~~It was brought to my attention that there's now another project starting a beneficiary incentivized curation service and while I haven't looked into their activity or know too much about them I just wanted to point out some things of how using beneficiaries should be okay and what shouldn't be.~~ (The post was meant to be about this but I went on a tangent and discussed other things Hive instead such as downvotes and maximization of returns, will write about that another time and after looking into the activity of linked announcement post more closely.)
Now of course some of you may think, any way should be acceptable, but we have to remember certain rules of curation we've put forward. They're easy to sidestep and many decide to go that route but they're just as unfair to the rest of us nonetheless and it needs to be clear why that's the case.
The issue with the project hope, aside from the usual overrewarding low effort spun content that a majority of their posts consist of, is that it resulted in a lot of indirect self-voting and gaining increased returns at the cost of the authors. Whether the authors are okay with it or not, that's not of importance, the importance is that this project is now gaining a lot more returns compared to other curators. Their actions also showed that they focused quite a lot to only curate posts that were giving them these kickbacks and that indeed their main prerogative was the returns that would let them lease more HP, donate more to community members, etc. Matter of the fact is that what is done with the returns doesn't matter, even if all of it is donated for charity, as it is earned in an unfair way to begin with. Let's not even get to the part where authors who may not have wanted to give them half of their post rewards had no choice as the way they would vote was pretty obvious that if you didn't, you'd be left out most of the time or receive very small votes. There was a lot of wrongs in one place with that project and I'm not going to go deeper into it here as I don't want to make another post about them, but it seems that they've started cutting back on the beneficiary kickback after a few weeks of downvotes, whether or not they've brewed up a new scheme or just the same one but only voting on certain people who'll give them the returns back other ways is not impossibly to assume but now that there's more attention to them maybe people will finally start using downvotes as a more genuine way to shave off some rewards if the content, effort or general contributions to Hive from the authors aren't deemed as deserving as the rest. I genuinely hope that not only will there be more downvotes come the next HF with the linear curve but that they're used well and that any malicious ones either downvoting too hard or due to retaliation or other harmful ways to a users experience will be countered appropriately as we do have more upvote mana than downvote mana.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Karma-Upvote-Downvote.jpg?trim=1,1&bg-color=000&pad=1,1 Source
It feels weird talking about using downvotes well, I know many of you would never dream of using them in the first place and many of you would hope to never live such nightmares to receive downvotes on your own content. Hive is unique, so much so that no other blockchain has yet to implement something like the curation system we have here and finetune and use it as well and fair across the chain. It's easy to generalize and think it's not working well just because some people who don't like the way things are used are usually the loudest while those who are okay or really happy about it may not make as much noise. I like to think of Hive as a very long term project, this means many more years of inflation, development and proof of brain ongoing. We're too often too focused on either short term gains or short term effects of downvotes and how they make us feel, a big reason to that is also because we see upvotes the wrong way. We quickly forget that pending rewards means pending for a reason and many of us are so used to using Hive without even knowing where the rewards come from to begin with, or at least the value of them.
To put it in simple terms, think about dogecoin mining. How many of you are mining dogecoin right now? Probably not many of you, neither am I. I mined it early on for a while but I didn't want to wreck my GPU's too much as they were often running hot and not letting me do other things on the PC. See what I mean? Wear and tear, a sacrifice to mine dogecoin. Other than that I was also not too happy to see that at the end of the month the electricity bill would come knocking and cut out more than 50% of the value my mined coins had at the time, another sacrifice. Electricity cost and hardware.
What about on Hive? Well, we don't have those sacrifices, but we have other more human ones. I'm sure you all know what those entail but I don't think many of you think about what it would be like if you were getting hive rewards too easily too often. There's still a lot of people in such positions where they're getting a lot of rewards either for very little work done or work done at some point in time they're still getting rewarded for or just having invested at the right time and now enjoyin the returns they're getting after already having sold their initial investment and riding out the profits. That's how Hive works and it's okay, compared to investors there could also be many who've put a lot of time and effort into their stake, sold some and are now enjoying the returns of what they felt they could leave staked.
The issue is that there's always some people who just never get enough. It's alright if you're getting rewarded for consistently and constantly contributing to the platform in meaningful ways but I'm sure a lot of you attempt to do it in easy ways.
"Hey let's just get this post out there today so I can collect my autovotes and be on my way."
"Replying to comments? Nah, I don't have time for that."
"Commenting on other people's posts? Nah, why would I waste time on that."
"Checking if I can contribute to Hive in other ways? Bring some value to Hive by promoting it in other places so they can also check out how good it is to me? Nah, lol, that would mean potentially sharing the rewardpool with more people and maybe losing out on some voting power of all the autovotes I get cause I talked some people into voting my posts up some time ago."
