"Tribalism" and "antagonism" have unfortunately been the words I would most use to describe this short time we spent apart from STEEM.
Sometimes the "tribalism" meant unity against oppression like it was the case with the STEEM takeover, sometimes "antagonism" was in service of a just cause like in the case of Justin Sun stealing funds directly from user wallets.
But we have to be honest and admit that sometimes our tribalism and antagonism was misplaced and unfair. Something I have found myself being guilty of as well.
With each "revolution" a new power structure emerges.
When HIVE was created all those close to @ned finally got their spot in the sun. They used to be there trying to get a place by his side with heavy bags hoping they could influence him to make something of STEEM. Months and years went by with them deliberating how to not have a social media platform that literally gives out money to its users, simply die.
They failed.
With their failure they resorted to "lower" methods, those more destructive for STEEM, methods of increasing their personal benefit with little regard for anything else.
They created tight-knit groups, circle jerks, they selfvoted for most of their VP, they spammed the platform, they used their downvotes to attempt silence critics.
Those of us that didn't care about their downvotes they demonized. Fortunately most of these people are gone, with only a few remaining. "Stinc" was bad, so anything that would replace it was instantly thought of as an upgrade. Im still waiting for that upgrade to be delivered.
What we ended up seeing was the funds originally intended for the betterment of Hive severely misused. Given away undeservingly to those that ended up packing their bags, dumping what they were given and quitting Hive, having taken the most they could.
I've been following the "behind the scenes" action for quite a while now, watching in disappointment the multitudes of "slack groups", "teams", "foundations" that do nothing but dissipate responsibility and achieve nothing in their everlasting impotence. Only purpose being to convince you that them, the members, are "important", "influential". That theyre friends with the "big guns". A pin for them to wear.
I wouldn't have a problem with their self-assigned titles, the "Hive outreach masters", the "marketing gurus", the "assistant to regional manager Dwight Shrutes" nor would I mind them thinking they're some kind of "gatekeepers of Hive knowledge" if only those groups didn't actively make Hive worse off.
A good example of that was what happened during the slack drama of 2020 with Cryptofinally and Coruscate when all of those "important ones" got together and started bad mouthing the biggest female crypto influencer on Twitter. Drunk on the success of the twitter campaigning the community brought on, they smugly decided on behalf of everyone that we didn't need these women talking about Hive to their tens of thousands of followers (aka simps😏).
They instead sided with the worst troll in the history of Hive and Steem, and not only piled on Cryptofinally, convincing the community that she was somehow "bad", but also decided to bad mouth another influencer, Coruscate, a long time community member, for no other reason then her being a girl on Twitter like Cryptofinally.
To add on to this absolute stupidity, @cryptofinally actually talked to Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Cardano and convinced him to reach out to Hive. That's what these influencers can do. But we dont need that, do we?
This brings me to the point of this post; not only do these "teams" do idiotic things to influencers like I mentioned above, they also do it to members of the community. Some of you are aware of the @hbdpotato issue where 191 000 HIVE, or approx. 37000 USD, is being held under the custody of former Steem and Hive consensus witness, @thecryptodrive, who is now focusing on developing his own platform, BLURT.
The funds were initially going to be returned before a smear campaign started against him. This is again something I followed behind the scenes and if im completely honest, if they went after me like that I'd tell everyone to fuck off and give nothing back. But i guess some folks are nicer then I am. lol
A telegram comment was dug up @thecryptodrive left to a STEEM user where he is NOT badmouthing STEEM in order to get this user to use Hive. I mean, I'll shittalk TRON all day but if I want to onboard a TRON user I'll definitely take it down a notch, or 50...which is exactly what @thecryptodrive did. He basically told the Steem user in a diplomatic manner that maybe Steem will come right one day, but at the moment, Hive is the best decentralized alternative. The screenshot of this was shared in Slack, his words twisted to mean he was a Steem supporter and everyone was tagged and rallied to start dropping their votes from @thecryptodrive's witness. Within a day or two he was out of the top 20 and all his work to get there over the years was nullified.
"The Team" basically decided that someone else was supposed to get paid instead as consensus witness, so it was important to demonize him. To top it off, once he was later found out to do the unthinkable, the crime of all crimes, oh no!!!, he was kicked from the Slack.
What was his crime, you ask?
He went ahead and made Github commits as a BLURT core member, which he went on to co-found. I really dont blame him. Instead of applauding someone's efforts to create something on their own, at worst case at least developing a partnership between platforms, what we ended up with is an active campaign to demean him and attack the Blurt platform.
You should have seen the #Koinos chat, a project created by the ex Steemit.inc team and how everyone shit on the potential of that platform as well for no reason before anything was even revealed yet..
