Ok, well, I did try to edge around the DV issue in my above comment, but I guess clever semantical tricks just aren't gonna work around you! LOL

Imma try to just leave you one comment that is responsive to both of yours, to save you time (and mana), if that's ok.

"You know that the person who receives an upvote before a payout has not received anything until the post is paid out. The "money" is still in the reward pool. We do not even know what the exact payout will be until it is paid out. Until a reward is paid out, that money belongs to the reward pool."

I've made the comparison before to a paycheck. Paychecks are often delayed a week or two, because it takes employers time to do payroll and take out all the taxes, reckon up PTO, and etc. While, just as with rewards on posts, the net takehome pay isn't the same as the gross, the earnings of the payee are theirs, even if they haven't taken possession yet, even if they're still in the bank account of the employer. In the same sense, the rewards on a persons post have been allocated by curators, but, just like income taxes, the downvotes have to be reckoned on them before they become the net rewards people bank in their Hive wallet. You're right that DV's do need to be reckoned before the net reward is claimed, but saying it's not their rewards yet because it's still in the pool is the same thing as saying the pay for the employee isn't theirs yet because they haven't cashed the check. Plenty of courts have ruled that those wages belong to the workers that earned them and ordered employers to cut checks, and I also think it's a semantic argument that doesn't have much relevance.

"...if stakeholder(s) do not want someone getting rewards anymore because the person does not invest in the ecosystem, I think that is legitimate."

I'll address this at length (boy do I ever address at length, eh?) later. I just want to note that people that don't invest in the ecosystem are only robbing themselves, not Hive. They're the ones not gaining stake, their votes of little value, their influence on governance, on DHF proposals, and the interest they gain on their staked Hive is minimal. Hive doesn't have to do anything to limit the influence of people that sell their stake. They limit themselves.

That being said, you'll note my complete acquiescence to the necessity that any DV's need to be deducted from rewards before they can be claimed. This is because I agree that DV's are necessary, as I have said before. But whether hourly pay needs to be taxed or rewards need to be taxed is only part of the issue. When we talk about paychecks, only official governments have that authority to tax. When we talk about rewards, every single stakeholder on the platform is granted that authority by the code, and the only limit on that authority is the quantity of their stake.

I've made the point that if Ford could tax Toyota, ISIS would be driving Fords, because there wouldn't be any Toyota trucks. Hive has that problem. There are no limits but stake on the ability to tax rewards, and I've seen personally the very worst of it in the past. I am absolutely not projecting that abuse onto you. You have your reasons for flying flags. You have never once done it just because you felt like it, or to be mean, because it was funny, or for any reason but those you have a considered basis for, AFAIK. You cite the KE that shows Karen sold a lot of her rewards, and I don't think anyone disputes that she has.

But we want Hive to be money. If people can't spend their Hive when they need it, then it's not real money. It starts becoming like dollars and sanctions, and the solution to dollars being a weapon because they're the reserve currency is BRICS and something else being the reserve currency. Hive doesn't want people to adopt that solution, which is what happens when people leave Hive and HODL and spend some other currency. We want them to spend and HODL Hive, but if we start restricting their absolute sovereignty to do what they want with their property, we have started to drive them away from Hive. This is the reason that Hive has such a terrible user retention rate. DV's have driven a lot of people off the platform, and most of them leaving is a loss for Hive. Most of us make mistakes, but most of us can be corrected and stop making that mistake. Most people can be valuable Hive users. Very few just can't be tolerated and need to be driven from the platform. Hive loses >99% of onboards, and most of them leave because of DV's. Back in May 2017 hordes of people suddenly joined Hive. Hundreds of influential creators were bringing thousands of their followers to the platform (before the fork) and this was an existential threat to the whales that controlled governance. They fixed the problem by driving them from the platform, and today maintain control of governance of Hive. Just like the HBD-funder comments, what's in the best interest of whales isn't in the best interest of Hive. There are misaligned incentives coded in by witnesses that are paid for running that code by the whales that profit from it, even though it harms Hive.

