It has been great seeing everyone talking about Paradox this week. Its one of my favorite concepts and I have been meaning to try out PoB since @PhusionPhil recommended it to me so guess you managed to onboard me with the one. Something I was surprised to see was no one talking about Hive itself. To me its a great example of a living contradiction and paradox and we have been given particular good case studies to evaluate very recently.
Many proponents of Hive like to boast about the immutability on Hive but the last while there has been a lot of dialogue about downvote abuse and general use of downvotes as an attack vector which seemingly contradicts this concept of immutability. I have already spoken on this topic fairly recently and there's a number of other good posts on it so I'll try to avoid rehashing it for the sake of brevity but try to provide some links for context. Several users have been quite vocal on the topic so its likely you're already familiar with the topic.
@jasonliberty/downvotes-and-reward-policing-abuse-of-power-or-good-for-the-platform
@r0nd0n/the-downside-of-downvotes
@truthforce/how-you-can-help-informationwar-and-deepdives-a-quick-post-regarding-iw-and-dd-community-downvoting-posts
@lucylin/is-this-now-counted-as-malicious-downvoting-part-2a-fridays-meander
@riverflows/new-user-heres-why-you-shouldnt-worry-about-downvotes-mostly
@rawbe/breaking-news-hive-coffee-roasted-and-why-you-should-care-the-sextuple-standard
I'm not here to make a case for or against downvoting. But I do have some interesting musings that I've been curious about around all of this discourse and the paradox in front of us. There's some bullshit being shoveled down people's throats and I do believe we need to create at least enough awareness around it so staked users and those being newly onboarded can be met with a level of transparency about what it is they're getting invested into. There's this mantra about working hard on the quality of posts you're creating and not shitposting, plagiarizing or spamming. But here's the most rewarded user on Hive
I have seen several developers give up and stop bothering to develop on Hive or make proposals with one stating publicly on a discord 'I looked at all the HBD proposals and its basically smooth running the ones that are funded.' And it gets worse when you look at the 10 spam comments being farmed every day from HBD.Funder, adding more to the low effort reward pool rape. It seems like a lot of people are becoming more and more disenfranchised from the poor UX within Hive while there seems to be this hyperbolic concentration of effort towards the HBD peg.
Now I really didn't come here to just speak of doom and gloom. I only have been seeking to observe the paradox before us and as I work towards a better outcome. But considering this situation and the last year on Hive has made me ponder a few things
- If downvotes are such an important part of the rewards/ecosystem, how come you can't downvote on the witness or proposal aspects?
- If Hive is so great, how come one of the biggest projects on it(run by 2 top 20 witnesses) seek to be an independent entity or 'blockchain agnostic' as I've heard Aggroed call it. Splinterlands was one of the main Hive projects and while I use the past tense 'was', I don't think its become less relevant but rather its difficult to refer to it as just a Hive game when its intersected into a number of different ecosystems
- If I'm such a Passionate Nihilist, why do I care?
Ultimately, a lot of these problematic elements don't matter on a long term basis when you examine what we have and the trajectory we're on. It seems to me that we're on the brink of something. I've seen some speculation on some sort of Renaissance and while I can definitely see that being a plausible outcome, there's something that needs to be accounted for. We're exploring some fairly new space and there will always be growing pains as we figure out what the most optimized solutions are. There are more and more projects like Hive that are being created to create decentralized creative spaces. As more and more options become available, Hive (or its denizens) will have to work to stay ahead of the curve in being relevant.
One aspect that I have seen go overlooked is that there has been a lot of focus on looking at Hive mostly as a financial instrument and not as a social/cultural one. Its really easy to see how that was fixated on being a cryptocurrency after all and its fair to want to use it as one but I don't think that plays to Hive's strengths as much as other aspects do. There's this concept called Maslow's Hammer which is a cognitive bias often summarized by 'If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail'. If you consider this common fallacy as well as Smooth's obvious focus on the financial aspects of Hive, it becomes much easier to understand how some people rationalize the use of the downvote whether or not you agree with what they are doing.
In my opinion, enjoying the quality content on Hive and having fun with the gamification are probably the best aspects of Hive especially when prioritizing the ecosystem for the long term. With that in mind, I think there are a lot of things that are being overlooked when considering this and other case studies.
It's fortunate that our timing with this problem synchronizes with a recent example on another platform. You may have heard of the YouTube channel called "All Gas No Brakes". There was recently a controversy surrounding it when there was a conflict between the creator of the channel and the Media group that 'owned' the channel. This video has a good synopsis of the situation but I'll give a quick TL;DW on it. The creator Andrew was doing all the work and Doing Things Media was reaping most of the rewards due to a poor contract negotiation that favored the media company greatly. This resulted in them locking Andrew out of all the social media and leaving the channel. Well Andrew just started another channel named Channel 5 and his fanbase quickly followed him so the entity that owned the brand didn't matter at all. They stayed loyal to the content not the content farm.
This can be paralleled on Hive very easily. Don't like the overlords and what they're doing? Well there are any number of options we could seek out. We could fork away just like we did with Steem. We could make any number of onchain solutions possible and work it out here. We could take our money and cash out and move to another platform. At the end of the day, you're not really beholden to the opinions of any whale or dev. You're beholden to your growth and how much you've cultivated your skills and craft. That's something transferable that you can take anywhere and take pride in how far you've come.
There's one thing about Paradoxes that I haven't seen anyone explore yet this week that I would like to spend some time on and that's the idea of the Koan. In some Buddhist studies, there are these puzzling paradoxes that often used as riddle-like tools. While a person could try to answer them in a very direct sense, the idea is to explore a more non-dualistic understanding by thinking deeper about it. A common example is 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' There are a number of different ways we could take this conversation but for the sake of brevity I would like to wrap up here with a small takeaway and urge to move towards the 'koan' ideal. Perhaps if we framed these paradoxes in a light where it was work still to be done as opposed to something that gets in the way of enjoying Hive we would be more focused on the solutions than the problems at hand. The way I see it 'there is no money in solved blocks' and we are very fortunate to have many opportunities to utilize our 'Proof of Brain' in a meaningful way to continue to parse out solutions on having a better Hive or whatever ecosystem we choose to share on.
Thanks for exploring the meaning of the term Paradox with me. There were a number of different directions we can continue to steer this conversation in so feel free to speak your mind on some of those that I went over a little too fast. I'm interested in creating as much dialogue about this as necessary because I know that it is a source of great tension lately but there is only so much ground I can cover as I ramble on monologuing about this.