I don't really actively use other social media like I do hive, most of my activities on web2 usually revolve around mentioning hive or growing my presence in an effort to show people about our existence. Very seldom do I use it for anything else. Whenever something happens, though, I keep wondering how frustrating it must be for regular users being targeted by this on the daily.

I've been trying to become more active sharing posts on Reddit lately. Other than that I also leave some comments here and there on non-hive related posts that I browse through whenever I'm trying to consume the kind of content that doesn't really exist on hive (yet).

The whole "world" of instantly getting banned and judged by some unknown person out there does leave me with the kind of foul taste in my mouth. This happened recently and even thought it's not a big deal it just made me think of how things work here in comparison.

I ban/block people as well, just earlier today when I tweeted something about hive and decentralized social media someone I know has had issues on here for past offenses instantly came with something along the lines of "we both know hive isn't decentralized". At this point I just don't have time to deal with those people so I just instantly go for the block and don't give it much thought.

Hive isn't perfect but compared to how things work in web2 it's miles ahead in terms of freedom and justice it brings to users social media experience.

Let's look at this example today for instance.

If I went to the worldmappin community and shared a post that didn't fit in there, they'd most likely let me know about it and ask me not to post that kind of content there any longer. They'd mute the post and potentially give me a "warning" that if I ignore them they might mute my account itself from being visible on the community through front-ends.

Their comment of this warning would remain visible for people who'd check on the account's/community's comments so that others could judge if it was a fair warning/mute. The replies would also be visible by the muted posts' user and potential further interaction regarding the mute.

If I now continued to post similar content there they'd mute my account, this means that all my posts shared in the worldmappin community would not be visible when checking the community feed, people could however check through my profile that I have a muted post and where it was posted. From people that follow me they could also see my muted post on their feed.

Okay so let's compare that to Reddit's banning + shadowbanning.

If you don't know what shadowbanning is, it's kind of like a soft-ban, often considered worse than a regular ban due to how it works. Basically they ban your post+account but allow you to still continue posting to the subreddit, this means that you are non the wiser about knowing that your submissions to that subreddit are literally invisible by everyone else but you continue to share there and think to yourself that your posts just didn't get any votes/traction.

When regular banned, you may not post into the subreddit any longer nor comment, you may probably still vote but unsure if that counts. There's options to message the moderators and receive a response but there's options to even ban you from doing that as I found out today.

Fact is, for whatever reason a group of people may fully block your voice without a chance for bypassers to even witness it occurring or checking on the interaction that followed to judge if a ban was justified or not. This gives immense power to the moderators to use their tools at hand however they wish because there are no witnesses.

Let's think about downvotes on Hive instead now, while this is completely anonymized on reddit which offers a ton of leeway for abuse which also affects upvotes in this non-stake based voting system but 1 account 1 vote instead.

Let's assume that worldmappin got really mad that I made a post saying they unfairly muted me and started downvoting my posts cause a few of their moderators held a grudge. (This is just an example, no offense to worldmappin team at all, lol) If they did so with their main accounts it'd be easy to tie what occurred together so onlookers could step in and state their opinions on the matter and try to counter the downvotes or attempt to difuse the conflict.

Maybe the team behind the community would be a bit smarter and rally some accounts not linked to their person to start downvoting but even there if no other conflicts have occurred in the past it wouldn't be difficult to assume that they'd be behind this activity all of a sudden. Further transaction history of those accounts could prove that they potentially belong to that community in one way or another and just creating an account to power it up with a lot of stake to "hurt" others with it is a bit of a stretch that not many may bother with.

Discussion would occur, the downvoted person could make posts about what happened and as we know drama usually gets a lot of attention so if there's validity to it people would approach it to voice their opinions or concerns over the matter and more importantly there'd be judgement/reputation on the line. If worldmappin constantly does something like this where they mute accounts even though they've adhered to the community rules they may start looking a bit sketchy which may drive people away from continued posting/activity in their community. If however the author often gets themselves muted for valid reasons then people would side with the community and eventually start to ignore the author's pleas for attention about the matter.

The important thing is that discussions happen openly and in public, allowing anyone to pick sides and judge the events with their own minds. Not behind closed doors and private messages, it'd open up so much leeway for abuse and other factors to decide on why someone gets banned or not.

Anyway, I'm not really mad about what happened today, it just proves my point that I've often discussed that web2 has a big problem when it comes to this. While mutes and downvotes may cause some drama here there's always the other end of it that it also creates a dialog for people to judge events themselves as they happen. Just a few weeks ago I was accused of "pushing people away" with downvotes, not only was that person misremembering me and I had in fact attempted to counter the excessive downvotes on @davidpakman to get him to continue using hive to no avail, but I've almost never zero'd posts out completely just because I disagree with the rewards some authors may receive.

While we all know that downvotes aren't fun and just as not fun to cast, there's a cost to it and people are held accountable on both sides. If this block that happened on Reddit today would happen on Hive instead where say I wasn't able to continue earning some post rewards by posting in a community ever again, then sure I'd be more mad about it compared to Reddit. This factor with direct monetary rewards involved does lead to a lot of "grudges" to be held by people, whether or not they were at fault themselves for what occurred. It goes so far as to always force people to cry foul and play the victim card when these downvotes occur for some reason rather than to ask for forgiveness, it's a bit weird.

If I had a penny for every time someone started blaming the platform as a whole, the downvoters and anything else rather than owning up to their mistakes I'd probably have quite a few bucks over the years I've witnessed this. It's a weird phenomenon to me as I usually don't have an issue to accept if I've been wrong about things but I guess it kind of depends on your history and experiences, not sure.

I think that as Hive becomes bigger and the rewards potentially have more value attached to them people would be a lot more careful about not overstepping on rules and etiquette we have enforced here as a community. It's always easy to blame everyone else and the platform when the ecosystem itself is quite small and volatile at this point in time but it's important to remember that there's plenty of other volatile things in this space. Even top currencies move from top to bottom at crazy percentages over the cycles even though there's literally billions upon billions of evaluations tied to their marketcaps we're still quite early in this space. If gold went from 6k to 1.5k and back to 6k in a couple years it'd be crazy to investors but as it has existed for a lot longer that doesn't happen there, even though a lot of markets have quite some volatility these days and not just crypto.

I don't know what drives some people to this stage where it reeks entitlement of "I don't deserve any downvotes I never do anything wrong, how dare you accuse and downvote me of these things? You're all wrong, I'm right! This is why this platform isn't going anywhere! This is why your coin isn't worth anything! You bagholders are just jealous of me, etc" but I can't help but feel it's a mixture of getting used to having it good for a long time and then being shocked that things may take a turn for the worst at a moments notice because you've rightfully been slacking/attempting to abuse/get rewards for no effort/take it for granted for long. Then they go towards this road where they spend countless of hours to shit on the platform that won't pay them anymore in any way they can even as if that's going to make people give them a second or third chance.

Either way, while Hive isn't perfect and I didn't even go into downvote abuse itself in this post as we all know that may happen rarely too. It definitely beats becoming completely voiceless and having no options to speak up about things that happened to you. That's what's happening in web2 on the daily, and unless you're a big time influencer with a voice and following on several social platforms almost no one will ever find out the injustice that may have happened to you.