It was brought to my attention that there's now another project starting a beneficiary incentivized curation service and while I haven't looked into their activity or know too much about them I just wanted to point out some things of how using beneficiaries should be okay and what shouldn't be. (The post was meant to be about this but I went on a tangent and discussed other things Hive instead such as downvotes and maximization of returns, will write about that another time and after looking into the activity of linked announcement post more closely.)
Now of course some of you may think, any way should be acceptable, but we have to remember certain rules of curation we've put forward. They're easy to sidestep and many decide to go that route but they're just as unfair to the rest of us nonetheless and it needs to be clear why that's the case.
The issue with the project hope, aside from the usual overrewarding low effort spun content that a majority of their posts consist of, is that it resulted in a lot of indirect self-voting and gaining increased returns at the cost of the authors. Whether the authors are okay with it or not, that's not of importance, the importance is that this project is now gaining a lot more returns compared to other curators. Their actions also showed that they focused quite a lot to only curate posts that were giving them these kickbacks and that indeed their main prerogative was the returns that would let them lease more HP, donate more to community members, etc. Matter of the fact is that what is done with the returns doesn't matter, even if all of it is donated for charity, as it is earned in an unfair way to begin with. Let's not even get to the part where authors who may not have wanted to give them half of their post rewards had no choice as the way they would vote was pretty obvious that if you didn't, you'd be left out most of the time or receive very small votes. There was a lot of wrongs in one place with that project and I'm not going to go deeper into it here as I don't want to make another post about them, but it seems that they've started cutting back on the beneficiary kickback after a few weeks of downvotes, whether or not they've brewed up a new scheme or just the same one but only voting on certain people who'll give them the returns back other ways is not impossibly to assume but now that there's more attention to them maybe people will finally start using downvotes as a more genuine way to shave off some rewards if the content, effort or general contributions to Hive from the authors aren't deemed as deserving as the rest. I genuinely hope that not only will there be more downvotes come the next HF with the linear curve but that they're used well and that any malicious ones either downvoting too hard or due to retaliation or other harmful ways to a users experience will be countered appropriately as we do have more upvote mana than downvote mana.
It feels weird talking about using downvotes well, I know many of you would never dream of using them in the first place and many of you would hope to never live such nightmares to receive downvotes on your own content. Hive is unique, so much so that no other blockchain has yet to implement something like the curation system we have here and finetune and use it as well and fair across the chain. It's easy to generalize and think it's not working well just because some people who don't like the way things are used are usually the loudest while those who are okay or really happy about it may not make as much noise. I like to think of Hive as a very long term project, this means many more years of inflation, development and proof of brain ongoing. We're too often too focused on either short term gains or short term effects of downvotes and how they make us feel, a big reason to that is also because we see upvotes the wrong way. We quickly forget that pending rewards means pending for a reason and many of us are so used to using Hive without even knowing where the rewards come from to begin with, or at least the value of them.
To put it in simple terms, think about dogecoin mining. How many of you are mining dogecoin right now? Probably not many of you, neither am I. I mined it early on for a while but I didn't want to wreck my GPU's too much as they were often running hot and not letting me do other things on the PC. See what I mean? Wear and tear, a sacrifice to mine dogecoin. Other than that I was also not too happy to see that at the end of the month the electricity bill would come knocking and cut out more than 50% of the value my mined coins had at the time, another sacrifice. Electricity cost and hardware.
What about on Hive? Well, we don't have those sacrifices, but we have other more human ones. I'm sure you all know what those entail but I don't think many of you think about what it would be like if you were getting hive rewards too easily too often. There's still a lot of people in such positions where they're getting a lot of rewards either for very little work done or work done at some point in time they're still getting rewarded for or just having invested at the right time and now enjoyin the returns they're getting after already having sold their initial investment and riding out the profits. That's how Hive works and it's okay, compared to investors there could also be many who've put a lot of time and effort into their stake, sold some and are now enjoying the returns of what they felt they could leave staked.
