I Now Vote For @Deathwing's Witness & Pushed Him Into the Top 20 - After Talks About His Support & Understanding of Free Speech on Hive

As I announced recently, I currently have over $1.7M worth of Hive Witness votes available for witnesses who openly state support for free speech on Hive and specifically in the context of the use and abuse of downvotes. Sadly, very few witnesses even replied to the offer of $1.7M worth of support for them! I'm not sure if that is because they don't pay attention to the chain or because they disagree that misuse of downvotes is a big problem for hive.

Anyhow, I have previously explained why I am voting for who I vote for and have now added @deathwing to the list. This actually pushed him up into the Top 20 witnesses, so congrats to him! If you are interested to see the summary of our conversation, you can read the comments from him under the post I linked above.

In short, while he wasn't originally seeing downvoting as being a problem for free speech on Hive, after explaining the less obvious details he added support for experiments to reduce the amount of free downvotes available to Hive users to his support for free speech in general. The idea here being that currently everyone can make 2.5 free downvotes per day - a figure which has never changed in response to the effects felt in the community. As my site HiveAlive has shown via it's Untrending Report, the figures surrounding downvoting on Hive leave the door open to activities that are counter to the spirit of decentralisation and free speech.

I have covered this topic extensively already and it is unlikely that commenters are going to say something in response to this that hasn't already been said 100 times, so please bare that in mind before commenting here ;)

The bottom line is that censorship is NOT just about post deletion, censorship literally means (in dictionaries) SUPPRESSION of growth and spread of information, which is one of the exact purposes of downvoting. It is therefore, critical that Hive is optimised to minimise the harm done to it's image and community sentiment via ideologically or profit driven downvoting. There are several possible solutions to this challenge, but top 20 witnesses being open to discussing changes to the system which might enhance user experience and make onboarding from the ever growing community of censored and dissatisfied Web 2.0 users is a key part.

I would also like to thank @aggroed and @yabapmatt for their heavy upvoting in response the several month long, sustained downvoting of all my posts by @curangel and @azircon (for unjustified or explained reasons). I appreciate it a lot, it means a lot to the community (and to me) to know that top 20 witnesses are paying attention to the daily dynamics on chain.

I'd also like to thank @pharesim for revoting me as a witness, though I am a bit confused that he has done that even though his project continues to downvote me constantly. If you see the situation differently now to how you did during our brief conversation months ago, then I'm happy to talk and discuss solutions.

Again, good luck to @Deathwing and to Hive in general!

Wishing you well,
Ura Soul

Read My User Guide for Hive Here