I'm not really sure how to begin this post, some times the disappointment can really get to you when you rely on others to do the right thing and keep on doing it. This post is also not really directed at anyone nor am I going to try and victimize myself, it's just some things I thought I'd take the time to rant about that I've thought of lately.
Why are you on Hive, Acid?
I mentioned in the Hive Thrive interview recently how I stumbled upon hive, I think there's an old post on chain where I shared a screenshot of a discussion with a friend I had before Steemit was created, although it was in Swedish I think people got the gist - I was basically discussing a reddit-like blockchain with a friend before Ned plotted to centralize his idea. Having been an avid reddit user and into crypto for a while it made a lot of sense but without the technical know-how or the funding nor contacts to get something going I was happy someone had done the work already so I may as well just jump in and use it.
Before that I was quite into shitcoins you might call them, I mined dogecoin within the first hour it was created. Even though I only had a couple GPU's to play with, I remember earning like 72k tokens per minute/block back then and seeing the rewards drop in that mining pool as hashrate increased along with the difficulty. Naturally I didn't hold many long term, kind of crazy to think what these markets have accomplished over the years - for better or worse, that me, a random student at home on a PC with 2 AMD GPU's was mining close to $60,000 per minute for a short period then and at dogecoins all time high. I was quite experimental, would mine some random coins here and there as they launched and seemed fair enough. I could name some you've probably never heard of before like worldcoin, earthcoin and bellcoin (which funny enough were created by the same guy who created dogecoin if I recall correctly) and as many random points or in-game currencies in some old games or save files are now gone to never be recovered again. I could tell you how many Dash I had at some point before they were called X coin or when they were still called Darkcoin and how much that would've been at the ATH. I could talk about ETH's first clone called Expanse and how it pumped only once just as I went into the city to convince some friends not to buy into onecoin and pick up ETH for under $1 instead or many other squandered opportunities.
I do wonder some times what shit I would've gotten involved in or how many other lost opportunities I could've had or maybe succeeded for once on if I hadn't ran into Steem and focused all my attention there. That doesn't matter however, in this simulated universe I chose to focus on Hive, and why Hive? Well, because of how it distributes tokens through curation.
Why did I focus on curation? Well, I guess it came from Reddit where I liked voting up what I liked and commenting on stuff and thought that'd be the best way forward to build up my account here on an immutable chain and do things right along with hoping everyone else would as well given the opportunities this chain enables.
Sure some times I wonder if we're on the right path, if the way inflation works is the most efficient, if the way how inflation is reduced is the best way forward or if the leaders in this decentralized ecosystem are the best for it. I some times even wonder if I'm good for this place, maybe it's my streak of bad luck in the past that's keeping this chain from getting the attention it deserves, maybe if I stayed away it'd finally bloom into the thing it deserves.
Having worked here for a long time and constantly trying to do the right thing is kind of tiring. It's almost been 9 years now, that's longer than I've ever hyperfocused on anything else in my life. Every so often I get a sense of accomplishment when I see certain communities grow, people empower themselves with stake and spread it well around with others. People being able to use Hive as a way to not only aid their daily life with some extra spending money but also learning and growing along with it. If I took a look at some of my old posts and comments I'm sure I'd cringe at most of them not just cause of how naive I may have been but also cause I've grown a lot since then.
Every now and then some things happen however that bring out some kind of disappointment in people. I'm quite frankly not sure how to react to it and it makes me wonder how I'm going to take it if my own yet to exist kids in the future would do something that'd make me disappointed. Not sure I'm prepared for it but maybe I've learned enough by then not to take it too hard and understand that everyone's different and changes over time as well.
What was it I was going to post about again?
Oh right, so there's a few things that happened recently that kind of caught me off guard. Again, this isn't about anyone in particular but mostly the interactions and ideologies that made me feel a bit like I may have wasted time, effort, voting power and hope on some users.