It's easy to understand many ways people would not want to risk the value they're earning here today, many would even sacrifice the whole future potential of the platform rather than losing out on a % of returns or upvotes. It's human nature. Some people aren't going to care that many others aren't just looking how to maximize their returns even if they believe in the future of this platform more than they do. Even if they have invested and bought most of the Hive they curate with, even if they've never sold any Hive and have stayed powered up and curating and contributing to the ecosystem in many ways on a constant basis. They won't care if they're riding on the backs of others to still get good returns, while the rest get less and even if the reason their own investment is worth more due to the people who do use their stake well and less selfishly.
That's decentralization. There just will be all kinds of people.
The problem we have today is that we've alienated downvotes so much, we have clone competitors who are against it so much, one almost never used it and were against it since they heavily invested in it and today have got a clownshow of a trending and are centralized in most ways by someone who centralizes most things, the other one doesn't even have downvotes to begin with. We all know by now, after years of trying these other methods, is that not having or using downvotes at all will not work. Don't you think youtube has thought about it and tested it out? Don't you think Reddit has thought about removing downvotes and be more like Facebook? I'm sure they have and I'm sure the latter is a joke to the formers in terms of content, content discovery and rewarding (adrevenue, visibility, promotion) those who do good despite downvotes existing. The difference between those platforms is that their downvotes are anonymous, much like all their activity behind a private owned database compared to our open blockchain that anyone can look into what occurred when, what was posted, who did what.
Just because you know who downvoted your content doesn't mean you should get all up in arms and demand downvotes to be removed, look for ways to retribute to the downvoted or start hating the platform and start listing reasons why it will fail because you lost $40 on a $150 post. Imagine if YouTubers or redditors did that on a daily basis.
"Some of you downvoted my post a lot and I may have lost a lot of traffic to my website because of it, this is why Reddit sucks, why it will never become big, etc." Of course Reddit is already big so that last part doesn't make sense, but at one point it wasn't, when I initially started lurking it it was pretty small, still bigger than Hive is today but still tiny compared to the other giants at the time. Try and think about downvotes the same way you think about them on other platforms. Think about the publicity of them showing you who did it and for how much as a benefit to you instead of as a reason to complain, get angry, grow your hatred, etc. You can instead request someone to let you know why the downvote happened in the first place, not only that but others who see the downvote can counter it when they hear about it or happen to follow you and think it's not deserving. Sure it costs them a little bit as their returns won't be as high but it's possible and it's only possible due to how open this blockchain is. We've gotta be more smart and accepting of downvotes because without them this place will just turn into a never ending farm for certain accounts with stake and new users will have to fight way harder than they do on youtube or reddit to ever receive some recognition, rewards or get into the whole thing and do well if they're deserving.
Okay, fuck, I've been ranting on for a long time now and realize that my initial title of the post "another post about beneficiary usage" doesn't make much sense so I'm just going to title this differently and just post it in that rant community instead and do some more research on the new announcement I read about using the beneficiary in exchange for votes and why that's wrong cause this post spun out of that context real quick.
Hope this post helped some of you see downvotes in a different light and that maybe, the short term ROI and greed may not be worth it over your dignity and long term respect and rewards the platform may give you for not losing face and instead playing by the rules that make this platform the best one on the internet.
https://images.hive.blog/0x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/hiddenblade/i2W9CjnS-Acidyo.jpg
@ackza | May 14, 2021, 6:52 p.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
beneficiary rewards RE UNDER EXPLORED and atrophying.
We should have a MUCH LARGER BUTTON on condenser that says "CHOOSE A FRIEND TO GET A CUT" so people know
im sure theres a fucking emoji for SHARE or something like SHARE REWARDS OF THIS POST
no one speaks greek or latin we dont know what BENEFICIARY is lol
unless youre TEACHING people about inheritance and @dan s universal resource inheritance
https://bytemaster.medium.com/in-defense-of-universal-resource-inheritance-1bb760cd27c4
>In Defense of Universal Resource Inheritance
Daniel Larimer
Daniel Larimer
Sep 19, 2018·7 min read
My last blog post on Universal Resource Inheritance (URI) sparked some controversy among libertarians and anarchists. There is substantial concern about the so-called communist nature of the proposal which I want to address. I also realized that I didn’t explain all of my principles for new readers who may not understand my deep commitment to non-violent, voluntary, solutions for securing life, liberty, and property for all.
I argued for a 5% wealth “tax”, but didn’t to disclose how such a “tax” would be collected without the use of violence or intrusive audits. The challenge with all “taxing” schemes is that markets route-around artificial fees.
