Some thoughts on downvotes for adjustment of rewards

There was an account recently that was brought to my attention, and even though I have posted about this in the past I think it's probably a good idea to bring some of these things up again when times ask for it.

Now this is my personal opinion on how I operate and potentially judge overrewarded content/accounts, not everyone may feel the same and not everyone may agree with some points. Before I go down the points I do want to point out that you can't compare hive rewards with #web2 monetization. This should be something quite obvious to most but it often isn't to some which is something they bring up and compare often. Adrevenue being the main monetization tool in web2 does not cost every stakeholder/the platform revenue, in fact the platform most of the time will take a big chunk of it and give the content creators a share, 50-70% usually. So with that in mind you have to understand that when (most) people downvote things they aren't doing it because it's fun, or because they have a vendetta against someone or because they profit off of it which is something I hear often. The latter is such a tiny portion that most wouldn't even notice it in terms of APR and the fact that downvotes are so seldom used it also constitutes that when they are used it's not used to increase the returns of the downvoters because everyone else profits from the rewards that are being returned to the pool from downvotes, not just the few daring to use their downvote mana to adjust rewards on certain posts. The whole "they're taking money from me to give it to themselves" is thus quite far-fetched.

When it comes to my decision to downvote certain posts it's often due to the initial votes being cast either too recklessly or there most likely being some intent to extract/maximize behind them, the latter is of course too difficult to know/judge but what you can judge is the active rewards and history of voting on certain accounts.

I often also like to split up how I judge these in two sections, there's users and influencers. I.e. you can have regular Hive users that don't have a big voice or influence outside of Hive thus they don't really attract new traffic/users towards the chain and then there's also influencers who have gotten here and receive a ton of votes for being influencers but they may not really use their voice outside of Hive to bring in any traffic - this last part often has a sort of honeymoon phase in my mind where I don't mind them being showered in rewards early on until they get to learn the platform properly and see the value in it and then potentially attempt to bring people in - but if that never starts occurring and there's never any attempts to do so then they also fall into the overrewarded category over time.

For users I often like to think, okay but what else do they do beside generate content and this might be one of the biggest reasoning to some of my downvotes in the past and why I often think some of their content is overrewarded. Most users on Hive are content creators, few of them consume content and interact with it but it has been getting better over time.

So in a way it comes down to value generation. A post by itself could be worth 0-100, on most other platforms it most of the time will be closer to 0 unless you are an influencer. Most on Hive aren't thus most of the content could potentially be worthless looking at it from that perspective, but as we've come to learn Hive we know that it isn't.

Content or authors where there's proof that others, especially within our ecosystem are consuming it, is worth more than content no one reads. This is quite common knowledge in most cases but some curators don't seem to care about this part which is often what forces other stakeholders to act and adjust rewards.

Let's look at a few examples, I'll try to censor out one of the examples as I don't want to generate negative traffic going that way but just use it to prove a point.

Here's an account that joined/started posting on chain a few years ago:

The dates and activity are a bit suspicious but I'm not going to get into that here. What stands out that their first post was pretty much ignored, no intro post happened (which is fine but could've gotten him some early followers/engagement) and then a year after the user came back, started posting and receiving quite big upvotes straight out the bat. The weird thing here is that these upvotes, mostly from leo.voter and steempty occurred consistently after here. Again not trying to accuse anyone of anything but I know that steempty for instance likes to set people up for autovotes and forget about it which is often also a reason to downvotes for adjustment of rewards (a.k.a. blind votes a.k.a. autovotes).

This user posted a total of 43 posts and half of them or so have been this year, out of the 3-4 years he's been here he's only placed 5 comments until the downvotes started occurring he decided to lash out against yesterday with a series of threads. According to @hivebuzz he's received 50 replies, but knowing Hive and Hivebuzz itself you can imagine that a lot of those have been bots.

This activity is nothing against Hive, whether or not it's an alt account I wouldn't know. I can suspect, I can see some patterns that would suggest it might be but it's only speculation. The problem is that for this kind of activity, consumption, engagement and value they're bringing to the chain this is a seriously overrewarded account that consistently gets support no matter the quality, length or effort of the posts. So in and of itself there's nothing wrong with the account if it was being curated reasonably. If the upvotes were reasonable most people wouldn't mind it, he'd have more reasons to engage possibly to "earn" those rewards, build a real audience and grow the rewards he may get over time. Start sharing his content outside of Hive, maybe link his Twitter account instead of just having "twitter.com" in his Bio and in other ways start bringing value for the value he's receiving, over time these upvotes he gets now would start to match with the value he gets or at least be on par with what others are doing in terms of value who are on the same level of rewards.

