It's great to have a platform where anyone can join and post onto. That was the case with social media. At least, that's how it was until the last 4-5 years when the concoction of 'fake-news' was thrown at alt-media to demonize information that doesn't come form the centralized 'authoritative' source of mainstream media.
Slowly but progressively, people have been censored more and more for speaking about things that 'they' (those with interests of various kinds) don't want the masses to be exposed to. Mainstream media was always in good control of the information they allowed the public to consume. And social media posed a threat to the established narratives that people consumed to shape their view of the world.
It's all about controlling the narrative. If you control information, you control perception of what is possibly happening in the world. Not that everything is said outside of the mainstream media is true, just because it's not what the mainstream is talking about. Just like the mainstream does say true thing. They sprinkle in some falsity with the truth to make it more easily consumed. That's how you swallow bullshit and think it tastes good.
As social media started to crack, we also coincidentally saw the emergence of blockchain social media. The first I know of was Steem, the predecessor to Hive. This empowered people to earn rewards for content. A new era of financial freedom was emerging.
But it wasn't all rosy. There are problems with blockchain tech. Not getting into PoW chains, the Steem chain was a proof of stake (PoS) (one of the first, and later become delegated proof of stake (DPoS) as we could delegate stake to others.
Delegation
Delegating has positives and negatives. You can allow people to use your staking power without giving it them, and remove it when you want. But it promoted the use of bidbots. The majority of top rewarded posts were paid for to get those votes. It was a pay-to-play system now. It wasn't an honest representation of what was actually valued by people voting for it.
The bot owners got a portion of rewards by charging for a service that was detrimental to the platform. and they kept all the curation rewards. They made themselves quite wealthy off the greed of people who wanted to pay to get to the top, rather than earn their way there.
Detrimental? No, it was great, some may say. Right, that's why as soon as 'free downvotes' came into effect, bidbots got wiped out. If they were actually good for the platform, they would still be here. Case closed. Get over your denial.
Anyone who ran a bidbot still sees no issue with what they were doing. It was a 'business model', or maybe they made a 'less evil' bidbot. Because level 5 evil is better than level 6 evil, so its fine, yay, I get to be less evil and get curation rewards as an income driven by the greed of vote buyers, and get popular along the way! Many of the former bidbot owners are still top witnesses and highly popular in this blockchain.
Delegation was also a way for people who were too lazy to vote on content themselves -- either manually or autovoting authors they knew produced the content they valued on each post. Instead of doing that, you delegate to bidbots, and you get a portion of the payments sent for buying votes. You were just upvoting anything that was being paid for.
This still exists now, as delegation for 'curation' groups or bots. You can delegate and get an ROI, return on investment, just like with bidbots. Your investment is your stake being delegated. It's quite popular. They pick content to vote and you get rewarded for the vote you allow them to make on your behalf. Same as bidbots, but without the pay-to-play of users paying to get voted on. There is favoritism and probably backroom deals of sorts or pseudo-nepotism based on who you network and make connections with, etc.
Now that this little history-of-sorts has been delved into, the issue of being able to earn for content comes back into play more clearly. The delegation curation groups do find new content and help to distribute rewards. But you, the user who makes content, have to earn your way to gain support from elsewhere. At least, that is how it's supposed to be allowed to work out.
Downvoting
What the delegation also brings as an opposite to ultra-powered voting accounts, is delegations for ultra-powered downvoting. These delegated accounts can wipe out rewards on posts. One of these delegation curation accounts even lets delegators submit posts to be downvoted. Everyone who delegates stake will get their power applied to downvoting posts, even if they wouldn't downvote it themselves. They use people's stake to downvote some targeted content significantly.
This is what has been happening to me for months now. I post for a bit, leave for a few months, come back, and still this 'curangel' account is there to downvote me over 50%-75% on average. A few times it was about 90% of rewards removed, and once or twice it was 100% due to another whale joining in the downvoting.
I have been here since August 2016 and have earned the support of various people. Some manually vote, and some autovote. Regardless, these people have chosen to reward me with their stake that allocated inflation to my content. But some people don't think I'm allowed to keep the rewards that others have allocated to me.
These content-reward police have been here since at least 2017, and I've been a prime target since since. Apart from haejin getting downvoted for up to 10 lame 'technical-analysis' charts per day for months or years, I would say I've been the most downvoted on the platform in terms of rewards or USD value or rewards in the past 5 years. I'm certainly the most downvoted for duration of time from 2017 to now, constantly, with less breaks of not being downvoted than actually being downvoted by large-stake accounts.
I'm not the only one who is being targeted. There are people who put out valuable information that can help increase awareness of issues in the world, issues that are negative to the advancement of freedom for all, etc. They are posting content that helps inform people on things that actually matter (unlike most of the things posted here). But because they post on these topics or don't post in a way that the content-reward police approve of, they get downvoted for it.
The content that informs people about relevant issues going on in the world and exposing the corruption or immorality going on, is the most valuable (non-monetary) information anyone can put out and anyone else can receive. This is value that anyone who comes across it can benefit from. But some people can't even recognize that value, or don't care about it. They have their own bullshit motivations to not want that value to be rewarded monetarily on hive. I don't care where it comes from -- your wordpress site that you copy to hive, a video on YouTube, BitChute, DTube, 3pseak, odysee, etc. that is embedded or not.
The information content itself matters, and if others value it and want to reward it (like I do), then that content should be allowed to keep the rewards given without the reward police deciding the content can't keep the rewards it has, for whatever lame reason.
The content-reward police either don't like the poster, what they post, or have some issue with the content itself, like where it comes from, the formatting or some other lame reason they decide justifies their power-trip to remove rewards from content that others value and choose to reward. No abuse going on from the poster or content. But these 'authorities' decided something, so that's how it's gonna be. Conform or else be punished. Control.
