The Hive community is second to none and the Hive blockchain may be the most decentralized chain out there...That doesn’t mean it’s without problems. We are learning as we go.

One issue that is making it's way into my attention a lot these days, an issue I've avoided for a long time is the issue of downvotes for reward disputes.

I know this topic has been debated a lot before but I’d like to look at it from the perspective of power rather than payout and how it’s executed rather than whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I also want to focus on a specific example that is potentially going to effect a few hundred people who @kennyskitchen has supported here and how we can avoid scaring people off the chain.

The biggest reason I avoid this issue is that I worry that even bring it up too much might scare new users or incite anger among people who haven’t invested the time to understand both sides. It’s easy to demonize people with power. Too easy. It’s true that power does corrupt more often than not but we are a small ecosystem with a lot of smart and decent people and so I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, except when I have reason not to.

Creating a system of governance is just about the hardest thing you can do, and we all come with our biases so I urge everyone to as stay cool headed and patient about these kinds of debates. Even if you are downvoted, try to stay calm and let us hear your perspective rather than rage quitting. At the same time, please be try to understand how one might rage quit or become negative about Hive after being downvoted by someone with a much larger stake. It’s not a nice feeling and for most people would shock and confuse us, and cause us to question how decentralized power really is here.

For all it’s problems, I prefer Hive to anything else out there. I still believe in both the tech and the community which is why I risk putting my neck out there or being totally ignored to make a post like this

For those who weren’t here two or three years ago…

Downvotes may seem like an unnecessary and unpleasant feature that most of us want to stay as far away from as possible. If you were here back then though, you know how much they benefited the platform. Along with the decision to move to 50% curation, we managed to de-incentivize all kinds of abuse, from self-voting, to plagiarism, to pay-for-vote schemes to shitty curation to a terrible trending page to awful rewards distribution.

These problems were all fixed (for the most part) thanks to changes to the rewards algorithm and the introduction of downvotes AND the active effort of the community and it’s largest stakeholders to create a better ecosystem. Whatever motivates each individual, whether it was a deep love of the community, a desire to create a better world, or a desire to protect ones own assets, we solved these problems together through lots of difficult discussions and trial and error. There were many casualties, people and projects who left the chain and some of them may have been justified and some of them were irreplaceable.

Once again, creating a better governance system is a difficult task.

No system will ever be perfect. All we can do is strive to be better and better and so we need to have these hard discussions sometimes. I don’t enjoy them.

The current issue

There are some people (including some of the largest stakeholders) who think that “disagreement of rewards” is a fair reason to downvote. Depending on your role on the platform and how you interact with it, this can seem like common sense or a stakeholders attempt to dominate the chain.

Depending on the motivations and methods, both of these could potentially be true.

It makes sense that people want to use their stake

• to make sure shitty posts don’t go trending
• to counter excessive autovotes or random votes that ignore content quality
• to discourage posts or topics that they see as harmful to the chain
• to deter users from being shitty community members or self voters.
• To prevent anyone from taking too much of the reward pool, especially when we don't think they deserve it.

The problem is that in many cases, this is a very subjective judgement.

So do we just agree that everyone can downvote as they please and that's that? That seems to be the current consensus and one that I disagree with. After all, if "My stake, I can do what I want with it" was enough, there would be no need for downvotes. We created downvotes to solve a problem with incentives, and so it makes sense that we will need future adjustments to incentive structures.

Being downvoted by someone with more stake than you also highlights power disparities more than upvotes do because it inevitably feels much more like an attack.

The people doing the downvoting may not think of it as an attack or as a display or power, but that's how it will be perceived by anyone who has struggled to get heard or seen on chain. As for power disparity, this is a very complex issue because without sufficient incentives to stake Hive, the selling pressure will be perpetually higher than the buying pressure and this deflates the price of Hive to worthlessness.

It's easy to complain about whales and how unfair things are (I used to!), but whales often understand the chain better than minnows, are involved in continued developments and are often the people that work hardest to keep Hive valuable as an investment, whether they buy Hive or they just stake it.

We are doing our best to be decentralized but we are still a far way from it. That's ok. This is not easy. We have essentially created a little society. That's an incredible feat and the fact that we have this many people and this much development is amazing. It will take time and a lot more trial and error to get it right and sometimes disagreements will arise, and we will have to learn from our mistakes.

I don't want to make anyone feel like whales are waiting in the shadows ready to downvote you. That's not the case. Usually.

In 5 years I have never been downvoted by a whale (and I hope that this post doesn't change that). I have found most of the people arguing against downvotes to be whiney and unable to compromise or discuss things, which is why I believe the community doesn't come to their rescue when they are downvoted. I understand though, it’s easy to get that way when you perceive someone stronger than you as attacking you (whether or not it’s an attack is one of the issues that we need to hear more from both sides on).

