I have discussed downvotes at length with as many users of this platform as have been willing. A couple issues that have caused discussions to be unproductive are the definitions of words used in discussion, and the two primary words causing the most disagreement are censor and tax. For the purposes of rational discussion I will use the definitions of these words that has been provided by the best sources of definitions, generally considered authoritative.
To censor means to remove or suppress content and authors, in it's relevance to Hive. Suppression is anything that discourages posting on Hive, in any way. Killing someone censors them, as does cutting out their tongue, cutting off their hands, or banishing them from society. An enormous variety of means of suppressing authors and content are potential, and almost every means you can imagine (and probably more than anyone of us can imagine) are practiced today. The use of taxation to censor is widely practiced in the world, (as Canada seizing the bank accounts of principals in the Freedom Convoy, that coincidentally has just been ruled unlawful by Canada's courts) and the only practical mechanism to censor on Hive is the downvote. Every downvote censors authors and content on Hive, and most of the reasons people downvote on Hive are to censor content and authors, such as spam, scams, and plagiarism. I will agree that these are the only acceptable reasons that censorship can be fairly practiced on Hive, but note that spam and scams often are not able to be well suppressed by taxation, since these often are not intended to gain financial rewards directly, or at all, and because they have different purposes than rewards are not directly discouraged by taxation. I submit that while taxation for these reasons is fair dinkum, it is not the best way to censor spam and scams. This is why Peakd, the most popular front end on Hive, actually conceals content from authors once their reputation reaches zero, and requires clicking on that content to reveal it.
Of note, censorship is not the eradication of information. No authoritative definition of censorship suggests it is. The No Hiding theorem in physics has shown that information cannot be removed from the universe, not even by falling into a black hole. Killing someone does not remove the information they have published from the universe, and Hive cannot do more than suppress information even were it's entire purpose to create one official narrative and censor everything else, and despite it's stated purpose, that isn't far from what it has become. One of Hive's original primary purposes was to prevent censorship in a world in which censorship is becoming ever more harmful. Today in America, widely considered to be a bastion of free speech, police are knocking on doors because of social media posts. That is how it started in the UK, where today >3000 people are jailed every year for their social media posts. Censorship resistance today is an enormous market, and all Hive needs to do is prevent censorship better than the terrible social media platforms competing with it to outperform them. Instead of outperforming them, Hive dramatically under performs, and is literally on the verge of destruction. That is terrible considering Hive's original goal was to enable censorship to be prevented by enabling social media posts to be preserved durably on the blockchain, and demonstrates that more than that is necessary to prevent censorship. The mere persistence of information is not prevention of censorship, because information will persist no matter what is done to destroy it. Today Hive's claim to resist censorship is merely performative, a claim without substance, and legacy social media platforms, universally regarded as censorious, censor less than Hive.
To tax means to burden, and this is why taking money is called taxation, because it causes a financial burden. You tax an oxen when you burden it with a load to carry, just like states tax their populations when they take money from them. My arms were taxed yesterday splitting a cord of wood with an axe (although I feel it more in my legs today). The definition of taxation is not limited to states taking money, and anyone taking money from you, or burdening you in any way, is taxing you. Theft is another word meaning taking money, but it implies criminal taking, and not all taking is criminal. Neither is sale appropriate (notably, sale is an appropriate word for upvotes, the opposite of which is no sale, or no vote). In American English, tax is the word that best expresses the act of taking money relevant to Hive, committed by downvotes.
It is demonstrable that Hive, and it's progenitor, have execrable user retention. A social media platform necessarily benefits from the largest user base possible (while excluding bad actors to the extent possible. What constitutes crime on a social media platform is necessarily different from crime IRL, but the same principles of just society apply). Hive is therefore demonstrably failing to be the best social media platform on the market. While I have discussed ad nauseum the myriad misaligned incentives that have caused users to leave, I note that, by far, the most common thing driving people from Hive is downvotes. The purpose of this post is to consider the several different needs users have that downvotes are intended, or able, to fulfill, and how to separate out from the present mechanism several tools to fulfill each separate purpose.
If all you have is a hammer, you have to treat everything as a nail, and this makes screws perform poorly. Both screws and nails are excellent fasteners when applied properly, and either are the right choice for constructing things for different reasons. If you're going to use screws to construct something, a hammer is a poor choice to apply them and will cause screws to perform poorly, even though you can hammer screws into place. If all you have is a hammer you should never use screws to build with. The best structures use a variety of fasteners which all require specific tools to apply, glues, nails, screws, bolts, and etc. Hammers can induce unconsciousness, but also cause blunt force trauma. While bashing someone in the head with a hammer can enable painful surgery to be completed, there are better tools to anesthetize patients that do not cause blunt force trauma. There are times that blunt force trauma is the desired effect of using a hammer, but if you want to enable life-saving surgery rather than cause life threatening injuries, you definitely want to use a different tool than a hammer.