Why is this an issue? The premise of greater financial freedom for being able to earn from the content you put out. Blockchain was promising in that respect, and many have benefited, many who have not been targeted with downvotes for their content and have been allowed to keep the rewards that others have allocated tot hem.
Not just being able to earn some rewards, but to keep the rewards that have been granted through the action of voting on your content because others value it and want to reward you. They also get curation rewards, so they need to vote. But they could just not care about your content and delegate to a curation group and get more ROI.
Earning your way
A fundamental important part of the new social media blockchain where you can be rewarded for your content, rather than not being rewarded for it on the mainstream social medias like Facebook, is the ability to earn your way to those rewards. Bidbots hampered this greatly, as people bought their way to attention and rewards while enriching the exploiters who took advantage of the greedy motivation by enriching themselves along the way for their 'service'.
And curation groups also hamper this to some degree. The stake owner isn't voting on content they value, they just want some ROI. So they delegate to an account and get paid returns for it. They don't actually vote, they don't find content they value to reward. Instead, a small handful or people have millions of stake at their fingertips and they get to decide what gets rewarded by the votes they cast. That's not ideal, but people want to get ROI without doing the work of even clicking on content to reward. So that's they way it is now.
The greater problem with this power attained through having million of stake delegated to you, is when you get to decide who can and can't get to keep the rewards on their posts. I don't like you, your content, what you post about, how you post it, how you structure your post, how you format it, etc. Whatever reason they want, the content-reward police deem themselves the authorities to determine who is allowed to keep their rewards by not downvoting it, and who is not allowed to keep their reward by downvoting it.
Someone values content or a user who constantly delivers content they value, and votes for them each time. They want to reward that user for their content. But others who have the power to change that are. They are saying no, I don't like something about you or the content, so I'm not going to let you keep your rewards. I'm going to allow the person voting to give you the rewards they wanted to give you, nor make the curation rewards from that voting. Those who want to reward you for your content and being denied that ability and the ability to earn the curation from that vote.
In many cases, those who do the content-reward policing are themselves benefitting from being allowed to keep the rewards their supporters allocate to them, while thinking their are justified in removing rewards to others that their supporters were providing. What a lowly mindset it is to be a content-reward control-freak while benefitting from the mechanism you won't allow others to benefit from for whatever bullshit reason you have to deny honest content creators the rewards from their supporters. I can keep mine, but you're not allowed to keep yours because I say so.
That's not to say there is no place for downvotes. As originally intended, the downvote, formerly called a flag, was a flag for a violation of some kind. This was to fight abuse of some kind, like spam being rewarded, or comment-farming, or trash like technical analysis charts being upvoted by posters buddies and ending up with 4 posts in the top 10 of trending, meaning 4 of the top 10 most rewarded posts. There are also cases of large-stake accounts who self-vote their content more than they vote other people's content, or users who belong to curation groups who use the millions in stake to upvote their content more than others. That's also not playing too fair and can be deserving of some downvoting.
But if you're posting about some information (or any content or media like pictures some people value that I might not value at all) that isn't crap, and people value what you post about, even if they are autovotes to get in before others vote and try to maximize your curation rewards, then you should be able to keep the rewards that voters want to give you. Don't you think? I don't go downvoting content that I don't value, that I don't think deserves the rewards it gets. Why do some inner-group of hive-'elites' (for lack of a better term, who have networked with wealthy or influential users) think they can be the content-reward police and authority to decide and take away your rewards that others want to give you, and also get the voters curation rewards cut.
This reduction in curation rewards may also incentivize voters to go vote elsewhere since their curations rewards will be cut, sometimes in half or more. All because a few people view themselves as the authorities, control-freaks who want to control what amount of rewards some content and users can receive, who can't let users get rewarded by voters who choose to vote and reward them.
Alternative platforms and tokens
A solution to this comes in the form of new platforms built on the blockchain and the new tokens they create to reward people on those platforms. LeoFinance is an example of this (and 3speak with their token to come as well). So far I have not seen the content-reward police step in to say they get to decide who can or can't keep rewards for non-scammy content or self-voting behavior being put out. There is an issue at the moment with one curator who has been abusing the stake of the curation account to self vote themselves a lot. Will this be dealt with, or ignored?
Alternative platforms than the native hive platforms and token can bring even greater financial freedom to people. The LEO token did gain traction fast, and has been at the $1 mark for months while HIVE was at bottoms of $0.20. That's remarkable for an offshoot of the main chain. And anyone can do this, potentially.
What's really unique about LeoFinance is the development of products and services that anyone can get into and benefit from. LeoFinance as a posting platform was/is where you could/can earn LEO for posting and being rewarded for it. And the asshole downvoters on hive can't touch the LEO you are getting rewarded. It's great!
The creator of LeoFinance, @khaleelkazi has shown the potential of these offshoot platform and tokens. But he's doing even more (with help of course), to create value that anyone can benefit from and increase your chance of greater financial freedom. The latest development is CubDeFi.
I won't get into CubDeFi, as I have posted about it a lot recently. If you don't know about it, you can go learn from some of my posts and others as well. You can earn in one place, like LeoFinance posts, and then take that and bring it into CubDeFi to earn there as well or instead. I really value the value Khal is bringing and see the benefit this can bring to millions.
Developers like Khal have created value that anyone can benefit from, and we each can create value in the content we bring forth that can benefit ourselves and others as well. These are truly remarkable times to be involved in blockchain, and certainly LeoFiance and CubDeFi. It's thanks to pioneers like Satoshi, Dan Larimer, Vitalik Buterin and Khal who created the infrastructure or sceond-layer services the rest of us can benefit from. I look forward to more great things being built in the future.