Watched this video by penguinz0 today and like usual when I come across something on the internet I keep thinking how it could be better on Hive, so this'll be another post going through the video and talking about Hive. Let me know if that get's tiring. :D
Either way, something he brings up is that there's a lot of copycat (no pun intended) brands and products out there that offer things cheaper to costumers because that's probably their whole shtick. Re-create an idea, at times even leech off of it with similar naming and offer it at a cheaper cost to consumers because the economy sucks and most of us are poor so they'll bite.
In this case however, the cheapening of the product is resulting in the product literally killing cats of their lazy owners. Okay, I'm being a bit judgemental there, not too long ago I was cleaning up the cat litter and was wondering if there's an automated version of catlitters these days that'll clean it for you and maybe bag it up so all you gotta do is place the bag outside and be done with it. I didn't go as far as to check on this and watching the video above now I'm kind of glad I didn't pursue this longer in case I would've given these cheaper versions a try.
A few reviews had gone out to these products that are sold on amazon where customers were mentioning that the product had ended up killing their cats, someone by the name of 5cats1man had followed up to attempt to contact these people who had left these reviews to get some additional info on what had occurred. At the same time he had also purchased this product and as can be seen in the video above it had quickly proven what occurs when it goes wrong, even though he didn't get the product he ordered.
Apparently the scanners that are supposed to prevent the process of cleaning the litter when the cat is still nearby or in the way weren't working. The youtuber even gets his hand stuck quite badly in the process and has to pry it back out with force. What he found out is that there's a firmware update that may fix this but naturally that's not something on the mind of customers, especially not when it isn't mentioned anywhere upon purchase that they need to update the firmware. Of course it's quite bad to begin with if they had to include a message with every order stating they need to do an update or it'll kill your cat but what is more disgusting is that their solution to this is to stifle reviews and settle in court the owners who had their cats killed by the product.
Using legal ways to force them to remove any reviews and mentions of what occurred to their cats and on top of it all deleting comments they can under their own youtube videos and then just rebranding and selling the same products under different names rather than owning up to their mistakes is quite disgusting behaviour in my opinion. It might also be of course that now that they know there's an issue with the product there could be some lunatics out there purposely killing their cats just to get settlement money from this faulty product, but I'm not going to go out of my way to give them the benefit of the doubt that that's the reason they're not making it clear what has happened.
Anyway, this brings me to Hive. How could this process be different here?
Well, for starters, I know @blocktrades has been working on a proper reputation system to implement on top of Hive in some ways. While I don't know any details I assume that immutability will be a big factor behind it. While reviews potentially won't be the main reason to the project, it leaves room for other ones to use immutability and a different kind of reputation around that to make sure things that have been said aren't censored the way they're being censored in web2 now.
If a review has been left on a product that their cat has been killed by it, I'd wanna know about it before I decide to put my own cat in harms way. As you all know, when you place a post or comment onchain, no matter if you edit it out later people can always read the original post and comment. So if someone forced you to change your comment by using the law, sure you can edit it but it won't hide what it originally said. This is of course a double-edged sword, we're people after all and sometimes you may write things at the wrong time and change your mind about it but that's not something that's as important in the grand scheme of things. If I tell someone to fuck off but decide the next day with a cooler head that I could've worded it differently, people aren't going to care much about me changing the comment. If however I suddenly removed the mention that a product killed my cat because the brand forced me to do so in a settlement I can tell them that sure I'll edit it but the original mention of it having occurred won't be forgotten. The only way that happens on web2 now is if someone is there to observe it and record it before the edit occurs which someone happened to catch it in time in the case above but it begs the question how many more reviews have been hidden since.
Anyway, all in all, I guess not the best idea to automate some things like a cat litter but if you have to I'd say make sure you pay a little extra and test it properly before having your cat use it. With automation there's always a chance of errors, I know most of the time humans are the main reason errors occur but if there's sand involved, cat feces and pee and repetition and on top of it you bought the cheapest version that exists it's not surprising if something goes wrong eventually so I'd be very careful with such products and I'd consider if there's other solutions to this idea that don't risk the decapitation of cats.
Other than that, web2 sucks and is prone to manipulation so what else is new.