The Great Hive War of 0.007 HIVE

Apparently, 0.007 HIVE is enough to start a one sided war. It's not even a particularly expensive war either or economically significant, but apparently it's a long-term war by the looks of it.

A while back, I manually downvoted a few posts belonging to @davideownzall Bec he was down voting people with no history of real abuse. The votes were tiny, roughly 0.007 HIVE each. But now my posts receive a very specific kind of attention.

A consistent automated downvote from the same account, arriving at roughly the same time point after I publish, with the amount changing according to the rewards already sitting on the post. maxing st around 0.242 HIVE. Conveniently enough to wipe out the author and my readers curation rewards I would otherwise receive from the normal amount votes coming in.

At some point you stop looking at the individuals downvote and start looking at the behavior. This isn't really about 0.242 HIVE. It's about what someone chooses to do with voting power.

Hive gives people the ability to reward content they like and reduce rewards on content they don't like. That's part of the system. People can use their voting power however they want. no issues there to a degree. Yet there's something psychologically interesting about accumulating enough influence that you can affect somebody else's rewards, and then deciding to use that influence because they once gave you several tiny votes you didn't like.

The original offense: approximately 0.007 HIVE.

The response: approximately 0.242 HIVE at a time.

That is an impressive exchange rate for holding a grudge. We've apparently reached the stage of technological development where human beings can automate revenge on a blockchain.

While this pettiness is happening, the same account continues producing its own content and receiving rewards. Actifit posts, Worldmappin posts, ordinary daily activity, nothing wrong with any of that. People should get rewarded for whatever the community chooses to reward.

One person can spend their voting power supporting their own participation in the ecosystem while simultaneously spending it trying suppress somebody else's work rather than using that stake to fight against real abuse, and then you have to ask what exactly is going on psychologically.

Is it disagreement?

Is it retaliation?

Is it status?

Is it simply the satisfaction of having enough HP to make somebody else's reward disappear?

I don't know what's inside another person's head when the behavior is visible. People tend to behave differently when they have power than when they don't. Give someone enough influence and eventually you get to see what they consider worth doing with it.

Some people accumulate power so they can create, support other people, build communities, while others apparently accumulate it so they can make sure a guy they don't like loses approximately 0.242 HIVE every time he publishes something. That's one hell of a use for financial sovereignty.

And before somebody misunderstands the point: I'm not saying anyone is obligated to upvote me. Downvote my work if you think it's shit. Don't vote for it. Ignore it. Write a rebuttal. I don't care. That's all normal participation in this economy. But repeatedly using substantial voting power to specifically drive somebody else's rewards toward zero is a different kind of behavior, and I think it's worth documenting when the blockchain makes the pattern this obvious.

Especially when the original disagreement apparently involved seven-thousandths of a HIVE.

The entire thing would almost be impressive if it weren't so fucking petty. And this is why I want more Hive power myself and not because I want to become some little blockchain aristocrat sitting on a throne of HP. I want enough power that somebody else's grudge doesn't matter.

The long-term objective is 1,000,000 HP. At that point, the answer to petty voting games isn't crying about the downvote. It's having enough economic weight that one person's decision doesn't determine whether your work gets rewarded. That's what power is useful for. At least that's what I think it's useful for.

Anyway.

This is the only post I'm going to make about this. I don't want to become the guy who writes a new episode of The Davide Downvote Chronicles every time somebody presses a button. The blockchain already has the receipts. I'm going back to making real things aside from actfit shit posting

You keep doing whatever it is you're doing.

Post Rewards Are set to burn.

• @yayogerardo, writer, researcher, analyst, anarchist, autonomist, Humanoid 🃏™️

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