RE: When Is a Censor Not A Censor? The Wider Implication of Downvote/Cancel Culture on Hive.

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Most of the other arguments are kind of void when you take into account how blatant autovoting is ongoing and not handled with care. You could say everyone not on big autovotes is getting censored with your example.

To then take the meaning of censor from some older definition instead of the one people are facing in this day and age all over web2 feels like you're just trying really hard to make your points feel more important.

I'd argue a lot of people are more willing to check out a post if there's downvotes on it and especially the comments to see if anything was said about it. On top of it all most of your examples rely on people only checking trending/hot and ignoring their own feed of the people that may be getting downvoted they themselves chose to follow. I don't know about others but I barely check trending.

Anyway, that being said this isn't real censorship. As you mentioned yourself people can band together and vote it up past the downvotes, there's barely any in existence anyway and a small fraction is being used. Who knows even if the 25% is written in stone or will be changed later to reflect on how much it is being used/needed. By banding together even smaller users can overcome the downvotes, sure they'd take a penalty for it, sure they could tip the author if they really want his content to continue being posted - assuming the demonetization from downvotes demotivates them from posting but that can also go the other way. Someone may disagree with other people and their thoughts so much that they may dip into their upvote mana to downvote as well and also be penalized from inflation like the people countering the downvotes.

I haven't seen many actual malicious downvotes happening ever since Steem, there I spent a lot of time and potential rewards manually countering said downvotes and I think at this point in time we're way better distributed and have many more options such as L2 to most of the time ignore the downvotes or easily counter them.



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Anyway, that being said this isn't real censorship

Taking down from trending page everything about fake pandemic and fake vaccine is a shadow banning (a form of censorship)

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(Edited)

That's literally not shadowbanning, mate. Shadowbanning is when you're posting into the void and no one can see it, literally no one except for you yourself and Twitter on their servers or whatever garbage you're posting on. Everyone else on there cannot.

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the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

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So if you're partially blocked just ask for an RC delegation once that's possible! :)

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Downvotes could maybe be compared to tweaking the algorithm on youtube/twitter to not show you certain content from certain users as much, it's funny that you guys compare downvotes to censorship while people barely talk about getting soft-shadowbans such as the algo never recommending your content to interested consumers.

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downvotes/upvotes affect the GLOBAL algorithm, not just your own. tweaking an algorithm for your own benefit is not the same thing. the nature of the algorithm on hive is not the same as the web2.0 sites in that there is generally less management and more purity of the trending list than on FB et., which use AI to heavily manage what you see. This is a good thing about Hive.
I do talk about shadowbanning on Youtube and Facebook etc. - I've spoken about it publicly for 15 years. I have video of Facebook deleting my comments in realtime and of Youtube not showing my comments to others (proven by access through Tor).
It is the shadowbanning on the controlled, anti-human web2.0 sites that is most of the reason why I am here and also whole heartedly support the massive court case that is ongoing against them at present. I have covered all of this extensively on Hive previously.

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(Edited)

On that trending note, these posts about the pandemic have been on trending in forever, I'm sure enough people have followed these content creators by now to be able to see them in their feeds or scroll a community related to it or tags. It's absurd how little anyone here cares about them to drop a comment every once in a while, yet we're supposed to let them take a big pie from the rewardspool while they barely give a damn about Hive to at least link back here from their other socials.

Do you want Hive to have 20 posts about covid with 0 engagement on trending constantly? That's a way worse look than people downvoting them (often late after the trending attention has been had) for disagreement of rewards.

I mean at this point I'm starting to find it ridiculous how people are even trying to defend those let alone touch on the censorship subject.

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Do you want Hive to have 20 posts about covid with 0 engagement on trending constantly? That's a way worse look than people downvoting them

And the fact that the 0 engagement is not exclusive on these posts makes this worse look even more worse. People just/only have to look around. There are many posts with 0 engagement. I often see posts with 1-5 bot comments, but 0 human comments. It is in the statistics that nowadays the average number of comments per posts on the Hive blockchain is 3, but most of those are bot comments. I guess that it is fair to see that the most part of the Hive community is censoring (or soft-shadowbanning) itself by not caring about other people's posts.

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I guess that it is fair to see that the most part of the Hive community is censoring (or soft-shadowbanning) itself by not caring about other people's posts.

