Clearing Abusers

The Hive blockchain is definitely a target for people looking to do all kinds of nefarious things when it comes to stealing and draining the reward pool away from people that deserve the rewards. What has been pretty cool to see though is there has certainly been quite an increase in activity to counteract those types of abuse!

One of the things that I look at when I'm logging into Hive for my few minutes of engagement, voting and reward distribution, is where my various levels are at. I make sure that my upvoting power isn't too close to 100% that it would limit out and end up having me waste my voting potential. I also take a look at my downvoting power to make sure that hasn't been used, and if it has, who has it been used on? Mostly the past few months I'd occasionally see my down voting power get drained a little bit because I follow the downvote trail of a select group of people that seem to be a pretty good group focused on reward abuse more than anything. I don't like to follow people who are down voting things willy-nilly as I don't know if I agree with that, not liking a post so you down vote it. I guess that's each persons prerogative but I don't think that is something I go for.

For the things I do accept though, are the people who are policing the place as far as making sure we don't have fake scammer BS people who are trying to siphon off some funds with various shell accounts they are thinking will get them a decent little reward by posting in introduction zone among other areas. I think that for the past 3 weeks or so, my downvote power has never been 100% LOL. I was like whoa! What the hell is going on here?! Either we are getting a huge increase in scammers or we are getting a newfound zeal for enforcement against the community ideals for things like plagiarism, or better yet catching more people who are trying to steal the rewards that we all try to earn but also try to promote through engagement and positivity on the blockchain.

This has been an interesting thing to see! I've seen a lot of posts get cleared for rewards and have also done a little bit myself when I have a few minutes to go out looking but I think these types of activities are important for people to be partaking in. I don't want to create a Stasi type police where everyone is looking to report and snitch on the next person but at the same time, I don't think we should feel afraid to down vote someone's post that's doing things that are pretty shitty. The people who are posting gaming videos with zero additional content and 30 different pages for people to donate and support them are thankfully getting cleared out but the challenge there is that there are legitimate content creators and people trying to make it on Hive that may be doing similar things to that which end up getting caught in the cross fire. I know it's likely not a large number when compared to those trying to steal the rewards from us but it's enough for me to be annoyed at the people looking to scam us!

At the end of the day, I'm glad that I've been following a few trails that keep up with some of the various aspects of the chain here with a finer tooth comb than I am able to do, so that we can have a bunch of good people monitoring the chain for those nefarious players and clean em up. I know we won't be able to get rid of all of them but the more moles we whack with these things, the better we get at keeping them at bay and the whole community improves and prospers.

I did also leave out the pretty significant elephant in the room though that is AI content. That is something a number of other people have recently posted about so I don't think I need to hash that out here thankfully! :D. I agree with the people fighting against it, I can leave it at that!