There was someone who quite openly and directly pointed out to me saying I'm one of the main reasons the price of Hive is where it is today because of my actions. This was in relation to an account I had downvoted recently as they wouldn't stop buying votes and had been doing so for over a year already. The thing is that this wasn't just a random account I hadn't interacted with, and I'm not saying what they said had much meaning or truth behind it, I still stand by my actions and they probably just wanted to vent and blame someone for the decline in price, but. Imagine you're doing what you think is right as a curator, spending quite literally every day for the last 9 years voting on your feed, voting on community feeds, etc, not just on people and content you're interested in and have a friendly relationship with, but what you think is best for the platform as a whole. I follow quite a lot of accounts, many probably not active anymore or any stake left - as was this account in question - and most of these accounts I wouldn't follow anywhere else. By this I don't mean they're bad or anything, but the things they post about is not something I'd generally consume, it's just what I think and see others are consuming and seem valuable to the chain that I want to continue following these users so I can throw some inflation their way every now and then in hopes they'll do the same. The account saying these things was someone I had tried to interact with when they had some issues with another account on hive and may have been the reason they left. I had spent time interacting and getting involved to find a solution to protect and continue supporting this user as I felt the actions upon them may have been concluded wrongly. When someone you follow and have voted on many different occasions all of a sudden reappears and says you're one of the main reasons the price of Hive is down it hits you differently.
Again, they have no basis for saying what they're saying - it's not like I'm believing they're right or that they even had any truth to it, but the sense of disappointment in people still gets to you somehow. How did this user get it in his head that after all my quite transparent activity here for so many years would think that just because I'm trying to protect the rewards pool from unfair voting schemes I'm actively "destroying" hive? It's quite weird to me.
The bad apples are often the loudest.
This isn't something new, over time those who've been abusing the rewards pool have often shown their true colors when it comes to downvotes entering the scene. They often play victim, blame everyone else and lastly blame the platform and shame it because it hasn't lived up to the expectations of many - all the while they were doing close to nothing to help it get there. Similarly, those who are affected by certain actions also cry loud. If my actions to try and avoid letting vote selling grow are causing a number of people to miss out on earnings, naturally this is going to spread like wildfire and even though I don't hear about what's being said you can tell that things have been said by the actions of others that randomly hit you.
Again, not trying to victimize myself, I'll be fine, it's just disappointing to me when you start seeing downvotes, witness unvotes, undelegations, vote removals based on certain things that make sense to you and you think majority of people would agree with. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm living in this bubble where whatever I think is best is what I'll always believe, I'm open to discussions and debates and letting others change my mind - it just needs to make sense to me or else I can't force myself to agree with you.
I also know that getting out there and doing what I feel is right when it comes to downvotes or making things fairer for others is going to backfire and affect me - that's just how hive is for better or worse. Did I need to downvote that user cause he kept buying votes? No, I don't get anything out of spending countless hours trying to get them to stop or casting big downvotes once they reach a certain limit of what I can tolerate. Did my downvotes have any affect on the outcome and what I wanted to accomplish? Not sure, but it seemed like discussions weren't doing it any longer.
I am however happy that many of the projects ceased to continue their operations and are pivoting towards curation. I'm happy some others are still around making sense and backing me up on the whole ordeal and that their words also carry weight. I'm generally happy that we put an end to some of that activity and what the curation may lead to for the authors affected and hopefully new ones too. The way some people have reacted about it however is not so great.
"We're only this few active users left, why you gotta start doing this now?"
"It's just very little hive power, let the poor projects do what they need to survive."
"Why don't you go after the big earners earning hundreds daily instead from auto/blind votes?"
"You're running people off of the blockchain with your downvotes."
"It's a decentralized platform, why do you care what people do with their votes?"
"Why are you doing this, what's in it for you?"
These are some of the few things I guess that stood out and I cared to remember that have been said out loud or asked of me privately. I don't know how many of them really need an answer, but, what do you think curation is?
If we give up on curation just because it's not perfect, we make it worse instead of trying to make it better. We know selling votes is worse, we've seen it before, we can see it still on the dumb chain and we can see on the dumber chain what not having downvotes at all does as well.
