know that karma isn't worth anything?
What does that tell us about advertisement? Do you think the only way people post ads on Reddit is through their ad system or do you think some may use black-market or expert hidden advertisers who post in a way that makes it not sound like an ad as long as the content favors a project or company and lands on trending to get it the most attention?
The main difference between these and Hive, and I'm not saying these kind of tactics would be impossible on Hive neither, but here everyone can check for themselves. Reddit and Twitter isn't opening up their logs in their databases to everyone and most likely never will. As for Hive everyone can check who upvotes this person's post/comment, how much stake that account has, what else does it vote for, what does it comment on, what did it vote for/comment on recently, how did it stumble upon this post, is he following the user or subscribed to that community, etc, etc. It gives us so much more leeway into determining if a post or comment was upvoted because they wanted to upvote it or if the poster paid for some hidden service to active certain accounts to get his post some attention through the upvote system.
Think about it back in the Steemy bid bot days. It really wasn't hard to determine if a post was bid botted up to trending or if they had been genuinely curated. Even with services such as @smartsteem that used other people's posting keys to sell votes without the need to delegate it was quite easy to see that the trail was a bought vote. Nowadays there are no more "public" bid bots. Now I know that if we had more attention as a platform, millions of daily active users these services would become a lot smarter, in fact they'd have to be since everything is open here, but we'd at least have the opportunity to decide for ourselves rather than seeing things the way we do now on web2. Where it's not just hidden behind a thick veil of a closed database but also ran by people who will never be held accountable for their hidden actions they may or may not profit of in one way or another or have ulterior motives to act or look away if they see such activity.
Numbers don't mean anything on web2 anymore really, there are still people with real attention and they're determined by who is actually engaging with them and how their reputation is and often times what their net worth is. All that is and will remain private without the public/masses ever finding out or being any smarter about it, on Hive all of that comes open and transparent to you by default.
