Hive when people say it has a problem!
What the hell are we doing here?
Way back in the mid 2010's, some like minded people had a vision for a different kind of social community and new kind of cryptocurrency economy. They seemed to believe all people could offer contributions to a society and a community could be formed around a more principled and equitable way of sharing resources.
They promised a world where Proof of Brains, aka Proof of Work and the merit of a user's contributions could be measured by the members of the community and rewarded according to value added within the community. The promise was power to the people, by the people, for the people.
The general premise was that there were flaws in a fiat system where power was centralized throughout the course of history and concentrated in a very wealthy but very small group of inner circles of power and influence. All which lead to a world that became all but unchangeable and mostly escaping their grasp was all but unobtainable by the common person. Sure some nations and systems claimed to be merit based or "democratic" in their decision making and dangled the possibility of advancement to those who "worked hard to overcome adversity" but in reality, they still were controlled by gatekeepers who picked and chose who could rise to the top. Good ideas were squashed. One only need to look at examples such as Nikolai Tesla's life story for real world examples of merit being crushed by the guy with more money.
First, A little reminder
Of the key principles used to guide the design of Steem, the most important is that everyone who contributes to a venture should receive pro-rata ownership, payment, or debt from the venture. This is the same principle that is applied to all startups as they allocate shares at founding and during subsequent funding rounds.
The second principle is that all forms of capital are equally valuable. This means that those who contribute their scarce time and attention toward producing and curating content for others are just as valuable as those who contribute their scarce cash. This is the sweat equity principle and is a concept that prior cryptocurrencies have often had trouble providing to more than a few dozen individuals.
The third principle is that the community creates value to serve its members. This principle is exemplified by credit unions, food co-ops, and health sharing plans, which serve the members of their community rather than selling products or services to people outside the community.
From the introduction of the original Steem White Paper June 2018
But what happened to those altruistic principles?
Well let's take a closer look at that...
Hive is an innovative and forward-looking decentralized blockchain and ecosystem built on the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol [1]. It is the first highly-scalable DPoS blockchain independent of central authority that addresses the problems of mass adoption and versatility of use.
Hive allows the easy storage and retrieval of immutable strings of data and information. It sports three-second zerofee transactions and is designed to store vast amounts of content and to make it available for time-based monetization.
Hive recognizes that transaction fees are often one of the largest challenges to facilitating development and flexibility of use on a blockchain. Instead of requiring potentially costly and inconvenient transaction fees, Hive uses a novel stake-based Resource Credit mechanism to create a fee-less model.
Hive also aims to overcome mainstream adoption shortcomings in blockchain technology and content publishing by improving on their accessibility. It leverages the coined Proof-of-Brain (PoB) concept by distributing a portion of the inflation to content creators and consumers. To earn without financial investment, individuals partake in a wide range of activities. Those include blogging, participating in discussions, curating others, building and engaging with dapps,playing games and more; their limits are only constrained by their own imagination to further the decentralization of the system. All content is always readily-available on the blockchain and retains its original integrity.
Since its inception, Hive has steadily grown as an ecosystem. Myriad dapps, APIs and front-ends contribute to a general and straightforward accessibility of data, transactions and records, so that this existing diversity and utility ensure that the ecosystem is welcoming to content creators, consumers, investors and builders.
Hive was created as an independent and decentralized fork of the Steem blockchain. As a community-driven fork, its intention is to continue the strong community values that have been established, while also freeing the ecosystem from the burden of Steemit Inc. and its disproportionate influence. While that influence had threatened Steem’s decentralization since its inception in 2016, it was kept in check by the means of a social contract. Following the sale of Steemit Inc to Sun Yuchen of the Tron Foundation In February 2020, the exploitation of this influence and loss of confidence in the continued viability of Steem ultimately led to the creation of the Hive blockchain.
From the introduction of the original Hive White Paper September 2020
Can you see the difference in the tone of these two introductions?
Look again, it's subtle but critically important. We've been the victims of a Coup.
We went from Proof of Brain to Proof of Stake, in a single move.
We got taken by a coup and did any of you have a say in the new white paper or the change from proof of brains to proof of money? A say in the new direction? Or did you just go with the flow, assuming it was just a new clone of the same thing, because the old one got bought out from under us, and by the way, pay no attention to the parties who benefited from that, that's old news now anyway, right? Despite some of them being still among us...
But yeah so...