I'm not even gonna go into how some of his posts may not fit into the LeoFinance community but are still getting curated by leofinance or how he's not even sourcing to any images used which may get him in trouble with hivewatchers, etc.

Here's some more screenshots of more recent posts so you don't think I'm just using the old ones when the price of Hive was higher to exaggerate.

Oh wow, 7 replies on that one post, wonder what they talked about! Let's take a look.

Okay, a pretty generic investment advice post, doesn't seem that special for the rewards in my eyes but you know, not like we have the best authors onchain:

Wow, someone left him a very thoughtful and long comment, that's amazing!

One could say this could be worth even more than the initial post! How did it do, even if the author doesn't have a lot of stake maybe curators noticed it and gave it a vote as well! no? oh okay they must've missed it, but surely the author gave it a vote and a thoughtful response?

I just realized I didn't censor the footer but kind of pointless now not like I'm giving the commenter any shit anyways:

Oh okay, guess he just ignored him and everyone else in the post cause he had to post another 3 generic posts the next couple days to get those juicy rewards. Who has time for engagement and appreciating this dumbass' long response, amirite? (sorry @andy-plays, just kidding :p)

Okay so, while downvotes aren't occurring much and I don't see people going all nitpicky about it in general like "oh this post is at $54 but in my opinion it's only worth $52" and are mostly used in extreme cases like the one above. There's still a lot of resistance when it comes to them, people somehow can't fathom why downvotes exist and why even in good intentions like the ones above they are used.

There's quite a few ways to go about them as well, everyone has their own reasons and things that make certain posts or authors go above their line where they feel the need to adjust the rewards a bit and most of them are nice enough to let you know that that's what they're doing even knowing it's opening up the possibility of endless drama, finger-pointing, etc.

Then there's also bad usage of downvotes, downvoting for opinions, downvoting cause you don't like someone, there's most likely a lot of others such as retaliation, etc, and in many ways the use of downvotes a lot like upvotes can tell you a lot about a certain person, except those just following a trail/autovoting. You can also track people's history on the chain since everything is open-source to see the intentions of certain downvotes. Has this user been downvoting people out of nowhere for no real/overrewarded reason in the past, is this a downvote for that or is it cause he's having a bad day?

Downvotes aren't perfect and they're not always used perfectly. I have some times cast some downvotes on people who seemed to completely understand them and be friendly towards it and thanking me for letting them know why I cast it. I've some times even cast downvotes on my own content or content I've voted on with my curation accounts that ended up being too rewarded or have had to ask others to help bring it down a bit. People just need to normalize them a bit more, not think black & white or that rewards are being "taken from them" or that everyone's casting them with ulterior motives then going on rants telling the person who downvoted you why you think he did it, how this platform sucks, etc.

Anyway, before going down that route too much I'm going to end it with some other factors that go into my decision making of if users are bringing value to Hive before I decide if content is overrewarded and if I should act or not.

Are they active in engaging and replying to other people engaging with their content.

Are they active in other aspects of Hive, curation projects, contests, dapps, discords, etc, could be anything and everything that's not just the content. Some times I may not know and it helps if they let me know but most people are quite happy to place these things in their bio.

Are they sharing their content on web2 or attempting to bring traffic towards the content, this doesn't always have to be from web2.

Are they new to the chain?

Have they been "overrewarded" consistently?
How many of the same upvoters over time?
How many of the same "blind upvoters"?

As mentioned, I don't downvote often unless I find obvious abuse or cases like the one above and there's many times I also disagree with some people's downvotes for overrewarded content. It's all a bit subjective the same way content and value is but I think that over time with more users and content, better distributed stake, etc these issues will become smaller and smaller and we may not see downvotes for overrewarded content much and will mostly most likely tend towards abuse or very suspicious accounts like the example above.

Lastly, here's another example to compare with the previous screenshots. Now I am of course biased because I like the author both as a writer and friend but I know he has been consistent in both writing and engaging. Do you think it's fair/makes sense that a somewhat brand-new account with close to no history receives up to the same rewards as this account?

Or maybe @tarazkp is just super underrewarded compared, or you know, a lot of other more deserving users are underrewarded in comparison to the former mentioned account and we should act when we see suspicious accounts like that and hold the overvoters accountable as well, if not by words and advice then by downvotes to bring their APR down even if it may mean a bad taste in the authors mouths for a short time who may or may not be an alt and/or having gotten too spoiled unfairly.

Anyway, kind of a long post so not expecting many to have read it and have a lot to say about it but I'd be interested in how you've used your downvotes lately and if you've been using them at all for overrewarded content or has it felt like it's not worth it? (which would be understandable in many ways)