"KE is very objective."

It neglects some things, like liquid Hive and HBD, and staked HBD. Were those things taken into account, my KE would be much less than 1. My KE isn't over 1 because I have sold some Hive. I have never, ever sold even one token since I joined this platform in May, 2017. I have given some away to other Hivians (I have no idea what I have given in tips), but I have more in my wallet then I have received in rewards. Peakd says my account is valued at >$3100. Hivelytics says I have received ~$1,362.89 in rewards. Peakd says my KE is >1.5. KE isn't a good measure of whether or not I have sold any Hive, because it's not taking into account liquid tokens and staked HBD.

"...you never asked me for a detailed explanation on why I think that account should not get rewards."

You explained it. It was her KE. I followed your conversations with her.

"You are always welcome to lobby for me to remove my downvote on another user."

I appreciate that. I'd rather not have to ever do that and instead would rather completely agree with every DV you cast. If you are convinced of the principles and merits of my arguments, then I'll likely never have any reason to lobby for the people you DV. I'd rather discuss principles and merit than people, because principles and merit have never let me down. I'd hate to take a stand for someone that you treat kindly because of it and then they turn on you like a snake. The principles I advocate will never betray you, and I am comfortable advocating for them because I know they have merit.

I advocate adhering to fundamental principles. The collective good never trumps individual sovereign rights. As soon as it does, the individual sovereign rights sacrificed are sacrificed by everyone in the collective, and the entire collective is harmed by the attempt to ignore the fundamental principle of sovereignty in order to benefit the collective. Collectives aren't born, don't feel pain or hunger, love, or die. They don't have rights. They're a fiction, but people are very real, are born, hunger, hurt, and love. People have rights. Every violation of a person's rights hurts all people by putting them at risk of their rights being violated. Every time we defend an individual's sovereign rights, we defend all of our individual sovereign rights. Ben Franklin observed if we don't all hang together, we will surely all hang separately. We need to defend the absolute sovereignty of individuals or we will harm the collective we are trying to protect, because it is the individuals in the collective that are the fundamental purpose of the collective. If the collective ever becomes the purpose of the collective, tyranny is born, and the people will suffer.

I just read the comment a 19 year old Venezuelan made to you on my post about Venezuela, and I wonder if you'd give some thought to what that man said about being interfered with by the Venezuelan government, and how downvoting people for spending their money as they see fit is similar interference. Perhaps if you imagined someone telling you that you could only spend your money as you were told to, you'd better understand where my argument is coming from. We need to control plagiarism, circle jerks, botnets, and all manner of abusive acts seeking rewards on Hive, and DV's are very suitable for that. I don't think they do jack all against spam, scams, and the like, because those abusive acts aren't seeking rewards. But we have no business telling people how to spend their money. When we do that we harm Hive, by putting it above the sovereign rights of people.

Hive needs other tools to oppose those abuses, because DV's won't work for them. DV's aren't the solution to all circumstances. We have staking and savings accounts that limit how we use our money. Staked Hive takes months to spend. People that stake Hive know that before they stake it (or should). That's not a violation of their sovereignty, because they choose to stake their Hive. That's how we can encourage or discourage ppl from spending Hive, by ways that give them the right to choose. We can make the powerdown longer the higher their KE, for example. That respects their rights to stake their Hive as they see fit. My issue here is that there's no limitation on DV's at all in the code, and they get applied for any and all reasons under the sun, or none at all, and many of the reasons DV's are applied aren't just. This is problematic for Hive. Every stakeholder, no matter how irrational and toxic, has the unrestrained power to tax Hive earnings. This has been egregiously abused against me personally, and against a lot of other people for whom I feel worse than I do me (as you astutely observed).

