Even though I haven't posted on Hive lately, I've tried my best to keep up on what's going on and manually curating to use my hive power in a supportive way. One of my favorite things to upvote and support is independent investigative journalists like @pressfortruth and @lukewearechange.
They inspired me to do an investigation about The YouTube Wage Gap Fortunately, because of the pressure from publicity on the issue, YouTube has since then backed off and reimbursed those affected.
But now it seems I need to come out of my Hive Hibernation early to investigate some controversy happening right within Hive.
It appears Hive users are being harrassed and downvoted with double standards. I noticed user @Hivecoffee feeling censored and dejected, needing to 'bend the knee' and deleting their post after being targeted by another user and downvoted.
So I looked into the user(st8z) that was alleged to be attacking hivecoffee, finding out that they have been targeting many other users who were replying and pleading with him to not downvote and to provide with some reason for the attack on their free speech. One user was lucky enough to get an elegant retort of
'I can tell you why I downvoted your content: It's just bullshit. Nobody needs that shit spammed in this frequence, there is 0 benefit. It's just anyoing if you try to find interesting articles and stumble across shit like this. Don't take me to harsh, just being honest.'
And 'Does not fit into a financial community. Sorry, but ppl like you are spamming this site wíth a bunch of this shitposts. Downvoted.' To another.
So at this point you're probably like "So what? This guy is just downvoting shitposts? Isn't that just the system working itself out?" But if you dig a little deeper you can see the hypocrisy and multiple double standards which is actually just another version of the cancel culture people are fleeing that Hive is supposedly a safe haven from.
First, st8z uses LeoFinance to support his initiatives which are not finance related. The last few months he has been trying to run an ARG(alternate reality game) in LeoFinance which is not finance related at all. Essentially the game was some watered down version of Cicada 3301 that has pay to win elements where you can buy hints each week for 8-100 Hive. Not only is this shitpost considered permissible but it was actually promoted.
In addition, st8z was targeting users shortsightedly. One post was without question a financial post. @demondantv/after-action-review-of-tell-me-why-chapter-1-6dhjzq with a chart and some fundamental analysis. Others were posts that used the LeoFinance hashtag but were outside hive-167922 which is what Leo and the rules of it governs. Leofinance itself is an unmoderated hashtag.
So here is where the greater picture unfolds... it isn't necessarily wrong for people to be hashtag nazis and downvote low quality posts but it isn't very helpful either, particularly when there isn't a consistent list on whose shitposts are authorizible and others aren't. Coupled with the other problem is that people are actively marketing how alive and well free speech is on Hive. People complain how there isn't enough people on Hive and we just need to onboard more but also seem fine with stifling existing users. Also I noticed an initiative to bring the WallstreetBets community over because of the censorship they suffered. But that's just grand overseer censorship. Here an account with only 3000 Hive Power is able to bully users out of free speech. Some of them even publicly apologizing despite really doing nothing wrong, just making honest content. It's pretty easy to see the similarities between this form of censorship and the ones affecting people who are being deplatformed today like Gina Carano.
Maybe some of their content isn't the greatest but if no one will offer them constructive criticism then the only way they will make better content is through praxis and trying to post as best they can.
Pushing people down to get ahead will never enrich the community and it would be great if there was better etiquette generally utilized where people get some heads up and opportunity to improve instead of the 'shoot first ask questions later' mentality of the instadownvote.
At the end of the day, it's not about demonizing downvoting or shitposting. It's about the future of Hive and whether we really believe in free speech or if we've devolved into a wretched Hive of scum and shillany and it's good that cancel culture is an available feature and with enough staked interest. Decide which one you want and take ownership of that. You can't have both.
It's fine for communities to have their own rules but if the rules differ depending on who is involved then it just seems like we're not heading in a good direction that's distinctly better than what's already out there. And if that's the case why should wall street bets or any other community onboard onto an inferior version of another product?
At the end of the day it is up to us to decide what the future of Hive should look like but is it really worth sacrificing a better tomorrow to sate our ego and greed today?