And why should people feel bad about not caring for things that fall outside the scope of their interests? Should people be compelled to give a fuck about topics they aren't into just to show others from outside the platform say we got a functional community?

If you attract users that fall under the unpopular opinionated crowd, you're going to get a crowd where the mainstream users won't give a damn about their content because that's not their cup of tea.

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And why should people feel bad about not caring for things that fall outside the scope of their interests?

The problem is the fact that almost everything "fall outside the scope of their interests". And it is enough to look around a bit to see this. There are many users without any real interaction.

Should people be compelled to give a fuck about topics they aren't into just to show others from outside the platform say we got a functional community?

I do not say that. But taking a look at the current state of things, I can say that around 90% of the users cannot create contents, which would be interests others, so we (this platform in general) currently do not really have a functional community. There are a few successful people with plenty of interaction, but that is all.

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The problem is the fact that almost everything "fall outside the scope of their interests". And it is enough to look around a bit to see this. There are many users without any real interaction.

I don't see it as a problem if there's lack of interaction. Authors need to earn their audience first and if their content doesn't trigger a reaction, then they need to work on a new gimmick. Who are you going to blame? 30 people that passed by your post without saying anything because they had poor taste of content? or yourself because not a single one was convinced you're worth the trouble commenting to. The latter is within my control and it's the battle I picked while most concern themselves with everyone else's fault for not seeing the genius of the post.

I can say that around 90% of the users cannot create contents, which would be interests others, so we (this platform in general) currently do not really have a functional community.

This I can fully agree on. Most are just content consumers pretending to be creators. I'm also slacking off from content creation and just do shitposting nowadays.

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I don't see it as a problem if there's lack of interaction. Authors need to earn their audience first and if their content doesn't trigger a reaction, then they need to work on a new gimmick

Exactly, @adamada.

I'm popping in here to add my perspective as a longtime WordPress blogger. I posted for years in relative obscurity (some would say I still do...lol) and it wasn't until I connected with a group of WP bloggers back in 2014 that I started getting comments on my blog, instead of people just hitting the WP "like" button & leaving.

However, that only happened after I went to a bazillion other blogs and left a bazillion thoughtful (not, "nice post") replies to other bloggers.

There are great pockets of engagement here on chain (check out @abh12345 Hive & Leo Engagement League posts to see some of it in action), but as you said - authors need to earn their audience. As communities grow, I think it will make it even easier for new people to connect with others in a relatively short amount of time.

While blockchain blogging is only a small part of our ecosystem, I think it's actually finding an active & engaged community (with upvotes as the cherry on top) that will eventually draw more people here, despite the consternation of some about the downvotes. I've actually had more traditional bloggers show interest in our community after mentioning, "comments" not "crypto."

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Just adding to the great input above.

It's an attention economy. It's not that people are all the time are preoccupied about their own content, even if most of the time that is the case, it's more like taking the first move to show you care and attention gets reciprocated. Reciprocation is a drive everyone has when someone does nice things for them and it snowballs when an entire community has members doing it.

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I didn't think of it this way, the engagement aspect of it. I personally don’t comment on it because of blockchain permanence. I don’t want shit to come back and bite me in a few months or years, regardless of what I say. I’ve made enough mistakes, don’t need to make more lol

I do think it’s important to have posts with lots of comments on the trending page though! I’m sad when I don’t see any engagement on it.

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Most of the other arguments are kind of void when you take into account how blatant autovoting is ongoing and not handled with care. You could say everyone not on big autovotes is getting censored with your example.

That would make some sense except that this is a stake weighted platform by design and the people placing the autovotes have done so voluntarily based on their choice to support the authors. In effect they are saying that they trust the 'brain' of the author to create the content they want to support. Sometimes they might remove the autovotes if the person changes. I understand what you are saying but the nature of proof of brain is not inherently invalidated by auto upvoting - though I agree that full manual curation would be a significant improvement.

To then take the meaning of censor from some older definition instead of the one people are facing in this day and age all over web2 feels like you're just trying really hard to make your points feel more important.

