It's been an interesting past few days over in the community with alot of issues arising in relation to the misuse of reward farming surrounding content and reward payments.
Many people know that Az and I are not good friends and have some beef in the past but for this instance I'm kind of on his side in regards to his use of down voting. I had been seeing the person people are discussing and watching their rewards. It was odd that a lot of incoherently constructed sentences were being upvoted to such high amounts. Both on Hive and in PoB.
If you've been on the block chain long enough you'd know who Az is and yes Az can get a little too excited and over the top at times but he means well. Do I agree with his approach? Not all of the time. I do think he may have gotten a little over involved in the issue but lets be honest. Az didn't go out looking for the drama people brought it to Az's attention which indicates that alot more people had an issue with the rewards.
We often find in these instances the real instigators remain hidden while they throw someone into the fireing line. Az has a pretty decent stake and can negate much of the incoming retaliation.
However, it's important to note that alot of the complaints that were arising came from within the PoB community. It has been a common discussion in the discord of reward pool abuse. Much of the discussion appeared to go unanswered and I'm tipping many of the community members felt unheard. This would have led to people feeling the need to reach out to others. Az is one of those people that tends to put his hand up to help.
I can understand that down votes are painful and yes as you may or may not be aware Az and I were at logger heads not too long ago in disputing my rewards and I received a number of down votes from him.
As I monitored the situation and have been for some time I have come to learn that where Az at times does go over the top he is also incited by others. In fact the issue that he and I had there were a number of smaller players in the background urging him to zero my account. He didn't. But what I'm trying to say here is that there is a bigger issue at play where people run to bigger players to do their dirty work because the feel hard done by.
Another example which makes no sence is the discussions arising around Alpha. Now a big part of PoBs success has been from people buying in which is driving the price up. I can understand peoples fears of significant amount of investments and what people want to do with that investment. But the focus on Alpha was uncalled for. Alpha is a good curator and investor. Content creator, he has a few good posts but not all are high quality but then neither do I. I mainly blog about my kids and a morning financial update. I'm sure not everyone is in favour of my posting.
The community turned on Alpha and when they saw Az buying in they immediately appear to have muted Az. A fear of Az buying up PoB to down vote was probably a thought. But Az doesn't typically go out and down vote or hunt for people to down vote.
What mainly ocurred was the community eating it's own, Az does see PoB as a bad investment. I won't dispute what people say on that end because I'm a shocking investor and my main reason for being here is ai enjoy writing, engaging and meeting new people.
What is clear and everyone will know is that there is a lack of performance monitoring and reward abuse. This leaves it open to conflict arising between parties. There are also no safe guards for people, from some of the posts produced by the person ir was clear that there were health issues. That doesn't make the person less of a person but enabling poor behaviour is what led to the current issue.
Hive needs some form of dispute resolution process, perhaps a method of freezing rewards while parties debate their positions. This way we remove the power imbalance and enable anyone to be able to dispute a reward. As much as we like to admit it or not a significant amount of both reward abuse and down vote abuse occurs. We just don't always know about it. If you're posting in a non english community it goes hidden because people are not aware of what is being said.
This also occurs with down votes, some smaller accounts continuously down vote someone purely because they have a feud. This in itself is abuse but it gets ignored because the accounts are only small.
I was excited to read that blocktrades is in the process of developing something that will attempt to tackle this issue and I can't wait go read about what it is. It is not an easy subject because lets face it real or not we're talking about money, money drives people bananas.
PoB started with good intentions as a way to reward content creators with a limited supply token instead of the model that Hive has. It's main focus was about content creation and uniqueness. I can understand proofofbrainio coming to defend the person because what are the rules? Yes DPOS is a thing but PoB is an internal community and if it's token value reflected alot of others at low levels then we probably wouldn't be seeing the arguments we are. Money, eh? Root of all problems?
But I have to agree with PoBs high value it also makes it (opinion) accountable to the broader hive community because it's community economy has the ability to impact on the broader hive ecosystem. It could potentially be used as a scam to trade for Hive and build large accounts for free. As someone who invests fiat I too see that as an issue which requires monitoring of it's own.
But what also comes into discussion is what validates a blog? What enables it to be "worthy" of rewards. This is the dangerous part of the discussion because a number of answers are provided. One being that the down voter didn't agree with the awards. Well, there are alot of issues with that as there are alot of posts that the rewards don't align and some do occur at the top end accounts. It's not the top accounts fault it's all the smaller accounts channeling their votes to whales in the hopes of receiving a return upvote.
The other discussion is around rewards aren't yours until payout. I too disagree with this focus as yes votes shift in line with inflation and there could be a difference between payment and upvote. But at the end of the day if no one removes the votes with a down vote they will be paid. So saying that they weren't yours is akin to saying on payday after working the week your employer takes half your cash because it wasn't payday yet.
This model isn't used by youtube, mainstream blogs or other forms of online advertising and you will be paid based on your engagement/users. Hive just provides a more direct focus group to appeal to. Similarly akin to creating your own community like PoB did and it chose to defend a PoB user regardless of what our thoughts are of the persons postings. The community thought that that persons posts were acceptable. It saw an outsider attempt to purchase PoB to push their views on what they deemed appropriate rewards and anticipated it as a risk resulting in the person being muted.
Was it right or wrong? I do not know. But it did cause a retaliation by the other party down voting the main community account to a negative position to censor their engagement. An over kill perhaps?
I'm not sure of the way forward but I know that as Hive and it's communities grow more and more of these issues will emerge. Some will be attempts to scam and others legitimate attempts at producing strong, vibrant and inclusive communities.
What is missing and desperately needed is an agreed upon set of community standards. A constitution that provides clarity to both posters, leaders and enforcers. Something that we can all agree upon so that when these issues arise regardless of in a community or on hive we can reasonably resolve the matter and not have extreme escalations like we are seeing in PoB.
The muting of a Hive participant who is active is a bad move as Az is someone who takes Hive seriously, sometimes a little to seriously but he shouldn't have to wear the brunt of it. A code that we can all agree with that anyone can raise an issue and point out when there are breaches to have them reviewed removing the power imbalance is, in my opinion the right way forward.
What are your thoughts?
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