I’ll reply to 2 comments here.

They're not equivalent. Upvotes earn rewards and generate payouts, downvotes don't.

There is your answer to the question “no one complains about upvotes so why do they complain about downvotes?”. A large payout on a post only effects everyone else’s payout by a tiny bit and so we’d rather let it slide, it’s not worth antagonizing people, which is what it does (especially when we risk antagonizing people who could destroy our potential to earn stake).

Meanwhile, one dude deciding that my friend’s posts deserve to have 80-100% of his upvotes countered because he’s from Africa and doesn’t need that much to live…that feels a lot different, like an attack on his ability to build a stake in the network because he isn’t one of the cool kids, or because stakeholders don’t want to let anyone besides their friends have any say here. It feels in contrast to the idea of decentralization.

If the little guys should worry about the little guys, why would the big guys be ok with one big guy going around bullying a bunch of little guys like that? I know it’s not a wide scale problem (yet) but it sends a message to all of us when it goes left unchecked. It also causes us to mistrust downvotes as a useful mechanism (which I can see that it is only because I’ve been here 5 years). If I were a larger stakeholder (I believe I’m around #250, still peanuts), I’d treat anyone bullying smaller users as a threat to my investment, as it scares people away from the chain.

Aside from spam and absolute garbage, if I were to downvote anything, it’d be on posts that earn $1000 when the rest of trending is at $300. Most of those people add a lot of value but are already receiving a large part of the reward pool from their witnesses, from proposals, from second layer tokens and from strategic curation. It also consolidates power and hinders wide distribution of the token. You can see why I don’t do that though, I imagine, judging from your other comment.

very few actually think it is working well, or has ever worked well going on six years.

Why is that?

For 90% of the people here the rewards for content make this place exciting. I imagine it has the potential to attract much more development in the coming months too. I’m not just here for my own ability to earn, I’m here to see how incentivized content creation allows people to do what they are excited and passionate about. I understand the emphasis on free speech and governance models, but the monetized social aspect is so powerful and we do it better than anything else out there now. The improvement of trending and the reward pool distribution in general is astounding. I see the rewards as a way to gather excitement and resources to make it easier to build whatever else you guys want to build.

I wish the old stakeholders could see how life changing this place has been for so many of us and how much of that has to the rewards, then lean into that. The incentivization keeps us constantly working to improve ourselves and find ways to benefit our communities. It may seem boring or cheesey to people who don’t engage in it, like we are all just farming without much care for anything else but most of us love this place, we just want to know that it’s as fair as it can be.

I’ve learned how markets work thanks to hive. I’ve gained access to people in very different life situations to understand them and build communities with them. The incentives made it possible. I will likely travel to Nigeria and Venezuela only thanks to the friendships I’ve made at Hive.

Sure it could work on a second layer too, but there would have to be a project that can handle that better than we have up until now. I’m glad you say there would have to be better support for alternatives.

But why do you think it hasn’t worked well? Don’t you think it’s come a long way and could continue to improve with new faces and a few tweaks?

I appreciate your response. I’ve invested countless hours into Hive so it’s good to know the largest stakeholders can bother discussing things with the rest of us. That’s the kind of thing that keeps me here.