I have been finishing a huge book for years which is on the topic of English language. When seen in the context of the bigger picture, it is very clear that understanding the origins of words makes a huge difference to our understanding of ourselves and why things are as they are. The deeper intentions behind words are often lost and many important truths about human interaction can be picked up by finding the underlying essence of words. Etymology is even a specific field in Yoga and others schools for this reason - it's an ancient spiritual understanding that word roots are important for individual and societal balance. If I 'judge' that your words are unethical 'in real life', I might not censor you in that I can't stop you speaking, but I might make sure you miss out on opportunities in your life in ways that I have power over - this is a form of covert censorship and power limitation that is in some cases even more effective than deleting your tweets. It's all censorship and the underlying etymology of the word makes this clear.

I'd argue a lot of people are more willing to check out a post if there's downvotes on it and especially the comments to see if anything was said about it.

If they see the post then they might do, but the main mechanism we have currently for making posts visible is upvoting. One way around this would be to stop downvotes from having an effect on the trending pages, but to still remove post rewards.

I don't know about others but I barely check trending.

I look at both. When I first started I was only checking trending as I didn't follow anyone and wanted to get a sense of the type of community involved on Steem. The majority of my post is as much about marketing as anything else. Perception is key and the trending page is the prime focus for potential new users and investors. I know for 100% sure that most of the people I have pointed to Hive or Steem have rejected it for exactly the reasons I am highlighting - they look at trending, ask why things are so weird and skewed, laugh and go somewhere else!

Who knows even if the 25% is written in stone or will be changed later to reflect on how much it is being used/needed.

I'm not sure which 25% you are referring to here.

I haven't seen many actual malicious downvotes happening ever since Steem, there I spent a lot of time and potential rewards manually countering said downvotes

It comes down to what you personally define to be malicious. I'd say that consistently zeroing most of someone's posts, even when they cover completely different topics to those you have stated you have a problem with, would be considered malicious by most people. That's what is happening to my posts at present, plus others. Attempts to discuss the issues or mediate were met with aggression, superiority and avoidance.

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Your post is being maliciously downvoted? Come on.

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It comes down to how you define malicious downvoting. If downvoting is being done on the basis of the content of the post, then surely it wouldn't be done on posts which are quite different. If the downvoter does so repeatedly and not only doesn't explain but does as much as possible to avoid properly explaining, I'd call that as malicious as downvoting can be.

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Or they just disagree with the rewards and constant autovotes? Shouldn't you also expect comments by the big autovoters similar to how you're expecting comments on downvotes? I'm pretty sure smooth isn't a malicious downvoter from the downvotes I've seen him cast over the year.

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I'm not referring to smooth, I'm referring to the chain of 60+ downvoters that have zeroed most of my posts in the last week. I've spoken to some of them and they have removed the downvotes and were surprised to find their accounts being used in this way.

I follow a couple of upvote chains which select who they follow based on the opinion of the people running them. It is a delegation of responsibility based on trust and shared goals - just as when stake is delegated. I don't expect people who delegate me to also comment or even pay attention to what I use the stake for and I don't expect recipients of my delegation to do as I say either.

Upvotes are inherently a statement of agreement about the content of a post and a desire to see it gain attention. Downvotes are 'maybe' the opposite, but maybe not. If I know that I have constant upvotes coming in then I know I can take time out of my working week to make quality posts. If that is removed at some point randomly then I can't. It's a simple courtesy to explain why you decided to downvote in a major way that can actually affect and influence someone's working day. It seems to me that the more money people have, the less they consider these things. The least they can do is not hide behind a thin veneer of 'service to others'!

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So it all comes down to rewards then, you'd post if the autovotes continue to land but if they're removed you wouldn't. Somehow you think that's the same as your content/account/ideas being deleted and blocked from the platform completely which is an actual real problem on web2.

It's weird cause when I was being downvoted by 50m+ korean steempower for months for standing up to downvoting overrewarded garbage the first thing that came to mind wasn't that I was being censored. People could still see my posts, interact with them, etc. Of course some weren't as loud due to fear of also being targeted but I wouldn't say that's censorship either way, at least not the kind that's haunting web2 right now where it's a real problem. We might have to find another word for it cause this one doesn't do it justice imo.

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I posted for years with zero autovotes or even upvotes for quite a while. When it comes to life and ddeath level of important topics I will post whether I get upvoted or not, but when I only have so much time available, the knowledge that I will likely get regular upvote support helps me feel comfortable in setting significant time aside to make posts. I can literally sit and build my own business, that benefits me mostly or I can share what I know in posts so as to help potentially many people. After many years of helping others for free and having very little to show for it, Hive/Steem is a welcome change that makes info sharing much more practical economically for me/us. I take the upvotes as appreciation from others who want me to carry on doing it. I don't rely on it but I do respond to it. If I were posting about cat memes or recipes I wouldn't be that bothered, but I am often sharing heavily censored information that can save lives. The downvotes seem to come from people who disagree and claim that the posts are actually harmful - yet they have provided zero evidence of this.