So, It used to be about merit, value, brains, but now it's by definition about merely and only about the elite with the most money who can really matter here or affect any kind of changes.
Sometimes anyway, but I'll get to that too.
It seems we may have lost our way. Because in reality, it's not working out like they advertised after all for anyone BUT an elite few.
In fact one could and many do argue that there is a very strong irony to that last paragraph of the Hive white paper and that in fact, not only did little change, but in some ways things got much much worse.
Read this bit once again:
While that influence had threatened Steem’s decentralization since its inception in 2016, it was kept in check by the means of a social contract. [...], the exploitation of this influence and loss of confidence in the continued viability of Steem ultimately led to the creation of the Hive blockchain.
But wait, in the same paper they swap from proof of brain to proof of stake, aka, proof of money as decided by one's bank account value, instead of proof of merit as decided by the users shared consensus.
Let me ask you all some very specific things.
Do you really feel like this current version of the blockchain is "decentralized? in terms of governance? Not to be confused with merely having distributed server nodes, but actual decentralized decision making regarding the future of the chain?
Do you feel like "proof of brain" is really all that it takes to make it to a governance position or even warrant a level of rewards worthy of your efforts as a user?
Do you think that there is truly a meritocracy on this ship?
Do you feel as it seems that many others seem to feel and openly discuss, that there are gatekeepers and centralized colluding parties that work to prevent the unchosen from achieving momentum or higher rankings because they jeopardize some incumbent's position?
This stuff causes a user adoption and growth problem big time!
And aside from ALL of that I have asserted already, we can't even grow the user base, because a new user who actually arrives here excited, finds out quickly that he or she doesn't have any of this precious "stake" and can't even use the place when they arrive, unless they join by being rich and/or know some insiders to get some RC from once they arrive!
We are so far from making growth possible by this self defeating baked in bullshit that it's almost ludicrous.
When a new user joins, - IF - they make it through the complicated and poorly contrived signup/registration processes,
and then figure out what all their complicated keys mean,
and then learn about all the types of currencies and tokens involved in using the platform,
then they will then quickly find out they can do very little anyway because of the Resource Credit system precluding them from actually even USING the damn place in the first place.
I myself experienced this when I returned after 2.5 years away from the chain with an empty wallet, only to find out after making my "hello again!" style post, that I couldn't even reply to the first round of comments that post received due to a quickly drained lack of RC.
Luckily, a kind old friend delegated some RC to me so I could continue and then another noticed I was back and added some more to help as well (thanks @malos10 and @snook !) --- but if I were new here and had no prior contacts, I would have been totally stuck, totally confused and totally considered it just "broken" or "stupid" and left before even getting started.
Because frankly, that IS broken AND stupid. And completely antithetical to all the promises made in BOTH whitepapers.
The Promise
The Truth
Further upon investigating the system in the eyes of a new user, once again, after completing all the technical learning curves and hurdles it took just to sign up and start posting, I would quickly find that my voice was worth nothing and only by the grace of sheer chance would anyone notice my posts or react to them. If I was completely unknown, as so many are, that post would languish and I would once again decide this was a waste of time and walk away.
IF then by further chance, I was intrigued and enticed enough by what I saw around me to continue despite the first several obstacles, I would see that this community that proudly goes about exclaiming its whitepaper documented "inclusiveness" and "proof of brain" largely was just another clusterfuck of who you know and how you know them and far less about merit or value than about cronyism and collusion.
For evidence of this, look at trending and new posts. Look at what really IS quality, original content being ignored, while oddly strange things appear as the most rewarded or most seen content.
Look at this real time example I just grabbed:
How can a post with 3 votes about something that is barely "quality" anything, be the alleged most viewed post when the two right under it (and we will discuss that in a moment) are MASSIVELY more viewed and voted on with the numbers to prove it right there. A flaw in the interface maybe? Ok, but its been this way all week, that weird porn post topping the chart for the last three days while really good content that would have mass appeal is buried much further down the list.
Proof of Brain? Well if this is real, then it must be true that people keep their brains in their pants!
Now about the next few posts.
Anyone who has been here awhile knows that Proof of BULLSHIT is a better metric for what "sells" on this platform as "value." I've benefitted from that myself in years past. Stir up some shit, start a feud, call out a vapid imposter for what they are and you get attention economy eyeballs and rewards. But is that really proof of brain? Proof of merit? Or just tabloid trash no better than that National Enquirer paper at your supermarket checkout line?
