How many times has it crossed my mind to write this post before being personally impacted at the risk of losing my objectivity?
One time too many it turns out. 😉 I'll try to contain my rage. Let's just get through this.
Since finding a tiny home on this blockchain a few years ago I've always had mixed skepticism and appreciation for HiveWatchers and its predecessors. But on balance more skepticism.
The thing is this. There are already successful platforms where anyone is free to login and be told what not to talk about and how not to say it. Plenty of em.
The presence of HiveWatchers has been taken by several people I've known as evidence that onboarding to Hive would be about the same experience and risk. Only for more work and a smaller audience.
One such friend, even though he was in strong agreement with HiveWatcher's anti-spam efforts, pointed out to me how HiveWatchers proved to him that it would be easy to impose some other arbitrary speech code on Hivians.
"Millionaires," he said, "with fringe ideas about what's True and what's the One Great Satan are not exactly hard to come by."
But I digress.
A few days ago a week's worth of my daily news aggregations and commentary were down voted to zero. Initially, I figured my 185-word opinion on Apple's #spyPhone controversy had rubbed some whale or other the wrong way. Or perhaps I'd triggered retaliation with my open letter to POTUS:
Oh well. Easy come easy go. Being wrong on the internet is surprisingly easy to live with.
Here's where I'd like to say I don't really post for the rewards, but that wouldn't be completely honest.
I do like earning a smidge of crypto to experiment with, but I don't depend on these rewards even for pocket money. In any case, I earn about twice as much from curation as I do from posting.
So, I'm mainly here to learn about chains, socially as well as technically.
But emotionally, I do probably look forward too much to the validation of a few daily upvotes — especially those from the repeat voters whose stuff I read myself. And from those who I know are at least occasionally engaged by it because maybe we've commented back and forth or we've talked off chain about this or that.
Gimme those little blue hearts, those magic internet points.
I'm a gamer and gamification works on me. I suppose to me an upvote means something because it's worth something and that voter could have done something else with it. But instead they decided to pat me on the back for hanging out here, being interested — at least — even if I'm not all that interesting.
That's enough to make it easy to cope with having something that I wrote actively disliked. Heck, if someone with deep pockets actively disagrees with me that's still validating — at least sempai noticed.
Less easy to live with is the policing of content because it was misread or misunderstood. Or worse the content police misunderstand what they're policing without ever asking the author.
So, of course, I did eventually stumble across the slightly opaque connection between the account that downvoted my posts and the HiveWatchers and Spaminator projects.
The connection could easily have escaped, especially since, as far as I can tell the account didn't actively or recently disclose its connection until about 6 days ago, roughly 6 days after the latest of my downvoted posts closed for rewards.
The stakes are low for me. But for others they may not be so low.
At first, I was still a little inclined to attribute the whole thing to some sort of content-based disagreement because all articles in my posts point to their original sources and therefore, by definition, are not plagiarism. Likewise my summaries are not infringements because they either quote small portions of the article or make fair use of blurbs which are published expressly for the purposes of news aggregation.
And I wasn't completely wrong about being caught up in someone else's beef. I later found a discord post where a user — notably one that had recently been sanctioned for trolling — complained about my account.
HiveWatchers acted quickly and — in my opinion — mistakenly by its own standards. I suspect this happened in a rush to show how "fair minded" it would be to act on a complaint that came from a previously vocal critic? I really dunno.
I do know that I was not approached about it before hand and that no explanatory comment was left on any of the posts.
For now it's impossible for me to take any position on whether that user's other grievances are legitimate — dunno enough about that situation, can't chase every rabbit down every hole. But it doesn't strike me as a casual or typical complaint. It seems more like a whataboutism raised in the course of a long running argument.
Apparently this complaint was never submitted via HiveWatcher's usual form. It's not clear to me whether this will or won't show up in HiveWatchers reporting? I think of that because it's another way I might have found out what'd happened? Eventually.
And also I wonder how consistently what procedures do exist are being followed. I've started a conversation about this in discord and haven't yet figured it all out, but will update if I learn more.
Impressions and concerns
Here are a few of the reasons I have not been a supporter of HiveWatcher's proposal. For what it's worth, my opinion mostly pre-dates the roughly $10 in downvotes I received. I'd like to think I can set aside whatever biases that might create. But it is what it is.
The project needs significant revision including a policy of greater restraint, full transparency, and safeguards for fairness. Absent that it should be defunded and free to enforce whatever standards it considers fair with its own stake.
- What HiveWatchers calls an appeal really isn't. Appeals examine whether an arbiter may have made a mistake in applying a rule or understanding facts.
The HiveWatchers process in contrast involves compelled contrition, including the writing of obligatory apologies, which is a type of negative reinforcement. In that sense it is not an appeal.
- HiveWatchers judges unilaterally without confronting the accused. To be clear, typical curators let posts speak for themselves and vote up or down according to taste. That's fine.
HiveWatchers is different. They accept community funding on the promise of benefitting a community as a whole.
In turn we should expect them to uphold broadly accepted principles of fairness when using their power against much less powerful individuals. One of the oldest and most basic of those principles is that an accused gets fair notice and time to respond.
- There's a noticeable amount of intemperate language in and around HiveWatchers' community. Good faith isn't always assumed toward critics of the project and people defending themselves. There's overlap in those groups which makes decorum particularly vital.
I get that HiveWatcher's draws a lot of hate and that's no fun. It's a natural human tendency to respond to slights in kind. Taking on the mantle of an arbiter means they should resist that tendency — it helps a community be sure that standards are being applied neutrally and with a level head.
To that end, I believe HiveWatchers has a responsibility to do more in moderating and disavowing personal attacks, ridicule, demeaning language and prejudices directed at its critics, those it is accusing or even someone it has found "guilty" of violating its standards.
Even if plagiarism, spam or abuse are horrible crimes against humanity, every person is better than the worst thing they have ever done. We should all do our best to talk to each other like that's the case. Institutions with more power than the rest of us can set that example.
- Finally, plagiarism is viewed differently across cultures. As mentioned in Wikipedia, "the modern concept of plagiarism as immoral and originality as an ideal emerged in Europe in the 18th century, particularly with the Romantic movement." So, it is ethnocentrically western in outlook, relatively young in the history of thought and didn't develop with the Internet, online discourse, or blockchains in mind.
None of this by itself means that HiveWatchers is a bad endeavor. But I do think the project should be encouraged to tone down its condemnations and create further protections for basic fairness, in light of the fact that people find the Hive blockchain from many different places and backgrounds.