Somehow you think that's the same as your content/account/ideas being deleted and blocked from the platform completely which is an actual real problem on web2.

No, it's not as much of a problem as Web2.0's censorship - but at the same time there are so many more users on Web2.0 that getting followers and discovered can be a lot easier than Hive at times. Ultimately, both systems are a particularly convoluted way of communicating with people you haven't met before. There are probably much better ways of doing this that neither web2 or web3 provide.

the first thing that came to mind wasn't that I was being censored... We might have to find another word for it cause this one doesn't do it justice imo.

I have been very actively and deliberately censored on Web2.0 sites for around 15 years. The first social network I used, Tribe.net, was literally bought out by Cisco and turned into a shithole of weird gay porn and random shite because the messages being shared there were too effective at disrupting the societal domination of large corporations. This was Web1.0, not even 2.0. Trust me, I know what full censorship is.

I understand that what takes place in Hive can seem to be less like censorship of that kind and in a sense it is. However, Hive is a decentralised space where anyone who does the 'obscuring' of posts via downvoting has the opportunity to engage publicly to discuss the issue. Facebook is hated partially because of their ridiculous control of posts/accounts without even providing a legitimate reason most of the time. Downvoting without attempt to engage feels very close to that kind of approach, but things don't need to be that way. For some reason, people seem to think that completely removing social interaction from social networks is a rational approach, when clearly it isn't and will not yield sustainable growth.

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(Edited)

but at the same time there are so many more users on Web2.0 that getting followers and discovered can be a lot easier than Hive at times.

This is so not true. There's way more content creators trying to make it and consumers only consuming content from the top 0.01% than actively going out and being incentivized to find new content creators. As a curator with a project focusing on newcomers I can attest that.

Not sure why you compare it to facebook, they don't have downvotes/dislikes as far as I know. A better comparison would be Reddit, where I agree that it's way worse being downvoted or having bots downvoted you for months and you never find out who or why.

For some reason, people seem to think that completely removing social interaction from social networks is a rational approach

Who is saying this? Just because some prefer not to comment on their downvotes it's not always necessary or hard to figure out knowing who the downvoter was, what they usually downvote and given the content you're providing or your own history with downvotes. It's way better than the example I gave above and as we all know, me personally at least, is that not saying anything saves everyone a lot more time as trying to explain your downvotes only causes endless discussions.

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So now that the post on downvoting has been downvoted to zero - along with all my other posts, again with no comment or explanation by the downvoters.. I guess this still doesn't count as malicious downvoting because.. reasons. I have a question - what IS malicious downvoting? Does it exist?

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Bro, it's Chaos at this point... Get you some sps, and buy some vouchers... its not too late! jk but seriously though its chaos bro. You do understand that Ned was a really progressive liberal, BFFs with Anthony Bourdain and all. No surprise the small circle of legacy holders from steem and now on hive are not jiving with your stuff well maybe the poker players are that found steem and btc useful hopping borders in europe to play poker but still let us know what you find in terms of an alt way to do crypto with content. I loved what you had to say about threespeak and I might vote for their proposal after all.

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If they see the post then they might do, but the main mechanism we have currently for making posts visible is upvoting.

Or just following people and checking your feed?

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that is only possible for a small percentage of the users of hive that already follow a given profile. these people have already expressed interest the profile and so are following the posts. In general, we have to somehow discover the profiles that we want to follow and the way that is baked in to proof of brain is to do that through the posts percolating to the top of trending/hot via upvotes. Accounts which have the most stake inherently get more follows because people want their votes, so making network reach dependent mostly on follows is a decision that most hurts the smallest accounts and most benefits the largest.

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There's also this thing called communities where people could actively look in new/hot/trending for posts of a niche they're interested in, that is if you wouldn't post in a general content community such as proof of brain that pretty much just nullifies the point of communities.

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Yes, communities can be useful - I generally crosspost in my own ones, starting in proof of brain as I get strong interest and support from that community. Busy community trending pages will still bury zeroed posts though.

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