Reading yet another post by a long term Hive blogger who is leaving the platform because they are sick of having their posts downvoted, I felt compelled to have another bleat about this.
After having a look around quite a few platforms over the past decade, I still think Hive is really good in many ways. But there are a few things that always hold it back. The biggest of those, ultimately is MONEY and the control of who does or doesn't get any of it.
The downvoting and the relentless control of the reward pool and account reputations by the chosen ones, works against the platform ever succeeding as a creative space for blogging and interacting.
Sometimes I just feel like doing a quick post (yes, a shitpost!) and I don't care if it earns a few cents or not, but like everyone, I don't think we should always be forced to turn the rewards off to stop some dickhead whale downvoting us.
I've said things like this many times over the past seven years on Steemit and Hive, but believe it or not I do see a need for some control of the reward pool. Otherwise a bunch of accounts could just take all the rewards themselves and that would be bad. Wouldn't it?
The other side of the coin is, what if a bunch of accounts controlled what content was allowed to be posted by downvoting anything they disliked?. Wouldn't that result in a censored platform like Facebook?
But if someone came along and said OK, bugger the rewards, I'll turn those off and post whatever I feel like, a problem for those that like to control the content, is that once the rewards are turned off, unlike Facebook, Hive doesn't have a team of performing eunuchs who can suspend accounts. There isn't even much in the way of AI to do that job.
Some days I teeter on the brink of using this site more often, as the PeakD front end really is pretty impressive. The name "Hive" (Hivemind) does suck though, so I've taken to referring to it as PeakD and just ignoring the Hive name altogether.
With rewards off, calling it PeakD, and posting whatever I feel like, I think it would be a better platform, so yeah, that is how I see myself using it more often.
