RE: My last post?

It's good that you took the time to explain this, thanks.

Part of the problem has been that you don't explain yourself after having taken action that frustrates other people - regardless of the details of the hive voting situation, which just adds to the frustration, negative image and the chances of conflict.. this is something to learn from imo.

When I previously asked you who was downvoting you to zero and why, you assumed that everyone already knew and just didn't answer. I didn't know (even though I run the downvote monitoring page Untrending at HiveAlive too!) and I imagine most people don't - unless you point it out.

This situation is an example of the way that actions within a community often have a knock-on effect to others and when a war erupts of some kind, other people get drawn in who would otherwise never pay any attention. This is unavoidable in a community like Hive, as long as stake effects voting - so it is all of our responsibilities to do what we can to create harmony. It's also an example of how the right to vote freely is something that people will stand up for, to the point of harming their own interests. This needs to be considered when downvoting.

I don't doubt that Marky has prevented plenty of scammers from extracting rewards using bot nets etc. - however, for me personally, I only ever encountered him when his system had wrongly identified someone, cancelled them and then found it was not possible to get him to rectify the situation. So it is wrong to view this situation as purely one where a perfect Hive user is the victim of nasty bullies. Even if the intentions are pure, the implementation was not and the image created as a result was not responded to in order to improve public reputation.

Comments on specific points made:

• @Transisto vs Marky: We ideally need a new option for post rewards that sends the author reward back to the rewards pool, while the stakeholder still gets the curation reward. Another option is the addition of an automatic (reduced) stakeholder reward that everyone gets paid for unused curation power. This might motivate people to not engage in upvoting pointless posts that breaks the proof of brain post discovery and post ordering system that is built in to Hive. I don't know how many of the podcast posts Transisto voted on but I do know that quality curation takes at least 1-2 hours every single day. This is a huge amount of time for people to be putting into the system to get their curation reward and it is totally predictable that people will just upvote whatever post they see sometimes in order to be able to do something else that day. When smaller accounts do this, no-one notices - but larger accounts are very obvious.

• @TDVTV posts: I agree that the original setup for Vigilante.TV was not good - in that content was effectively being stolen to some extent, with the original creators not getting the rewards. However, since they improved the system to prevent this from happening, the only problem left is that sometimes posts get uploaded to both 3speak and also to vigilante.tv, so there are duplicates on the blockchain. I don't personally see this as the fault of the content creators who are just wanting their content to be viewed by the most people. I also don't think this situation calls for downvotes because I don't see people upvoting both duplicate posts - people either vote for one or the other.

• Marky vs @Xeldal / @Enki: I can't speak for Xeldal or Enki as I don't know who they are and have never spoken to them. However, it looks to me like they are responding to the downvotes which appear to be limiting the reach (censoring) posts that cover triggering and controversial political topics that get routinely censored on web 2 platforms. I don't agree with nuking anyone's posts for such things, however, I can see the motivation for Xeldal's downvotes since (to my knowledge) there was no public discussion of why the downvotes were happening or what could be done about it. Punishment is not a necessary part of learning and if there is no discussion then zero learning can take place - the only outcome likely then is retaliation.

• @kencode: Ken's new site @cast.garden has also been nuked by various downvoters and I don't think he has had an explanation as to why. The content there is provided by account owners who get paid and is often decent quality. Though I don't see Marky's downvotes there, it's more Curangel and steemcleaners. Just another batch of antagonisation through DVs that isn't explained. I think effectively slandering @jeffberwick is not such a great move, but let's see what Ken has to add about that. In any case, I don't think Ken's concern about Jeff is any kind of justification for negating his complaints about the downvoting his projects receive.

Conclusion:

I accept that you don't like doing all the downvoting, I wouldn't and I think only a sociopathic person would 'enjoy' it tbh.

There are various proposals being planned to improve the downvoting situation on Hive and some will be made public soon. Other than that, this seems like an opportunity to learn the lessons from Avatar 2 - where an outcast whale becomes a hero through compassionate communication with one of the characters in movie. More communication with an intent for empathy solves problems.