What is Hive and who are Hivewatchers?
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Hive, and formerly STEEM, is a brilliant concept. Simplistically it is a way of earning from what you post on the World Wide Web, although for many Hive is different things to different people; for some, like me, it is a blogging platform wherein an essay or an article is posted that took maybe an hour or more crafting together, setting out the best format, checking the spelling and the grammar and setting the images within the piece to grab as much attention as possible. For some, it is a home for ANYTHING in which case they will upload videos songs and even play games on it. Then, a third element sees it as an offshoot, a sideshow of the main event, trading in HIve coins. For me, it's about Community.
Hive is billed as FREE the code is certainly Open Source, and you will hear plenty of folks advertise Hive as: "You're in control of your account, you can't be censored or have you account removed." however, sadly, some elements have no interest in Community or Building something; they see it purely as a means for financial gain. The problem for Hive and the Hive Community is that there is not a never-ending supply within the Rewards Pool, and so Hive Watchers took on the role of guardian of the rewards pool, or to be more factual, the name changed for a project that already existed under STEEM with the username cheetah the name changed to Hive Watcher when the vast majority of the former STEEM userbase migrated to Hive.
Is Hive Watchers like a Police force then?
"The first rule of fight club is: you do not talk about Fight Club."
--Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
You'll often see people moaning that they didn't know or nobody told them; the most unforgivable omission in my book is the fact that at the time of writing this post, Hivewatchers does not have an explanation, guidance or FAQ on their website https://hivewatchers.com which is why I wrote this but more importantly I hope to explain better why they make some of the decisions they do.
Hive Watchers are a group of individuals who have set themselves up to fight Bad Behaviour. Now we need to make things clearer here. The vast majority of people who see a warning notification from Hive watchers on their account have been reported by another member of the Hive community Using the Report Abuse form on the HW website. Those individuals who (Successfully) report transgressors are paid a small bounty reward for bringing cases to HW's attention because they probably don't have the time to trawl through every single new post to make sure it is squeaky clean in terms of the so-called rules and so, therefore, relies heavily on users being the eyes and ears for them.
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Using hivewatchers they will Downvote content they deem has fallen foul of the rules. "But I thought there weren't any rules? I signed up because I was told this was unlike Facebook or Twitter?" If you have fallen foul of HW then you have probably ended up on their Blacklist. Now you need to understand what that means; it means your username is now known by Bots which will automatically downvote EVERTHING you post and any other accounts that you own and post through too until such time that you go to the HW Discord Channel and plead your case in 'Appeals'. Be warned, it is a total Bear Pit, and there's very little politeness there. If HW allows it, you will go through a pretty tough appeals process which takes thirty days to complete. In those thirty days, you may still get downvotes from the likes of adm because HW will not remove your name from the Blacklist until the thirty days are up.
EDIT: I have been advised by guiltyparties that while adm was originally controlled by a bot that is no longer the case. It is now managed by a number of individuals who manually issue downvotes.
It is for you to decide if that's a good or a bad thing.
Downvotes from users have nothing to do with Hive Watchers!
Let's take a slight detour for the minute. The idea of Hive is you post something if people like it, they will upvote it, and by the same token, if they don't like it for whatever reason, they will downvote it. This has nothing to do with HW's downvoting, although it might be because HW has DV'd a post that someone decides to DV the post as well! If a DV really aggrieves you, you should ask the individual why they DV'd a post; maybe they misunderstood what the content was about or, sadly, they may just not like you. Don't be surprised if most folk issuing a DV will not respond. 🤷♂️
By the same token Just because you posted something, it does not entitle you to an upvote! I see so many people crying like a spoilt brat that: "Nobody has voted or commented on my post!" You want votes, start making friends.
Forget everything you thought you knew about content ownership
Hive, or more importantly HW only wants Original Content to be posted. What does that mean? It means: "Something that has never been seen on the Web before." so forget about posting your back catalogue of poetry works or some sonnets in the style of Petrarchan; if HW can find it on the web, you're going to be accused of Content Recycling "But I own it, it's mine?" yep, and that's why you can't be accused of Plagiarism. Still, you see HW doesn't like it, I suppose because it requires little to no effort to take something from your personal blog which you may have already been paid for via Patreon, Flattr or even some sort of crypto tipping plugin and then expect to earn further rewards on Hive but here's the dilemma, authors release revised editions of their books, David Bowie and many other musicians release compilation albums containing songs they'd released before. Nobody says: "Hey! Hang on a minute! You already got paid for that!" so there is an argument to be made of: "Hang on, I thought Hive was freedom-loving?"
Plagiarism
"Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. ... Plagiarism may be intentional or reckless, or unintentional."
--University of Oxford
If you go to a website and either copy a paragraph or even the whole page and post it to Hive (Or anywhere for that matter), that's Plagiarism, and don't think you can be clever by rearranging a few words or sentences because checker tools can spot that. You can't get away with pasting it in your post with the idea of making comments or observations on the piece you copied, either. There are instances whereby it is acceptable to reference somebody else's work, usually, by containing the item in < blockquote > some text < /blockquote > as I did above and also give the original author source. Ultimately, the best advice is: Stay away from other peoples work!
Copypasta
Pretty much the same as Plagiarism, TBH. It's copying someone else's work and pasting it as your own post. I think the term should be dropped and stick with plain old Plagiarism.
Post Farming
This is the practice of either regurgitating an old post, remember we talked about this and how musicians etc., resold old songs? Or, and generally more common, posting the same content through multiple accounts. I'm not a fan of people having multiple accounts for this very reason it encourages less scrupulous folk to post the same thing through, in some cases, hundreds of accounts to pick up as many votes as possible across these accounts so that all those --Child Accounts can be harvested for their rewards.
Posting the same post in another language does not constitute a different post!
This is a common mistake made by people where English is not their first language. The best advice is to make your post-Dual Language. Either side by side or alternating paragraphs.
Vote Farming
This is tied fairly closely to Post Farming; this is where multiple accounts owned by the same individual vote on a post from one of their accounts, usually the main account, in an attempt to give the impression the post is viral and that maybe others should vote on it thus artificially inflating its value.
- Circle Jerk Voting: There are a lot of support groups on Hive that predominantly Upvote Minnows work. There are also Communities that vote on fellow members posts; however, HW seems to frown on people getting their aunt, uncle, brother, sister to vote on a piece of work or a group of people constantly voting for each other in what looks like a voting ring.
Spamming
While there is an element of the conventional understanding of "Spamming" covered within these criteria, such as people dropping some advert in the comments section of a post, on the whole, it relates to what is more commonly known in the wider Internet community as Pinging. This is where someone includes your username in a list of usernames on their post, which will notify each and every username, thereby ensuring everyone will look at the author's post and possibly upvote it. It's a less sophisticated form of Vote Farming.
Dear Hivewatchers: Please feel free to copy-n-paste my explanations on the HW website. This work is licensed under Creative Commons copy/edit/share attribution. 🙂
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