There are three broad classes of assets which people hold their wealth:
Money
Equities
Real Estate
Money is trivially inflated in supply by 5% per year. Assuming this was the only supply inflation, a productive economy with advancing technology would likely see price deflation. Major crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum grow their supplies by more than 5% and the supply of US dollars is also growing by more than 5%. The estimated money supply of the US dollar is $14 trillion dollars, meanwhile the federal debt is growing by $1.4 trillion per year. Since it is reasonable to expect that this “debt” will never be repaid, it is economically similar to printing dollars at 10% per year. A 5% increase in supply of real money is FAR below the current effective dollar supply growth. Remember, dollars are lent into existence, if supply doesn’t grow by the average interest rate, then widespread defaults result.
Equities in publicly traded companies are interesting assets because they represent ownership without liability. A shareholder of a publicly traded company is not held liable when said company causes a catastrophic oil spill. This economic privilege is “granted” by the people to the “artificial person” embodied in the company. Every company can issue 5% more shares each year and auction them for the money. The money can be evenly distributed to unique individuals. Since companies own the vast majority of the woulds resources, a 5% equity fee would end up covering the vast majority of productive assets, intellectual property, etc. A country run on a blockchain could trivially bake the share-tax into the terms for registering a company.
If someone wanted to create a company-by-contract (instead of by law) and bypass the 5%, then all the owners of said company would also be personally backing the companies liabilities. This kind of liability model doesn’t scale well when owners are to far removed from operations.
A huge benefit of this approach is that a company cannot cheat the system by cooking the books unless they are willing to suppress their own stock price which is determined by the market.
Real Estate is already subject to a “property tax” based upon assessed value. The existing system is broken because it relies on appraisals given by the government. A very simple solution is to put all real estate inside a company and issue shares which are auctioned off at 5% per year. Owning 51% of the shares gives voting control over use of the land and all improvements on it.
All of my numbers in my prior URI proposal were based only on taxing these three things in this relatively voluntary way.
Defection
One of the major challenges with such a proposal is that people will adopt crypto-currency assets which don’t pay the 5% tax. They will use gold, move to countries without a wealth tax, etc. This capital flight is as much theft from the rightful owners as today’s central bank inflation being allocated by crony capitalism and crony socialism. No system is perfect and we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
No system of laws can make a corrupt people fair and honest. Most people wouldn’t steal from their neighbor even if it wasn’t against the law. The loss to their reputation and social standing would be enough of a deterrent. Likewise, an unjust law will be widely broken and difficult to enforce. Copyright, originally created to censor the printing press, is an example of a property law which many people do not respect.
A URI system is about educating people about a new sense of inter-generational fairness and a self-correcting system for gross violations of property rights by prior generations. For it to be effective, the vast majority will need to understand and support the concept based upon its intrinsic fairness (see my splitting the cookie game theory).
Relative Improvement
From the lessor of two evils department, a URI system could replace complex, impossible to understand or follow, privacy destroying income tax systems. It would replace our corrupt unemployment, welfare, child support, and social security systems. In effect, half of the population is already receiving cash-payouts. The current system punishes those who increase their income and tells people that they qualify for money based upon their “need”. This need-based distribution is far more harmful to the mental wellbeing of those who accept it than an inheritance-based distribution.
Peace Treaty
A URI system is not an entitlement system, it is a peace treaty designed to recognize fair negotiation of property rights in a world otherwise governed by might-makes-right. To qualify one must be able to demonstrate they understand the peace treaty, to reject the peace treaty is to have the masses reject your claim to property rights as you have rejected theirs.
Impossible to Implement?
Some people have claimed that URI is impossible to implement because the powers-that-be would never allow such a thing. The same argument could me made against the graduated income tax schemes and resulting welfare / socialized systems throughout the world today. These systems exist because the powers-that-be know that people with “nothing left to lose”, “lose it”. The wealth and power of the “powers-that-be” depend upon the masses continuing to recognize the legitimacy of their claim to property. Allowing the masses to starve will result in a revolt before people accept death by starvation.
Almost 50% of the population already supports UBI proposals, and most of those who reject UBI proposals do so for philosophical reasons. If URI can provide a logically consistent philosophical foundation for initial allocation of the universe’s resources then it is conceivable to get supermajority support for the concept.
Even though I do not advocate violence or coercive governments, I believe that many would tolerate using governments to enforce honest reporting and taxing of wealth upon penalty of deportation. Such a system would be an improvement to the system of taxation and wealth redistribution we have today.
