In regards to Peakd, don't you have your own frontend? Correct me if I'm wrong since we haven't talked for a while.

I converted an old social network that I created long before Steem existed to support Steem and was in the process of updating it to run Hive when COVID19 hit. Most of the code was finished but the difficulties introduced in so many ways during COVID19 meant that I did not have time to invest into it and my current plan WAS to mothball the site and create a Hive layer 2 site instead. I am reconsidering that now though and looking at other chains.

Police are hired individuals. They're not someone who goes around and acts in accordance to their believes. When you downvote something you dislike you are acting out of your own free will with no instruction.

Policing is an act of policy enforcement. Whether someone is hired to do this or they do it of their own organisation and volition doesn't change whether the act is the enforcing of a policy.

The same as the people who downvoted your Covid posts because they dislike them are acting on their own free will with no instruction.

That is an assumption based on the alternative being unpalatable, in my opinion.

One thing we don't know when it comes to downvotes is whether the downvote is cast because the voter dislikes the post creator, the subject of the post, or the evaluation of the reward.

In this case, I approached the main downvoters and enquired the motivation and it was alleged that I was doing harm somehow to people by quoting the Doctors and scientists that disagree with the mainstream media narrative on COVID19. It was alleged that they have superior science knowledge but no evidence was provided and an invitation for discourse was met only with aggression. Clearly this is neither scientific, nor healthy.

The claim was that the downvoting was not personal, however, as you can see, they have already zeroed the next post I made which has absolutely nothing to do with COVID19. I'd say that in this case the behaviour patterns are fairly self explanatory, though the deeper sub and unconscious motivations are not made public yet.

The same with upvotes. Did the upvotes come because of a trail set simply due to profitability, because the person likes the creator or because they agree with the topic? What is the opposite of "police" for this matter?

I personally don't upvote anyone for profitability, but sure some people probably do. I think the changes to the curation algorithm remove some of the motive to upvote based on profit though. It also makes little sense to completely remove your own ethics from the equation and to only upvote for profit - well, to non sociopaths anyway.

I'd say the opposite of policy enforcement is non policy enforcement - or anarchism.

This is an opportunity to think hard about Trending and content discovery. Some posts have massive views despite having no rewards at the time of posting. There are ways to create incentives in parallel to content monetization.

The most viewed videos on 3Speak, by FAR, having crashed the system in fact - are those by the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, Dr. Robert Malone. Those views come from outside of Hive because he has a big following. He is actually saying many of the same things that I have been saying about COVID19 and the shots. The posts later got a lot of upvotes, but most of the views come from outside of Hive. The incentives in this case, for the uploader, are that he is not being censored to the same degree on 3speak as he is on youtube etc. - I actually invited him here. I have to say though that it is only really 3speak that is providing an inviting atmosphere to such people on Hive at the moment. As an aside, I now have a leaked video from the top scientists at the WHO also effectively agreeing with the key points I have been making for many years regarding vaccines. I fully expect that video to be downvoted to nothing too - clearly not for being 'unscientific', since these people are at the absolute tops of their fields.

There is also trading and curation

As a professional digital marketer I would not recommend Hive to a client for trading simply because it is so inflationary. The inflation involved makes it a poor investment for anyone not making content - whether people here like it or not, Hive is entirely based around the reward pools at present. Curation relies on there being content that we want to curate, unless we are going to ignore our own preferences and act like profit robots. If the only content creators on a content based network are those deemed 'acceptable' to the main stakeholders due to downvoting, then things will just be a homogenous pools of content that is shaped in their own image and little else. This does not leave space or motivation for many people to want to get involved in curation and to invest the time and resources which that requires. The reality is that many people are more motivated by controlling psychology than by creativity, which is a sad fact of the human condition. This is actually the primary issue that Hive and other social networks need to address - but so far we have not had the necessary balance as a culture to achieve resolution on this.

Expanding one's activities makes these income streams more predictable and eases stress.

I personally have looked at all available options and for me, creating content is the best one all around and the most practical. I am primarily ethics based and seeking to end human suffering - it is the primary motive for my life - I can't do that by playing card games.

In regards to Youtube or other social media, however, that's a private company. They don't owe anyone anything, including accounts.

They are in a market place and have set up a business model based on paying people out - so they do actually owe their content creators who have used their service because they have been told they will be paid to do so. If you tube fails to do this then the creators will go somewhere else, as Joe Rogan did, for example.

That's why those who want real freedom of speech need to self host. Before YT became the convenient norm, everyone had to self host. It was expensive but we did it and those who valued our content found it and supported us by purchasing whatever we had at the store or through donations. When we make YT the norm because we're too damn lazy to go back to our roots we give those massive companies the ultimate power.

I was previously under the impression that the decentralisation of Hive was partially intended to provide another option that makes self hosting less necessary. Ultimately, we could all host our own distributed ledger system for financial transactions too, but Bitcoin or other networks are more convenient than doing that so we tend to use them rather than self host. The argument that Hive is uncensored seems to be unimportant it seems, which really leaves it's main selling point gone.

I know what you mean because after reading through your other comments here I went and looked at who voted on your Covid posts. Many of your upvotes are autovotes. Those curators didn't read anything; one of them has staff hired to calculate profitability and curate

I am on two curation chains, one of them is informationwar. I know some of the people that run it and I know that they manually moderate the posts they upvote. I have conversations with some of them about my posts. I'm sure that there are plenty of votes that are automated too, yes. I auto upvote posts myself because I don't have time in the day to go and manually curate, plus the financial reward for doing so is too miniscule to justify doing that when I have bills to pay.

But I can't say much on this problem because I understand it hurts emotionally to see your stuff nuked. Can't say "don't let it bother you" to someone because that's just basic emotions.

You can say that, it's fine. My comments here are less about my own emotional response to downvotes on my own posts and more about the wider implications for Hive and it's marketing. I know the internet very, very well and have been in 'this space' since before the first social network existed. The behaviour I am highlighting makes zero sense from a marketing perspective, that's why I'm bothering to highlight it.

When I replied to your post I didn't realize you were talking about your own experience. It's been a while since we chatted and I figured you were doing well. I understand your points and perspective now knowing all this.

I have just spent 9 months in Australia supporting someone who was a victim of serious crime. I launched a company at the same time that COVID19 started - not knowing what COVID19 was going to become. So this time period has been very challenging. I have numerous projects and am not broke by any means, but I would not say I am doing well enough to be able to invest valuable time into Hive purely for fun or with no interest in the financial side. At the same time, I posted content completely for free for years because I have goals to achieve that are outside of money.

This is quite possible with HiveSQL. You would simply need to query all downvotes and exclude those made by the few anti-abuse account

Personally I would do the opposite and specifically highlight these accounts, but make filters to remove/add them easily. That being said, I have no intention of putting time into building anything on Hive at this time. This is a features that responsible front end developers should be implementing if they understand human psychology and want to see Hive thrive.

Wishing you well