The downvote button is like a hammer and using it to serve too many different purposes causes it to be the wrong tool for most of them. Since we don't have the right tool for those different purposes, Hive cannot well fulfill those purposes, and I believe this is the primary reason that Hive is failing to succeed as a social media platform.
Downvotes have several unrelated consequences that should each have a separate tool to achieve, so that the several purposes downvotes achieve can each be achieved without having all the other consequences that downvotes cause. Downvotes indicate disagreement regarding principles expressed by authors, tax earnings of authors, send rewards distributed to specific authors back to the rewards pool where they will be reallocated, decrease the reputation score of authors, censor content and authors, and necessarily induce social conflict. Because downvotes always have all these effects, they cannot achieve any of them without causing all of them. Also downvotes cannot be applied to actions that don't involve posts, so cannot discourage a wide variety of bad actors doing bad things currently happening on Hive. There is a huge amount of money being disbursed by the DHF through mechanisms DV's cannot apply to, and lacking anything but downvotes to regulate Hive means Hive cannot well regulate the DHF, if at all.
When you want to agree or disagree with principles an author has expressed taxing their post is not an appropriate tool. Sometimes it is impossible, or inconvenient, to engage in discussion beyond indicating assent or dissent with principles an author has expressed, but we have no tool to do this on Hive. If we had a thumbs up/thumbs down mechanism with no other effects (as most platforms for social media do) this would enable assent or dissent to be communicated in a natural way, and I think we should have ordinary up and down votes without all the other effects votes have. Downvotes are not the opposite of upvotes. The opposite of an upvote is no vote. Taxes are not the opposite of earnings. No earnings are the opposite of earnings. Downvotes are a different mechanism on Hive because they effect taxation. However, both rewarding posts and authors and taxing them can be effected by separate mechanisms from up or down voting, although this may not be necessary for upvotes.
For the same reason of specificity, taxing earnings/sales, or other financial assets on Hive, should have a separate mechanism(s) to cause only that effect that does not impact reputation, communicate assent or dissent with an author, or censor (insofar is it is possible to tax without censoring). Imagine if your country could only tax by downvotes on social media comments, and it will become obvious that reducing reputation of authors, censoring them, and disagreeing with their writing are all both unnecessary and counterproductive effects of downvotes that make downvotes the wrong tool for your country to use to tax it's population. All that is required to avoid downvotes is silence, and this makes downvotes a terrible tax mechanism on a social media platform that depends on social interaction to succeed.
There are different reasons for different kinds of taxation, and there should be some limits on who can tax you, the reasons they can tax you, and how they can tax you. This is an enormously complex subject, and I'm sure there are as many opinions on what is or isn't appropriate as there are people. Therefore our policies on taxation should be simple, in order to enable us to agree as much as possible on our tax policies, because Hive will best serve it's users when we have the broadest agreement on Hive's tax policies. The more disagreement there is on our tax policies the worse Hive will serve it's users, and tax policies are very important to people, making Hive's tax policies very important to the platform. Since Hive's tax policies are limited to downvotes, Hive is very poorly delineating it's tax policies, because there is very poor agreement regarding downvotes on Hive, and censoring and reducing the reputation of people when you tax them is unnecessary to financial tax policy. For example I wonder how well voluntarist taxation could support witnesses, curators, and the DHF, or specific DHF proposals. Another thing is breaking the rewards pool into communities, where the portion of the pool communities manage is proportional to their stake. Communities could determine themselves their policies on taxes, downvotes, upvotes, curation rewards, and etc. I think this could be enormously informative regarding how these policies affect Hive, and enable adoption of those policies that best enabled the performance of communities by others.
For all these reasons Hive needs to reform our financial tax policy and create a tool(s) specific to that purpose(s) that does not have the other effects downvotes currently do, each of which should have it's own tool(s) to effect. I believe it is unreasonable to enable anyone to tax anyone else for any reason (or none at all) to the limit of their stake, and that is currently how downvotes operate on Hive. This causes taxation to be unavoidably unfair, because it enables people and groups with more stake to tax those with less stake unaccountably. The principle of fairness is inherent in all higher animals, and produces violent reactions, because being treated unfairly can kill them in various ways. The essential misunderstanding of downvotes being the opposite of upvotes underlies these harms. All of the consequences of downvotes can be better achieved with specific tools for the purpose, just as hammers, nail guns, glue spreaders, caulking guns, biscuit joiners, screwdrivers, wire ties, wrenches, and etc. enable the best application of the best fasteners for specific purposes in construction.