You guys realize that if we don't have curation, Hive isn't Hive anymore. There's countless of DPOS blockchains out there, some I've invested in early on when they launched even before Steem like Lisk. If you want to earn a percentage off of your stake you don't need to bother with content if that's so stressful to you, just go use Ada.
Curation returns are quite easy to earn, right? You can trail someone or set up an auto-voter or delegate to a project you trust that gives you hive returns and you're going to quite safely make 7-9% APR and another 3% from your hive power. Why do you also want easy author rewards? Why both? What's so special about earning a higher APR and trying your hardest to get there with the lowest amount of effort?
A week ago or so there were some redditposh comments that had done extremely well so I gave them an extra vote with my main account after a curator had voted it with @poshtoken. Since these things take time I try get to them like 2-3 times a week which means that after POSH votes for them they sit there idly for a while and the bigger votes don't arrive until a day or two later. With the way curation is set up right now, this means that whoever that account is that votes it later will be penalized because he voted late. I realize just by saying this here I'm going to invoke some accounts to start voting on whatever posh votes as it's currently earning a high curation APR because of my actions of not voting daily, but I'm saying it anyway for a point I wanna make. Since posh and my own account had voted these comments on day 1 or 2, and the big account ended up voting them on day 3 or 4 before payout, posh and my own account received a substantial amount of higher returns. I think a few of the votes gave me 300% return on my max vote at that time, which wasn't high as my voting power has been quite drained lately but still, I spent only 40% voting mana to 100% upvote a comment early and the late voter, in this case @ocdb ended up losing 50-60% of its returns that went to posh and my own account instead. It felt wrong, I realized what had occurred and I decided to stop voting the comments with my main account. Not just cause @ocdb is my own project so it hurt the delegators but because it profited myself personally unfairly just cause I had the opportunity to vote earlier knowing ocdb would vote later. Why should I get 300% returns on this upvote at the cost of delegators? Sure POSH is going to continue earning a higher APR on curation but it's a nonprofit project meant to do good for hive and its stake is not that big so it's fine for now (until more maximizers appear trailing it soon).
Okay so with that example, why do you think it's fair that a project that has set up a voting bot should earn a higher APR on their votes than you do? Are they doing something valuable to Hive? Are you okay with losing out on curation and author rewards so that they can get it?
A lot of people don't "feel it", similar like I doubt anyone noticed their author and curation rewards may have slightly increased cause I decided to downvote that one account that week. Just cause you don't feel it doesn't mean that it's not happening, however and just cause it may not be a lot right now doesn't mean that it's not constantly growing and taking more and more from you. Worst part is that a lot of these projects are doing it with other people's stake, they may not even have skin in the game and any risk by doing this and ya'll are feeding into their schemes to get guaranteed votes mainly consisting of your own voting power patting yourself on the back at the cost of your neighbors.
Yes, Hive is barely worth anything. Yes, there's barely any active authors left. Yes, selfvoting here and there isn't that big of a deal if you have a small account, but guys, we're here for the long term, right? Are you just here to make as much hive until the next alt season to try and time the market to sell as much as you can and hope to earn it back later? Or do you want to grow alongside others with a clean slate and your head held high that you didn't succumb to some lousy schemes or didn't let lack of autovotes or curation hold you back from the real curation eventually that didn't ask you for a delegation or liquid hive or to buy their shittoken to get it but you got it because you earned it?
What are you going to tell the AI overlords when they come knocking metal on wood and judge you for your hive actions?
There's too much to say about all this, no one's perfect, curation definitely isn't, autovotes get abused, blind votes are annoying, trails can get corrupted, delegated stake can be misused, but buying votes is also up there as one of the worst of them all.
Anyway, not really sure where I went with this post, it's a bit all over the place, sorry for whoever decided to read all of it but also thank you if you did. Luckily I can curate your comment as a reward instead of delegating all my voting power away so I can get that big guaranteed vote from pimpmypost or upmyshit bot that I'm entitled to because I'm here. Good night.