I’m referring to this post. If you check the other frontends while not logged on, the following images are what you may see.
EDIT: If you got your filters on, you will never see the post from the account.
I’ve been apathetic towards the claims of being censored by downvotes. The negative curation not only strip some rewards away but also chip away reputation points (like they matter?). Any Hiver user who has been here a long time would already know those only matter when you’re trying to make an account less visible but never deplatformed.
If you happen to see a low reputation or negative rep account, you’d have to click another extra button just to see what they posted. It’s no different from tagging your content NSFW and people who haven’t set their profile settings to readily see will have to click extra to do so.
The whole being censored by downvotes has always been an absurd argument. In a centralized platform, being censored can just mean being deplatformed without being given a chance for appeal. Not having the capacity to make a few more reeeee posts crying about how other stakeholders will ruin the platform for their downvoting spree. As if downvotes are the only source of toxicity this platform has to offer?
Less than or equal to 2% of the total of the votes being done are downvotes. The rest are just upvotes for generic content. Hive isn’t going to fail because mean people will just happen to use downvotes contrary to what naysayers have claimed in the past. Remember, this issue goes way back since Hive was 0.15$ below and it’s still here on 3$ price levels. You think those claims would have just eat shit and died by now.
Here’s my take on it, blogging for rewards is an unsustainable model. If your income will depend on the graces provided by a decentralized platform where they can thumbs up or down your salary, that’s not sustainable. You may get flak, lose favor of a patron, or just price tanking your gains making you miss paying your rent. There are plenty of ways to earn from Hive without bothering with the blogging for rewards model.
The whole curation system is a fancy tipping system and everyone can be a curator by pressing buttons. If a professional artist says this post should be worth a lot of $, how would that really matter if some other curator (non-professional artist) that has access to 50k HP says that crayon drawing done by a grown ass man at a level of an elementary grader is worth more?
The same thing when evaluating what goes into trending. I’m sure whatever topics get rewarded more than the others, there will always be a group that says those content is trash because it’s not their cup of tea. I don’t look at what goes on trending and feel the same with other platforms I’m in. You think reddit doesn’t have paid promotions to convince people some unpopular niches just became a hit?
What did people really expect when they sport an unpopular content niche here? The benefits of fame that mainstream topics would have?
If you talk about an unpopular topic, you get the benefits of an unpopular topic and that means having tumble weeds or few comments on your post. How my NSFW even got rewarded was due to the graces of the people I surround with. I’m not deluded enough to think my content matters for general Hive, niche yeah but not general Hive.
If your content is the type that’s inherently unpopular and taps on a specific group, the threat of being downvoted because you’re rewarded will still be there. Don’t get me started about pro vs anti vaccine movements, I’ll tell you who wins in the argument, whichever side has more stake. Why? Because it’s just rewards that ties most of the drama happening on the platform.
9/10 of the problems that happened on the platform can be traced back to reward disagreement. Would be one hell of a popcorn event if those that whine actually staked up more to affect the witness rankings or reward distribution than wait for the alms given by other stakeholders. Get paid for your opinions or shared interests, that’s what the platform has become due to the layer 1 reward structure. If we actually tried to reward the best content on its own niche out there, we probably won’t have a lot of users to vote on.
That’s why we don’t have an ideal platform where content is king because most average users aren’t content creators but content consumers that try to take on the content creation role so as not to miss out on the rewards the platform could offer.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.