There's this thing I've noticed regarding hivers over the years, where if they're doing alright then there's no complaints, aside from complaining about how Hive could be doing better compared to other coins out there. Then when something happens, and 99% of the time it's not due to malicious downvotes or any other reason than their own fault usually which means they're not able to earn from post rewards the ways they've been before - they turn against Hive in an instant.
It's kind of weird, like I don't really understand it. I'm sure there's many other users here on Hive who might feel the same way, a majority even I'd say, but I've still have seen it happen more times than I can count. Here's a few examples as of late.
There was this one user who always complained about not being curated "enough", i.e. not making as much post rewards as he would have liked or felt he should. This is of course a subjective thing but I realize it's something quite unique to most people, how they perceive this in their minds. Certain actions on Hive may not mean much to you and me but to others it may build this sense of "debt" they believe the platform owes them.
"I've been here since 20XX, I should be rewarded more."
"I've been active daily posting and commenting, I should be rewarded more."
"I haven't powered down any stake, I should be rewarded more."
things like that. To me personally when I noticed the complaining, which was hard not to cause they did it on my posts, I checked out their account and the user was correct in that he was posting daily but most of his comments were always replies on his own posts. For some reason they also never curated the comment section which felt weird to me. We have this awesome ability here to reward your followers with some votes for having taken the time to consume and engage on our content but we're just going to leave a similar message saying "thanks" to all of them and not upvote? It's kind of like shooting yourself in the foot for no reason, imo. I don't personally listen to the people who say "you're just voting up comments to "bribe" them to come back to your posts or to get them to curate theirs. Dude, that's one of Hive's advantages, with stake you've either bought or earned you can buy attention, now if you curate shitty comments from people who obviously haven't read the post and are just coming in for their daily 0.1 hive then it might be your fault for not curating properly but don't try and use proper curation against someone as a way to "buy attention" cause the attention economy is one of Hive's main strengths but it's more important on how you use that stake.
Either way, the user was making maybe $3-5 per post and receiving a few comments here and there so I felt it wasn't really worth more upvotes because the content didn't really stand out to me as anything exceptional and I wasn't too happy with some other things I noticed aside from the things I mentioned above. He was following A LOT of accounts, like so many that it felt like he was going for the indirect "follow 4 follow" tactic where people either spam or automate the following action to active accounts in hopes to get them to follow you back when they notice the notification. This is also something I've really been against since I joined this chain. Sure the people I follow right now on my personal account aren't perfectly suited to my interests and people I'd follow on other socials but that's cause I view my activity here for now not just personal but to follow those I believe bring value to the platform even if their niche isn't of my interest particularly.
Over time when I went back to check on this user now and then there was always something fishy about it, some times I couldn't tell but it felt a bit like the posts lacked personality, opinions, etc. I didn't make much of it but another thing I noticed was the increase in these comment command token activities. From the outside his posts seemed to be receiving a lot more comments but when you opened the post up you'd notice that 80-90% of the comments were these automated tribe tokens along with some real users just spamming the commands over and over without even bothering to leave a genuine comment along with them and the author copying the others.
Either way, the reason I'm posting this is because I noticed they had done a "I'm leaving" post recently which was most likely due to hivewatchers starting to downvote the account so I figured at some point he had been caught reposting or plagiarising or something of the likes which would've made sense with my intuition of there being something fishy with the account and I was kind of glad I hadn't rewarded the account more because if that was the case then it would've just meant more stake going down the drain that could've rather been used on other accounts. I was curious to find out what exactly had gotten him on the HW list, though, but the crazy thing was that his posts were so filled with automated tribe bot comments giving out some tokens that I could literally not find the comment placed by hivewatchers. It's as if he was using these bot commands to either hide something since they've been going on in forever or just farming these tokens to the max making his comment section quite literally unreadable unless you enjoy digging through hundreds of comments to find a couple genuine ones. Not really sure but needless to say it hadn't helped his curation complaints he was going on about earlier because activity like that shouldn't be encouraged. I guess eventually he had given up on earning more per post and had settled with the autovotes he was getting and trying to maximize on the tribe tokens even if they barely are worth anything removing any chance of getting curated more in the future. Now I don't know with this case because as I said, I literally couldn't find the HW comment, but I'm guessing this need to get the most out of the automated upvotes got him to become lazier over time to start reposting/plagiarising/something requiring of close to no effort while still getting rewarded.
It's weird that some of these people don't just make due with all the Hive they've earned over the years to just sit idle and enjoy the curation rewards when they have nothing new to post or are feeling tired/writer's blocked.
Now I can't talk for this case, but often what I've seen similar users in this situation is that instead of admitting to their mistakes and how things went wrong they instantly go for the offensive. Start talking how everything's wrong with HW then move on to talk bad about Hive as a platform, then the community, etc. Very few own up to their mistakes and just ask the community for another chance, which it often may give because we all want to succeed together. It's also weird that so many of them have earned more here than they would ever on other platforms but this block in receiving another $3-5 rewards daily means they forget everything they've earned so far and go on a tirade on other socials to try and bring Hive down while they're powering down $1000 per week to sell.
It's this weird mentality where "if I can't have it as good as them then I'm going against them", similarly I've also noticed some who are like "haha it took you this long to figure it out, thanks for the money" and others who try to make stakeholders here feel bad. This "me vs them" mentality where they go "lol you've held onto hive while I sold mine and bought this and that at the top, lol loser" all the while they were complaining just a few weeks ago how they should be rewarded more. Similarly over the years it's weird to me how many people this chain has helped financially and many must've done well over the years in other coins and projects, close to none of them come back "to their roots" to at least be grateful for their starting journey and what this chain introduced them to. It's like they use the chain as a stepping stone to do better for themselves then don't really care about it. I don't know about you but I'd kind of feel bad if I were to behave like that. I'd be a disappointed in myself.
Alright this post got a little too long already so maybe there's no more room for examples but it's something I've also noticed with some curation positions in my curation project. When you invite them over and give them a chance it's all fun and games but when the time comes you have to remove them from the position of "power" and "rewards" then everything changes. Even when we have good reason to do so, such as lack of activity in the field they were invited for, they find any reason to go on the offensive on you, the project or some parts of Hive rather than looking inwards and wondering if they could've done better. It's like they take it personally even though we've made it quite clear that there's many people deciding on this in the project to remove leeway for personal opinions and judgements. Instead of being grateful for the time and attention and value they were receiving and being able to give to their community/users they're just unhappy and against you for the rest of time because it got taken away.
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