Because Hive is social media it depends on strong society, and human society depends on fairness. The ability of strong individuals to harm weak individuals does not create strong society, but the opposite, and most rules and regulations are intended to prevent it. The strongest human society is the most fair society, where the sovereignty and human rights of each individual are equally respected, regardless of physical, intellectual, financial, or political power. Human societies, segregated into the various polities on Earth today, are increasingly becoming less fair, and this is causing more violent reactions opposing unfairness in all polities, but most violently in those formerly most fair, because the people in those societies are losing more than those in societies that have were less fair to begin with.
The most powerful members of society have different incentives than other members of society, and of the society itself. Conversely, in democracies the most populous groups have more power, and their preferred incentives similarly differ from more powerful individuals, or their polities. What they do is often intended to benefit themselves, and not everyone else, nor the polity they rule. Hive is no different, and as we observe the most powerful people on Earth wrecking the polities of Earth for their own benefit, and the plentiful examples of societies being destroyed in history by this means, we must learn from the failures of every example of society on Earth to make Hive better than all of them. If we do that then Hive will become the most powerful society ever on Earth - if we can defend it. That is my goal for Hive, and I hope all Hive users share this goal. Honestly, looking around, it doesn't seem that high a bar. Hive already has everything necessary to govern a society, and only requires some minor tweaking to improve it's performance to become better than any other option that exists, or has ever existed, IMHO.
I submit that financial taxation needs to be as limited as possible, as fair as possible, and as specific as possible, for Hive to be as fair as possible, and thus be as strong as possible. Financial taxation should not involve any other mechanisms, such as censorship, reputation, or dissent regarding principle, insofar as that can be managed. Censorship on Hive should be as limited as possible too, while remaining available to discourage spam, scams, and plagiarism. Therefore Hive as a social media platform should have generally agreed definitions of all these relevant terms and stated policies of acceptable actions regarding them. It is such policies I seek to define by this post.
Another issue I think is existentially important to Hive is that society is people, not bots. Society must be limited to human beings interacting, and Hive should not enable automating human interaction. AI has become competent to mimic human interactions, and if we do not prevent automating human interactions, Hive will cease to be able to enable human beings to interact at all because AI will simply take over. It is currently unclear as to what extent that has already occurred. All curation should be manual. Every comment does not necessarily need to be typed manually, but canned comments must be manually posted (I could be wrong about that, and canned comments may not be acceptable at all, so seek reasons to reconsider).
Similarly, Hive is people, not tokens. While there may be a role for the weight of stake, KE, or other metrics, governance of Hive only by stake weight causes terrible fragility, as plutocracies are ruled by whomever has the most wealth, as Steem demonstrated. Perhaps breaking Hive into communities that govern their own rewards pools will resolve that existential threat, because I believe most communities will choose more metrics beyond stake weight, and the resulting ferment of polities will demonstrate the results of those policies. Other communities will have those examples of success and failure to inform their own governance. What is obvious to me is that unless we prevent bots from posting and voting on Hive, eventually there will be no people left on Hive as AI competes for tokens with bots. Similarly, unless we apply other metrics to governance, sooner or later Hive will be taken over by someone with more money, and there are a plethora of persons and groups that could buy every Hive token in existence with lunch money. Given Hive's dramatic failure to succeed, and it's continuing decline in market cap and users, that eventual destruction becomes nearer by the day, and I will much lament Hive's destruction if we can't turn things around.
Taxation is definitely something that needs to be managed better, so that it's as fair as possible. It isn't fair to take from someone just because they have more than you, or some group of you, nor less than you, or a group you are in. Commies all become Crapitalusts if they have opportunity to acquire financial assets, which has been well demonstrated in every Communist polity of note. As with all generalizations, there are exceptions to the rule, as occasionally societies are formed of only good people by some freak accident of nature, and just as there have been fair communes, there have been benevolent dictatorships. Societies should not depend on freaks of nature, but have reasonable incentives that encourage fairness to the limits of human capacity.
Hive is in bad shape, because it has poorly aligned incentives with it's purpose as a social media platform, as well as with it's purpose as cryptocurrency, and it's potential to enable voluntarist governance. That terrible performance can be improved by better aligning incentives with that purpose(s), and the consistent degradation of Hive's position in the coin market suggests that Hive is quite literally in existential danger today of some negative event causing it's collapse. Everyone that cares about Hive should carefully consider these issues, and I would appreciate your suggestions and corrections of my lack of understanding.
I believe being factually correct enables me to better prosper, and being incorrect has the opposite affect. Therefore I welcome correction, constructive criticism, and reasonable disagreement. Please set me straight where I'm wrong, and provide facts that counter my mistaken understanding. There are a lot of people on Hive smarter than me, so I have tried to only note some general principles and thoughts, and not outline specific fixes to the problems Hive has. I am sure there are folks that can suggest fixes I would never have imagined, and it is in the hope of hearing them from you that I make this post. I'm not going to tag anybody, but I've learned a lot from folks that are very interested in these topics, and you know who you are. I'd be very interested in hearing from you and considering how and what can be and should be done to turn Hive around, while we still can.