In the mean time, I believe that non-hypocritical supporters of a fair property right system could voluntarily create a private society that operates under these rules. If this private society can grow in market power and influence, then eventually it could take over public opinion. The key to the success of such a private society is that it condition membership and therefore qualification for URI upon tested understanding of the economics and principles behind URI and voluntary payment of dues proportional to wealth.
Won’t prices just rise?
One of the common critiques made is that “landlords would just raise rents and cancel URI”. This is based on the premise that all landlords are colluding as a monopoly to raise prices. The first landlord to defect would get the customer. Furthermore, many people have higher priorities than living in a nicer place, so they might spend their money on other goods and services like organic food. Surely prices will rise due to changing supply / demand dynamics, but they will not uniformly cancel out the benefits. The relative wealth disparity will still be lower.
With respect to landlords, if they were able to raise rents then the value of the property would increase as well. As a property owner they would be paying 5% right back to everyone else. The free market will balance supply and demand in a different location after all people are given a more democratic allocation than today. Since free markets organize to produce the desires “of the people” based upon price signals, a URI system is a much more powerful, efficient, and democratic means of organizing a society than one where people vote on who in government gets to spend their money.
Monopoly
One analogy which I have found helps people understand the concept is a modification of the game of Monopoly. With the simple rule of reallocating 1% of the weath of the players evenly after each role, the game can go on for ever. Players that exersize good trading skill and a bit of luck can still get ahead, but they never bankrupt the other players.
Modern capitalist systems are like a game of monopoly where the owners of the means of production see compounding gains due to effeciencies of economies of scale. The more you win, the faster you win. The rich get richer simply by virtue of being rich. Ask a poor man with a shuvvel to compete in the market for ditch digging against a rich man with a backhoe. It doesn’t matter how “smart” or “hardworking” the poor man is, his labor is worthless unless it can be mixed with the capital represented by the backhoe.
The move toward increasingly automated production of goods and services is like giving the rich capital holder the equivalent of a backhoe in every industry. In many cases, they purchased that backhoe with stolen goods and government favors. The compounding nature of wealth naturally centralizes, URI is needed to keep a sustainable decentralization of power required to secure our life, liberty, and property.
Conclusion
The concept of URI is something that everyone should carefully consider after setting aside preconeived notions about the nature of property rights, socialism, and capitalism.
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Good write up and I agree with your points. At the same time, I think downvotes are a difficult issue. Hear me out—I'm going to ramble a bit (but hopefully there will be a point in here somewhere)
This is a logical vs emotional thing. On one hand we can all understand that downvotes are not necessarily personal and only express some kind of disagreement: with a point you made, with the reward size, with something else. But on the other hand, it feels like a personal attack. And that feeling is not only hard to ignore, but hard not to respond emotionally to.
We see this problem a lot in writing critiques. Back when the Writers Block was a thing on Steemit (I think they self-destructed long before Hive) I was a poetry editor there. And before that, I took many creative writing classes at Uni long years ago and I remember the problems of critiques. The thing is, no matter how nice you are in your critique, no matter how softly you try to pad things, people get really really hurt, to the point of bursting into tears, running away, quitting. Now objectively that seems nuts. Why get so upset over someone pointing out that you have a tendency to use run-on sentences, don't know how to use a comma, or tend to have characters speak when you should be having them act? But trying to look at it from their side, they worked really hard on their story or poem or writing, they put a lot of energy into it; not only that, but they allowed themselves to fantasize when writing it about how successful it will be and how much praise it would get. Getting any critique after that is like a slap in the face.
Again, objectively that is silly, but we do need to understand that is what's happening. I mean it's human nature. We can say it shouldn't be this way, but we can't (or shouldn't) deny what it is.
I have been on the other end of this too. Sometimes I submit my poetry to publications. Like almost all writers except those who have made a name (eg Stephen King) I am rejected more than accepted, and those rejections still always hurt a little. I can say thank you, I understand, and I can take any points given to heart, but I still don't feel good about the rejection. I've writer friends who are in advanced age and they tell me they still have the same reaction.
Downvotes trigger the exact same emotional reaction in most people.
Let's not mention that when you get a downvote, it's what, 1 or 2 out of the 163 this post has made. You can shrug and move on. But when a newbie who only makes .1 on a post they worked really hard on, then someone comes along and downvotes it to zero, that really really hurts. Even if the downvoter leaves a comment "It's not personal, I just don't like the point you made", that still really hurts.
Hmmm
So I don't know. I mean I agree with what you write and I think we do need to police the system to encourage more high quality posting and less trash, only-for-a-voting-trail-vote, posts. But at the same time we have to be careful with downvotes because they can also be very hurtful and disincentivizing. Hive has enough problems attractive new users, we really want to be careful about not chasing the good ones away.