There are some topics and communities that seem to attract more downvoting than others, and some people who are more likely to get downvoted than others....

Recently @kennyskitchen and @ura-soul as well as others in the “Truther” community have been getting 100% downvotes from @acidyo @curangel and @azircon and are not too happy about it. @smooth also downvotes posts that complain about rewards.

Some others like @josediccus and who is non-aggressive as far as politics and hive issues has received downvotes as well as Natural Medicine community for "trending too often" and "not being transparent enough". While that reason is fine for me, I wonder if it would have been downvoted if it was a community run by a larger stakeholder.

See, I'm not even going to argue here that any of these downvotes were wrong. I pay way too little attention to what posts and what users receive how much of the reward pool, who self votes, and who interacts and contributes to speak on that.

That's why I have never downvoted unless I see blatant abuse or spam.

The main points I want to make are

#1 1-3 users/projects being able to decide what ends up on the trending page and what gets 0 upvotes does not reflect the ideal of "decentralization"

This is true of upvotes as well as downvotes, but while a "unfair" upvote is easier to ignore, a 100% downvote from a whale on your post or a friends post is a lot harder to ignore. It feels like an attack and makes us feel powerless.

I believe that eventually we need to find a way to distribute voting power further. I do not know what form it will take. A complex reputation system? Faster voting decay on certain kinds of voting behavior? Different rules for upvoting/downvoting? I do not know. This will take the whole community to come up with a solution. We don't want to de-incentivize people from trying to build a big stake here, and there is the issue of multiple/anonymous accounts (which is not something we really want to give up) so this is a tricky balancing act.

#2 Until we find a way to further decentralize power , we need to encourage a softer approach to downvoting, otherwise the community risks a continued leakage of users and support.

Decentralization won’t come from just technology. It will come from our effort to create it. Just because you have a $300 downvote doesn't mean you have to use it. If you disagree with the rewards it's one thing to knock of 20% of the current rewards. It's another to nuke it to 0. It's also a dirty trick if you leave it alone until the last minute only to downvote it right before payout.

I know that if I earned $200 on a post (first of all I'd be thrilled) I'd feel much differently about one user giving me a 15% downvote equal to $40 than them giving 100% downvote and cancelling out any and all potential rewards.

#3 We don't want to feel like voicing our opinions could result in having all the support we have worked on for years being erased in a moment.

I am nervous that even just writing this could cause me to lose support or even worse, make me a target. I don't think it will, but it's still a scary thought. I don't plan on selling most of my stake any time soon, but it's a safety net that makes me sleep easier, and I like to be able to support other users so the thought of becoming someone's enemy here makes it hard to speak honestly sometimes.

We may have a censorship resistant chain but we want to feel like it’s fair and welcoming too. If it feels fair most people will stay, whether it’s for money or to get our voice out there.

I also don't see the logic in demonizing someone for caring about their payout when it can influence their ability to survive in the world AND also their ability to influence the chain.

Remember many people don't have the resources to invest money, all they can invest is time and energy, and just because you don't see the value they bring, doesn't mean they don't bring value.

Perhaps in the end the best solution will be merely more support for anti-downvoting groups.

It's ok to disagree, but we should try to be more understanding of each other regardless of our position. That's how we learn.

Both Kenny and Acid have done an incredible job at distributing the rewards pool far and wide here, so this kind of thing makes me really sad. While everyone knows Acid, most people don't know that Kenny has onboarded countless people and has encouraged millions in investment for Hive and has supported a wide variety of users, not only hard-core truthers.

I won't even argue with the decision to downvote him. All I can say is It might be less about what you do and more about how you do it. Take your ego out of it. Be prepared for an angry person on the other side of the downvote and sympathize with that. Do your best not to scare them off chain. You may not care about them, but what if 100 people follow them? What if a great project ends up leaving the chain because of what they perceive as unfair power dynamics.

We want this place to be better than what came before.

If we are going to have “downvote because disagreement of rewards”, any whale engaging in it needs to do so with full awareness that throwing their weight around with downvotes could potentially scare people off the chain and hurt their investment. The same way people no longer self-upvote to the same extent, we need to incentivize and encourage a culture here where people aren’t trigger happy with the downvotes. Otherwise we all lose.

I think we can come up with a solution that can satisfy both sides of this debate, even if it won't satisfy every single individual but we need to be willing to respect each other a little more and point fingers a little less.

We need to consider out all viewpoints and look outside of our circles to come up with the best approach to keep this a healthy ecosystem and a good investment.

I’m putting my neck out here because I trust our large stakeholders will see that if they don’t tread a little more carefully with downvoting in this fashion (and eventually come up with a code based solution), they’ll likely scare off all but their own circle and turn their investment to shit. And cause I think a bunch of them are decent people who could understand (if they try) the frustrations of those of us who don’t have the money to invest enough to become whales.

Please prove me right.