When rewards are returned to the pool, whales extract >90% of them. It's in the financial interest of the stakeholders that elect the witnesses that run that code to not make powerdowns longer for folks with higher KE, and instead to convince people to downvote Hive users it high KE, because they'll get >90% of the rewards returned to the pool by that means as a group. The incentive isn't designed to benefit Hive. It's designed to benefit the rulers of Hive. If we stand on sound principles we should change that incentive structure, IMHO.

That is how I feel about it, that sovereign property owners have the right to do as they see fit with their property. I think there should be reasonable limits on DV's. If high KE is a problem, there should be mechanisms that set out choices before people rack up KE, to enable them to exercise their sovereign authority over their stake as they see fit. I bet most everybody rational at all would agree that DV's should have limits besides the stake of the voter. The question of what are reasonable limits, however, isn't so easily agreed. I don't feel there's any question that Karen is spending her Hive rewards, but I personally feel like it's her rewards to spend as she sees fit and the code Hive runs doesn't set any limits on KE, doesn't require her to stake a certain percentage of her rewards, and didn't give her an opportunity to manage her stake according to set rules, rather than Galen's whims. While there's a problem for Hive if lots of people decide to spend all their Hive, that's not a good enough reason to prevent, or penalize, people for exercising their right to own property. It suggests, in fact, that Hive has other problems that are causing people to spend Hive, just like dollars have problems that cause people to spend them on silver.

Karen's sovereign rights aren't the problem. If Hive can't attract enough people to HODL then Hive has a fundamental issue that is the real problem. That's where we should take action, but identifying that problem is troublesome, because devious manipulators have misaligned incentives to profit themselves, and sacrifice principle and Hive to their wallets. DV's are facile. The button is right there at the bottom of every post and comment.

I don't feel there's any question but that Hive needs DV's. I don't feel like you're casting DV's maliciously. I feel that you're casting DV's mistakenly, but you aren't me. You don't have to agree with me, ever, about anything at all. You are just as sovereign as Karen, and can spend your money as you see fit. I have made my case as thoroughly as I can, and it's up to you if you agree with me or don't.

Either way, I am honored you think enough of me to have this conversation, to even suffer my pretentious estimation of my opinion as being of any value. If we can agree on this, or anything, I think we have won. We have defeated the many impediments to people coming to agreement about anything. Honestly I think we win because we have discussion and hear what each other think, because we know we can better understand than we do, and hope to learn from each other. There's a lot of people that can't even talk to this group or that. Feminists with blue hair can't talk to hard working men in red MAGA hats, and vice versa. Whoever killed Charlie Kirk couldn't talk to him.

And that shows what happens when we can't talk to each other, because we're a bunch of losers. Winners talk away. Losers walk away, to kill another day. You demonstrate every day you are extraordinarily willing to talk to folks, even those that mean you ill, that insult you on purpose, or even by mistake trying to make convincing arguments using events you are familiar with (as I did). You're a winner in my book, because you properly value society, even though you recognize the value of money, your focus is society. Money is worthless without society.

"We cannot realistically stop auto upvotes."

I think we can. Ned said he was going to implement oracles that would sort actual people from bots, and sort individuals from multiple socks. While he never did completely describe how he'd do that, I do think it can be done, and I hope it can be done without us having to give up our biometric data. I think Keychain shows it can be done using hashes. I think automated votes and interactions are profitable to whales, because Hive is a social media platform and it's time consuming for whales to curate good content to get ROI, so they automate it so they have time to lounge around the pool snarfing up oyster crackers smothered in caviar and guzzle champagne, or whatever whales do for fun while they're not being good Communists like real Hivians. You don't automate social interactions AFAIK, so this doesn't apply to you because you do value social interaction highly and manually vote, I have observed.

The incentives are misaligned to profit Hive rulers, not Hive, and whales have financial incentives to automate social interactions on Hive because that's how to get a return on their stake from curation rewards rather than dividends based on Hive's performance. That's why I think savings accounts will be better for whales, or better for better whales, at least.