The big guns didn't like him so it was ok for the rest of us to hate him as well. It would even score us points.
That's the part of this I personally hate the most. People not thinking for themselves and instead joining a mob that "follows the stake" regardless of how deplorable the action.
I like this guy. He has lots money and lots people know him. If he says this guy is bad, it must be true.
I like a good laugh like the other guy but ever since the launch of Blurt many from the Hive community have attacked the platform with social attacks, repetitive dick gif spam and some even going as far as setting up an RPC with 60 accounts, exploiting a transaction which didn't incur fees in an attempt to bloat the chain and put a damper on the Raspberry Pi witness rollout.
I mean, why would you do that? Why waste your time on something like that? If it was a point of attack for the platform, there are always ways to make that known.
But no, when someone is made a TARGET then it must be ok being all kinds of asshole towards them. Dont be morons!
Speaking of those, one of the reasons I even reached out to @thecryptodrive is because of the most recent interaction I had with one of the Hive witnesses.
As some of you are aware, I am trying to bring marketing to Hive after 5 years of inaction from various groups (that list is simply too long). Because of that I've been talking to many of the witnesses and @themarkymark was one of them. I was aware of his deep dislike of me, which is still a mystery to me since I've never actually been in any kind of conflict with him, but was hoping that he was reasonable enough to put the good of the platform above his own personal biases. I honestly did not expect him to vote the proposal, I was mostly interested to see if he was going to use his influence to actively attempt to kill the proposal behind the scenes.
(something he has done in the past)
When I asked if he will actively oppose the proposal based on his personal antagonism regardless of the actual merits of the incoming proposal, his answer was:
Isn't that what everyone does.
Up 'till Tuesday I was voting Markys witness regardless of his antagonistic behavior towards me. I did not care about his opinion of me as long as I believed he worked towards bettering Hive.
Once he openly admitted that he cares more about his petty squabbles than he cares about Hive's future I removed my vote. I would encourage everyone to reevaluate which witnesses they are voting for. Consider for yourself if people like that deserve your vote. They've already helped destroy Steem and leeched as much value as they could. Now they want you to forget that. I would be willing to forget if they didn't work to hurt Hive now.
Let them take what they have and let's send them on their merry way.
https://peakd.com/me/witnesses
All of this really opened my eyes to the problems Hive is facing and why they rarely do get fixed, so I went ahead and tried to fix at least a minor one.
I picked up some of the comments Marky has been leaving and since his response to my inquires was a telltale sign of his approach to things, I knew it wouldnt be too difficult to get this one thing done. That one thing being the return of the HBDpotato funds..
Since themarkymark doesnt actually care about these funds being returned, writing these comments, a post, only served to antagonize @thecryptodrive further which in turn ensured no funds are returned, he found it at least a good opportunity to pretend like he's doing something.
"See these comments, I'm actually trying to get these funds back."
Lol. That's not how you get those funds back and he knows that. I mean its laughable nonsense only fools would be convinced by, but the appearance of effort is maintained.
He deemed Thecryptodrive an easy target and bullies love those. The 10 cent spammers and those marginalized by the inner group are Markys favorite target. He can go after those publicly.
The bigger fish? Well he deals with that behind the scenes. He wouldnt want to look bad and his witness to suffer, would he? lol.
All it actually took to get these funds back to the community is, you guessed it.... talking nicely to thecryptodrive.
I didnt have to shittalk him in Slack, I didnt have to try and convince everyone how he's a shit person, how BLURT is terrible, or be a sneaky troll taking digs at anyone.
I just asked him:
Hey man, the HBDpotato funds, wanna give them to the community?
To cut this short🙂...
@thecryptodrive has decided to multisig the @hbdpotato account with me, which means I'll have to sign the transaction for the funds to be moved. Since im not really techsavy in that regards I really want to thank @fbslo for helping set it up. His help was essential in making all this work.
Please note however that the @hbdpotato bot will stop working as it is not geared up for multisig support as yet. Luckily the bot is idle anyway because HBD is above 1 USD.
I'll leave it to the community to decide if it should be upgraded and continue running or to decide where the funds should go.
We can burn these funds, we can send them to the DAO or we can keep them there to be used for the incoming Hive marketing proposal in case its accepted. That would really help to set up marketing right away instead of having to wait a month for the funds to accumulate. If the proposal doesn't pass inside a few weeks the funds would be sent back to the DAO.
What do you think should be done with the funds? Let me know.
Ill leave it to the community to decide.
PS: Firefly has been off the air for almost 20 years.. It's time to move on man...