I can't tell you how many genuinely talented authors, news pundits, artists, musicians, poets and creators, and developers and scientists and philosophers and so on that I have met on this platform, within its various communities. So many brilliant minds and we are fortunate they are here, enjoying each other, and perhaps that is reward enough, but that is available everywhere on the internet, so why would they go through all those learning curves, onboarding hassles, technical limitations and suffer through endless noise in the signal like the screenshot above to be here?
They came for the promises in the white papers, the premise that a "better way" could be had here.
But where is that?
It's a world where we commonly now accept that mere effort won't get you any extra influence here unless its deemed to be of value to handful of wealthy gatekeepers who have decided to make this place their personal playground and to sort of take a Hunger Games style approach to everyone else, deciding whom they let live or die on the chain at their whimsical discretion disguised by the wiley guise of "curation".
You're so wrong Cork!!!! Look at so and so!!!
There will be those who argue with "What about so and so, or such and such" and as with any set of rules there are always exceptions. But let's be very very real. For every exception, there are many more who will never meet the criteria of a certain few to be accepted and allowed to progress very far.
Crumbs for the commoners, coffers for the chosen ones. Look at the proposal pages and witness pages and look at their historic and static nature, ever unchanging, never being replaced by anyone not from the club.
VERY rarely has the witness list changed much in the last 8 years and when it does, its because of feuds between the feudal lords, hoisting each other on their petards. It's illustrated by the same trending posts in the screenshot, and has been happening since day zero on both renditions of the chain, be it steem or Hive, same usual suspects, same concentrations of wealth and power and only about half of them deserving of any attention at all, based on "proof of brain".
So what should we do? What CAN be done?
That's how the elite will respond to this. Condescendingly they will ask... "Tell us then, what should we change? What would you do to fix it? Offer a solution if you want to bitch so much."
The answer to that, is sadly that my answer would be irrelevant, by design of the Hive whitepaper and they already know that. Why do you think they made that subtle change from Brains to Stake in the first place? They knew that was the only way they could thwart genuine meritocracies from occurring naturally and prevent content creators from taking too much of their precious rewards pool which they happily horde with poorly documented opaque "projects" and "proposals" and the top 20 witnesses propping each other up out of reach of change by even the most determined large groups in the community with collectively smaller wallets.
The system by design precludes even a mass uprising of RC limited, low value wallet holders from actually having any voice at all, sometimes not even enough voice to say a simple "hello" to commenters on their new posts as new users.
How is any of this true to any kind of spirit of "Decentralization"?
This place is and always was about Proof of Wallet and Proof of Insider Status and always was.
Again, some exceptions occur. Almost if as if purposefully allowed to happen, someone can be included just to be used as a token example, but should they in any way test the sanctity of the "powers" they run the risk of being eviscerated. It has happened to me, it has just been evident in the promotion of @engrave and the demotion of @pharesim because they dared speak aloud or were needed to further someone else's greedy ambitions.
And along those lines, I am sure an army of sycophants will come to defend some parties "Oh but Hive needs Splinterlands and Splinterlands needs money". Wait whut? A for profit business that has existed for years now, cant pay its own bills so it needs the communities money to save its ass? Sounds like exactly the kind of business failing that should NOT be bailed out. How many of their users are using their proof of brain on the chain? Showing any kind of proof of existence at all? What has this done for the chain except fill the feeds with game spam and bury quality content? And now they want substantial money to stay afloat? GTFO.
But that digressive example aside, its one of many. SO many good projects came here, and left because proof of merit wasn't REALLY how things work here. So many great people have come, looked and left to go elsewhere because they saw it for the illusion it can be.
Hive has a problem and that problem is the irony of its governor's actions and actors not matching its white paper words in deed or in spirit.
We need to find a way to empower the actual users to mean something again. And that won't happen if its only possible to affect change if you have a million dollar wallet strong enough to make a noise, and even then, if the colluding few want you gone, you will be. Even money can't fix this. I could name names of many who tried but most of them left and wont be remembered.
But if money cant fix it, and merit cant fix it, can it be fixed? Can we find a way to truly have the meritocracy and uphold that social contract, or is it really just a place for the rich to reap the pool and the poor to beg for crumbs regardless of their contributions to the stickiness of the platform?
WHY would anyone want to come here at all? Answer that, and you will quickly realize that spending half a million on "hiring a marketing person or something" is pointless and a cash grab, because truly VALUEABLE and GOOD things sell themselves....
Let that sink in.
And let's talk about it!