Bad actors might be one of the most useful forces Hive has right now.
Not because they add value—they don’t—but because they expose every weakness in the system. They force us to confront what isn’t working, and whether we’re willing to fix it.
Hive doesn’t struggle because of a lack of ideals. If anything, we have too many. The real issue is our reluctance to balance those ideals with practicality. When we build apps, when we try to grow this ecosystem, we can’t cling so tightly to decentralization that we sacrifice user experience or shut the door on broader adoption.
Censorship resistance is one of Hive’s strongest pillars. It’s the reason many of us are still here. But in practice, even fundamental freedoms come with limits. The idea that a system can be completely open without consequence isn’t strength—it’s naivety.
And we’re seeing the cost of that naivety play out in real time.
There are accounts that contribute nothing and exist purely to spam—hundreds, sometimes thousands of repeated messages in bursts. This isn’t edge-case behavior anymore; it’s persistent enough to degrade core features. Notification systems like F.R.I.D.A.Y become unusable without aggressive filtering. Frontends like PeakD have already stepped in to patch the problem visually, making comment sections readable again—but these are surface-level fixes. The underlying issue remains untouched.
At the protocol level, the incentives are still misaligned.
Resource credits are too cheap. That’s partly a function of low network activity, but even if usage spikes, it won’t matter much. Some bad actors already hold enough stake to operate above any realistic RC pressure. We’ve seen this before—cost increases alone don’t solve abuse when the abusers are well-capitalized.
Reputation was supposed to be the counterweight, but in its current form, it doesn’t work. Some accounts are effectively immune. No amount of downvoting meaningfully impacts them. A system that can’t reflect behavior isn’t a reputation system—it’s decoration.
That’s why proposals like the one from 
In that model, bad behavior doesn’t just get ignored—it gets progressively more expensive. Reputation drops, costs rise, and abuse becomes harder to sustain. More importantly, it allows for recovery. If someone changes course, the system can reflect that too. Accountability without the possibility of redemption just creates a different kind of failure.
And this is where the idea of invisibility comes in.
Because that’s the direction we’re already heading—just informally.
Users mute. Frontends filter. Notifications get customized. Bit by bit, the community is building its own way to deal with abuse: not by removing it, but by refusing to see it.
Invisibility is becoming the default defense.
The question is whether we acknowledge that reality and design around it—or keep pretending that unlimited openness, with no meaningful friction, is sustainable.
—MenO
