As a rule, I try not to pay too much attention to 'news' of any kind these days. It's not that I don't like being informed, but rather that there is no more information in the news. 'News' nowadays is mostly just complaints, aired in a way to trigger our prejudices. I don't need to read about other people's problems, I have plenty of my own. I enjoy reading though, and on the blockchain, it's hard to read too much without reading about someone else's problems.
Clever people, like many of you dear readers, know how to complain in a funny way. If your complaint makes me laugh, it changes from news to entertainment. Everybody (including my own alter ego) out here tryin' to teach, and educate. Fuck that, I just wanna be enter-taint-ed.
Now that I've complained about complainers for two whole paragraphs. let's move on to what I really want to talk about in this post: B!#RT. I'll also end up talking about the 'downvote debate', because you can't really talk about one without the other.
I love Hive, I really really do. I even love things that other people hate about it, like the downvote option. If you also love Hive, chances are you have no idea what B!#RT is, other than some other blockchain platform that complainers keep talking about. I have a curious mind, so I decided to go check it out.
B!#RT is, basically, Steemit/Hive.blog with no downvote. It seems to have spun directly from Steemit at about the same time that Hive did, but certainly did not gather as large of a user base. It has the clunky old Steemit interface, and I was able to log in with my Steemit keys.
You cannot log into B!#RT with a Hive account, which I found hilarious, because the whole reason I went to check them out was a post I had read claiming that 80% of their new users were coming from Hive. I knew there was going to be some amusement value there, because the poster didn't show the actual numbers. They even explained that they didn't show the numbers because they were depressingly low, and promised to show the numbers in a later post, when they looked a little better.
The first thing that I discovered was that the easy, logical reason why so many of their new members were coming from Hive was that they have the same onboarding issue. If you want a B!#RT account, you have to buy it, with STEEM or some other crypto that you can't easily buy in my state. I wasn't about to go through any of that, and I sure wasn't about to pay just to go see what some snubbed 'creators' have been up to. I had a hunch though, that like Hive, they would accept my Steemit credentials from my other account. That turned out to be true, so just like that... I was in.
I say 'just like that', but it was a bit of chore, even for me, and I'm above average. If you haven't been through the agony of setting up a blockchain account before, you aren't likely to succeed at it in your first try on B!#RT. If you didn't realize that there were more cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin, the only way you're getting a B!#RT account is if someone sets it up for you.
Difficulties aside, once I was in, I was not disappointed. I mean, I was disappointed in the content, but not in my ability to predict behavior.
Half of the content on the platform seems to be Asian and Arabic Twitter. I don't really know any Asian or Arabic languages well enough to say for sure, all I can say for sure is that they do not use the Roman, Greek, or Cyrillic alphabet. The other half seems to be people who were 'downvoted away' from Hive, and lo and behold, they are over there doing the same things they did here... complaining that they aren't getting enough attention.
It's even more funny over there than it was over here, because the majority of the platform either doesn't speak English, or doesn't care about their drama. I left just one comment (because you have to pay to post), thanking WorldTravelPro for continuing to spread support for Satanism on his new platform, and the complainers were so anxious to have someone to argue with, my comment drew 12 other comments, even though they knew I wouldn't be able to respond.
Honestly, maybe they didn't know I was unable, but they knew I would have to buy some of their token. They might not know that New York State doesn't just allow anyone to buy any old token, but it doesn't, and I'm not going through the hassle of buying their (admittedly cheap) token just to have a boring argument. It will entertain me enough to just swing by once in a while and watch them complain to deaf ears.
Why is that funny to me? I don't know, probably something broken inside. It provides me with free entertainment, so I don't think it's a problem that needs fixing. Maybe it's just a human part of me... I don't actually slow down to stare at accidents on the highway, but I'll slow down to watch someone have a meltdown online. That's the kind of train wreck that amuses me.
It's not all bad over there. They've picked up @lucylin, and @frot, both of whom I enjoy reading, from time to time. The possible Asians or Arabics post lots of beautiful pictures. @world-travel-pro can be found sharing all the access points to Satanism and child trafficking, which is pretty bad, but I guess if you're interested in such things...
Now, I'm not suggesting that anybody leave Hive, unless of course all you do here is complain, in which case, by all means, please leave Hive. I was happy to see a lot of those unhappy voices leave, but now I'm even HAPPIER to see that I haven't lost all those unhappy voices, they just put themselves into a nice little exhibit where I don't have to see them all the time, but I can still peek in when I want to see something a little more... unhinged. Maybe, one day, @gangstalking will move over there as well.
Hey, I can dare to dream...
How's it going, COM Community? Did you miss me? Is it weird that I asked?
This certainly isn't my best work, I know, but life has been too serious for me to work my funny as much as I'd like. Still, I wanted to drop off a little something, so you don't all forget about me.
My apologies, I have no time to find a clever picture to talk about at the end of this post. No time for editing either. This was supposed to get posted yesterday morning. Time to hit 'PUBLISH' and pray...