The issue is that there's always some people who just never get enough. It's alright if you're getting rewarded for consistently and constantly contributing to the platform in meaningful ways but I'm sure a lot of you attempt to do it in easy ways.
"Hey let's just get this post out there today so I can collect my autovotes and be on my way."
"Replying to comments? Nah, I don't have time for that."
"Commenting on other people's posts? Nah, why would I waste time on that."
"Checking if I can contribute to Hive in other ways? Bring some value to Hive by promoting it in other places so they can also check out how good it is to me? Nah, lol, that would mean potentially sharing the rewardpool with more people and maybe losing out on some voting power of all the autovotes I get cause I talked some people into voting my posts up some time ago."
It's easy to understand many ways people would not want to risk the value they're earning here today, many would even sacrifice the whole future potential of the platform rather than losing out on a % of returns or upvotes. It's human nature. Some people aren't going to care that many others aren't just looking how to maximize their returns even if they believe in the future of this platform more than they do. Even if they have invested and bought most of the Hive they curate with, even if they've never sold any Hive and have stayed powered up and curating and contributing to the ecosystem in many ways on a constant basis. They won't care if they're riding on the backs of others to still get good returns, while the rest get less and even if the reason their own investment is worth more due to the people who do use their stake well and less selfishly.
That's decentralization. There just will be all kinds of people.
The problem we have today is that we've alienated downvotes so much, we have clone competitors who are against it so much, one almost never used it and were against it since they heavily invested in it and today have got a clownshow of a trending and are centralized in most ways by someone who centralizes most things, the other one doesn't even have downvotes to begin with. We all know by now, after years of trying these other methods, is that not having or using downvotes at all will not work. Don't you think youtube has thought about it and tested it out? Don't you think Reddit has thought about removing downvotes and be more like Facebook? I'm sure they have and I'm sure the latter is a joke to the formers in terms of content, content discovery and rewarding (adrevenue, visibility, promotion) those who do good despite downvotes existing. The difference between those platforms is that their downvotes are anonymous, much like all their activity behind a private owned database compared to our open blockchain that anyone can look into what occurred when, what was posted, who did what.
Just because you know who downvoted your content doesn't mean you should get all up in arms and demand downvotes to be removed, look for ways to retribute to the downvoted or start hating the platform and start listing reasons why it will fail because you lost $40 on a $150 post. Imagine if YouTubers or redditors did that on a daily basis.
"Some of you downvoted my post a lot and I may have lost a lot of traffic to my website because of it, this is why Reddit sucks, why it will never become big, etc." Of course Reddit is already big so that last part doesn't make sense, but at one point it wasn't, when I initially started lurking it it was pretty small, still bigger than Hive is today but still tiny compared to the other giants at the time. Try and think about downvotes the same way you think about them on other platforms. Think about the publicity of them showing you who did it and for how much as a benefit to you instead of as a reason to complain, get angry, grow your hatred, etc. You can instead request someone to let you know why the downvote happened in the first place, not only that but others who see the downvote can counter it when they hear about it or happen to follow you and think it's not deserving. Sure it costs them a little bit as their returns won't be as high but it's possible and it's only possible due to how open this blockchain is. We've gotta be more smart and accepting of downvotes because without them this place will just turn into a never ending farm for certain accounts with stake and new users will have to fight way harder than they do on youtube or reddit to ever receive some recognition, rewards or get into the whole thing and do well if they're deserving.
Okay, fuck, I've been ranting on for a long time now and realize that my initial title of the post "another post about beneficiary usage" doesn't make much sense so I'm just going to title this differently and just post it in that rant community instead and do some more research on the new announcement I read about using the beneficiary in exchange for votes and why that's wrong cause this post spun out of that context real quick.
Hope this post helped some of you see downvotes in a different light and that maybe, the short term ROI and greed may not be worth it over your dignity and long term respect and rewards the platform may give you for not losing face and instead playing by the rules that make this platform the best one on the internet.
