RIP Hivewatchers

dickturpin(66)

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image source: ChatGPT

Hivewatchers is no more.

Well, bugger me. I have to admit that came as something of a shock. While I like to tell everyone I don't do much with Hive these days, that's not strictly true. I can be found in Ecency Town Square Mon - Fri., but for the most part, I'm concentrating on other things. Apparently I missed the moment when one of the institutions that has been part of the landscape for as long as I can remember has disappeared. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Hivewatchers we knew have disappeared. While there is apparently a proposal to bring the project back, for now the old Hivewatchers are dead, and that deserves a moment's reflection because, love them or hate them, Hivewatchers were part of Hive.

The project goes back to 2016, originally as Steemcleaners, before becoming Hivewatchers after the creation of Hive. Originally, they focused mainly on plagiarism, copy/paste abuse, and reward abuse. Over the years, this expanded to include identity theft, scams, fraud, botnets, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.

They actually did a bloody great deal of work.

According to their own figures, between August 2020 and January 2024, they received 11,677 reports, of which 10,844 were accepted as valid abuse. That's not a trivial number. These included 6,155 plagiarism reports, 156 identity theft/deception cases, 812 photography/art/image plagiarism cases, 742 copy-and-paste cases, 2,247 recycled posts and 566 unverified identity cases. They also said that their work had returned tens of thousands of HBD to the reward pool.

image source: ChatGPT

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this isn't going to be one of those posts where I pretend Hivewatchers achieved nothing. They did, and @guiltyparties, in particular, put an enormous amount of work into it, devoting hours of his own time and fiat for free.

But...

I've never been entirely comfortable with the way Hivewatchers operated. And this is where my usual problem with freedom comes in.

I am a great believer in absolute freedom. Well...

"Hang on, so you're saying your idea of the right way to behave is the right idea over everyone's choice, are you?"

Err? Ooh? Umm? No.

I'm not that stupid; freedom doesn't mean that everybody else has to put up with you behaving like a complete arsehole.

People cannot behave.

That's one of the great problems with freedom: who gets to say what the so-called right way to behave is?

So yes, there has to be some mechanism for dealing with people who deliberately abuse a system, but there is a big difference between dealing with abuse and creating an authority that decides what constitutes abuse, identifies the guilty party, determines the punishment, and then effectively controls the route of appeal.

That's the bit that always bothered me.

The blacklist.

There were certainly cases where the reasons for blacklisting appeared, from the outside at least, extraordinarily tenuous. I have no direct evidence that people were blacklisted because somebody simply had a grudge against them, or was jealous of them, or just didn't like them. But I do think the system made it possible. If I have a dispute with you, and there is a mechanism to report you to someone with the power to affect your rewards, then human nature being what it is...

Well.

You can probably finish that sentence yourself.

It also creates a rather unpleasant throw-him-under-the-bus mentality, and Hive has always had a bit of that. Tribalism: people picking sides. Somebody becomes one of us, and somebody else becomes one of them. And once you've decided somebody is one of them, it becomes surprisingly easy to find reasons why everything they do is wrong. That's not unique to Hivewatchers; it's not even unique to Hive. It's human nature, but giving that human nature a mechanism for reporting people, blacklisting them and removing their rewards is something I have always regarded with considerable suspicion.

And then there was the appeal process.

Ah yes.

The appeal process.

image source: ChatGPT

As I understood it, if you found yourself blacklisted, you were directed towards Discord. Now, I know Discord is terribly easy to use if you already know Discord, but what if you don't?

What if you didn't know where the Hivewatchers Discord was?
What if you didn't understand Discord?
What if you didn't understand what all the different channels were for?
What if you didn't understand the terminology?

And what if, by the time you finally found the right place, you discovered you were entering a room full of people who already knew the rules, already knew the case, and already had an opinion? That doesn't strike me as an especially accessible appeals system. It always struck me like being thrown into a bear pit to be told: "Right, you've been accused of something. Convince the people in here that you're not guilty."

And yes, I know that wasn't literally what happened in every case; people successfully appealed. Some people admitted what they'd done, changed their behaviour, and eventually got removed from the blacklist. But that's actually the point I'm making.

I believe there should have been a rehabilitation route built in from the beginning.

Not simply:

You've been caught.
You're blacklisted.
Appeal.
Prove your innocence or demonstrate that you understand your crime.
Then you're allowed back.

What I would have preferred was an escalation process.

A warning. Then perhaps a temporary sanction. Then a stronger sanction for repeated behaviour.

And only eventually a blacklist for people who demonstrated that they either couldn't or wouldn't change.

And, crucially, a clearly defined road back because people make mistakes. Some deliberately. Some accidentally. Some because they're new and haven't got a bloody clue what they're doing. Some because the rules aren't nearly as obvious as the people who have been on Hive for ten years and think they are. And some people actually learn. That's the bit I think we sometimes forget.

Punishment without rehabilitation simply creates permanent enemies.

And I don't think that's particularly healthy for a community. Which brings me back to Hivewatchers. I don't celebrate its demise, and I don't mourn it. I'm somewhere in the middle. I think Hive needed somebody doing what Hivewatchers did. I think they caught a lot of people who genuinely deserved catching. I think they saved the reward pool a considerable amount of money. I think @guiltyparties and the others put an extraordinary amount of time into something that must, at times, have been a bloody thankless job. But I also think the system had flaws. And perhaps the greatest flaw was placing too much faith in the idea that a handful of individuals should be trusted to decide where to draw the line. Because eventually somebody asks the obvious question.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who guards the guardians?

And then somebody else says:

"We need moderators."

And I hear a little alarm bell go off in my head the moment somebody says, "We need somebody to decide what everyone else is allowed to do."

I'm already up out of my seat, ready to leave. Perhaps that's the real lesson here. Freedom isn't about allowing people to behave however they like without consequence. It's about making damn sure that the people imposing the consequences have limits too. And if you're going to take somebody's reputation, rewards, or livelihood away, maybe give them a way back. Not a bear pit or a ritual apology. Not a permanent label but a way back. Because if people cannot redeem themselves, what exactly are we trying to achieve?

Now the old Hivewatchers are gone. The irony, of course, is that the people with the big sticks haven't disappeared; they're still out there, they're just holding different sticks. And I suspect Hive will still need people willing to point out the scammers, plagiarists, spammers, and assorted ne'er-do-wells. I'd rather we build a system where the objective is to stop bad behaviour, rather than permanently deciding who the bad people are.