Yesterday I was contacted by @trostparadox to clarify how muting works in regards to tribes. He asked if I could answer in a post, I provided an answer privately but I will explain it here as well. I asked if it was ok if I could share his questions to which he agreed.
Tribes use the blockchain level muting feature to add some level of moderation to tribes.
If the issuing account for a H-E token mutes an account, that account no longer receives author or curation awards and that author's posts are 'hidden' via the tribe's front-end but remain fully visible on other front-ends (e.g. PeakD.com)?
First, muting is controlled by the muting account (if there is one) assigned by the tribe owner. You can see who this is by using Hive Engine Tools Tribe Config tool. Some tribes have not assigned a muting account and so that feature is not available.
To answer this question, muting will forfeit all rewards for an account upon payout. This is an important distinction as you can unmute an account prior to post payout and nothing would have changed. What muting does is signal to Scotbot to treat a user as if all posts and comments are decline rewards effectively ignoring the account when it comes time to payout a post. Muting technically does not remove rewards immediately but as a tribe owner muting is enough to effectively remove all pending rewards from an account without having to flag them as well.
Muting also prevents new content from being index into a tribe. This means the Scotbot engine that monitors the blockchain posts will not include posts from muted users into the tribe database that stores posts for each tribe. This is only when content is created, all previous content will still be indexed just hidden by the front end.
Let me take a moment to explain indexing a little better. Scotbot monitors the blockchain for all new posts and comments. If it sees a post uses a tag associated with a tribe, it will take that post and put it in database managed by Hive Engine team. It will do the same for any comment that belongs to a post in this database. If at this time it sees a post by a user who has been muted by the muting account, it will not enter this post into the database. When you visit a tribe website it will show posts stored in this centralized database and not what is on the Hive blockchain. This is an important distinction, tribes are similar to a word press site where the content is pulled from a database and not the blockchain. Scotbot sits in the background and handles what should be stored in this database.
How does this affect curation rewards for accounts that voted for one of that author's posts prior to the mute action? Do their curation rewards get wiped out the same way a DV would wipe them out?
Yes, the end result is the same as if the author declined rewards. No author rewards, no curation rewards to give.
If a 'moderator' for a Hive community mutes an account (at the community level), that account can no longer post using that community's Hive-Community tag (e.g. 'hive-150329')?
Technically they can still post using the tag, it just will not be visible in the tribe, but the post still exists otherwise.
Can they still use alternative tags (e.g. 'pob', 'proofofbrain')?
No one can restrict what tags a user can create posts with. What can be controlled is what tribe/community will index/show.
This mute action does nothing to the token-specific (i.e. H-E token) rewards for that tribe?
Community mutes only affect communities, it will not affect tribe rewards.
As you can see here, a mute in a community is a unique action and is not a standard blockchain mute.
How does this mute action affect the user's generic Hive posts? (mineopoly recently got muted from leovoter (I think) and his comments ended up being hidden on PeakD, until he convinced the muter to unmute him).
Ok, I think something else is happening here you may not be familiar with.
PeakD has a feature that you can honor mutes by the author of a post, immediately collapsing all comments by that author.
This feature means if I mute a user and you view one of my posts on PeakD, any comment by this author will be hidden by default.
You can still view the comment by clicking Display Comment. You can turn this feature off in the PeakD settings and is controlled by the viewer if they want this behavior not the author of posts.
I believe this is the behavior you may have been seeing.
I want to bring up one more thing in regards to muting, tribes have the ability to mute individual posts in addition to users. This functionality was recently added to the UI to make it easier to use.
This allows a tribe owner to instantly mute off topic posts without the use of flags and without muting the author. I use this a lot on STEMGeeks where someone posts something with one of our tags and it does not belong in STEMGeeks (typically Crypto price discussions) but the author did nothing wrong, it just doesn't belong.
Hopefully this helps clarify things, feel free to leave a comment if you want more details on anything.
Why you should vote me as witness
Thanks for the clarification!
As always, you have provided truly valuable information (that would have taken most of us hours and hours, maybe days even, to figure out).
What happens if you mute yourself? Can anyone hear the screams?
LOL... I think.
At least you can still think. It's really dark in here.
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Thank you so much for the Tribe-Mute explanation! That is going to be extremely useful for my @hivelist moderation going forward instead of muting accounts entirely.
I still think the best way is to use the downvotes we have to curb abuse. I know many tribe owners are reluctant to mute for various reasons and just removing the rewards making the post not visible does the job. Lately I haven't come across tons of abuse on the @sportstalksocial tribe which is a good thing comparing o what was experienced in the past.
Using downvotes is whack-a-mole problem. If it is a one-off case like off topic, post level mute works great. If the account is maliciously abusing, then a mute is appropriate. If things change, it can be removed, it isn't permanent.
I get that and what you say makes perfect sense.
What happens to the tribe tokens on burn posts?
Or, when sent to the dao?
Tribe tokens honor beneficiaries but most burn posts are not tagged for tribes.
Edge cased, again.
Just for giggles, I checked what Hive Fund had out of curiosity.
Anything that goes here is as good as burned. There are no keys for @hive.fund.
Good deal, that is at least deflationary.
Looks like @null is doing pretty well.
@null is rich af.
Lol, I'd say.
Thanks for sharing valuable knowledge to the tribe!
I think these knowledge should be kept in some place that easier to access for community, especially newcomers.
Can I propose to create the FAQs section for #pob like others communities? @proofofbraionio& @leprechaun, can we do the FAQs in proofofbrain.io/proofofbrain.blog? #pob-proposal
Awesome educational post.
What happens to a muted account in terms of curation rewards and downvoting? For example, if I was muted from POB I could no longer receive payouts for posts and comments but would I still receive curation rewards for voting posts and be able to downvote posts in the POB front-end?
You will not receive author rewards, curation rewards, or mining rewards. As far as I understand it you receive nothing.
Wow that is centralised power and one easy way to rule a tribe with an iron fist if one desired too!
Thank you for this piece...this is really helpful
Excellent and informative post. Thanks for giving an answer to @trostparadox. Many of us appreciate it.
OK. How do you @themarkymark arrange to get unmuted?
Would need to speak with whoever did the muting.
Thanks for explaining this.
So when a user is muted his doesn't receive any rewards and so do those who vote his/her posts makes sense.
Posts which do not fit in can also be muted by the tribe without muting the user.
I learned a few things today from this post thanks.
All this is great, but I ask or wish that when a user is silenced they are told the reason, I hope that this is not used against users as a weapon, but that it is used to improve the community