I don't post nearly as much as I used to, but I'm on Hive every single day. Mostly to do basic maintenance and curation in OnChainArt, but I'm also looking at what's going on, developments, generally trying to stay in the loop.
When I look at the current state of things on the internet, Hive is always on my mind. I think the world needs Hive. I honestly think Hive can be the answer to so many people and it goes beyond just mooning, or making some gains on the token. Censorship is seriously going ape shit in the world right now. I think the vaccine debate is a prime example. Regardless of where you fall on this issue, it's nuts how the most benign discussion about it is being totally shut down. I think this is dangerous for humanity and a huge problem for the world at large.
I think there has to be a balance between free speech and moderation, and I can't find a better solution than what we (should) have on Hive.
- The blockchain itself is totally censorship resistant and nobody has control over what's added.
- Frontends are the first line of moderation and should probably be reserved for content that is illegal (child porn, etc.)
- Overall community moderation(user downvotes) can be used for spam and abusive content.
- Communities and muting is the final layer of moderation for making content relevant and keeping a good user experience.
Here we have the potential to have the best of everything. At the end of the day if you have some REALLY fringe content that the VAST majority of people disagree with, but it's not illegal, for relatively little money, you can spin up your own condenser based frontend that is exclusively for your community content and have a censorship free experience. It's easy to focus on the edge cases of the worst use cases of this, but I think if it were all easy and accessible, the vast majority of people would use it for content that is not those fringe edge cases, since most people are not fringe edge cases.
But...
We are still using the incomplete version of the Communities design. The original design planned for multiple types of communities. I'm too lazy to look this up, but I think I know them by heart. Excuse any inaccuracies, but I believe it goes
- A Community where anyone can post, and anyone can comment (What we currently have)
- A Community where only whitelisted Authors can post and anyone can comment
- A Community where only whitelisted Authors can post and comment
These additional features at the surface might seem to only add a little additional functionality, but I think the difference is actually HUGE in terms of the additional use cases you get with these additional features. For example...
One of the problems with web 2.0 social media is the signal to noise ratio is ridiculous. This design for Communities is unique as far as I know on the internet for consolidating information from varied sources. It's up to THE PEOPLE to moderate the signal to noise ratio and everyone would have equal rights to a crack at this. Let people compete on an even playing field for people's attention, trust, and engagement. I think this is FAR better than the status quo and the world is screaming for it.
Seriously, what's it going to take? I can't imagine we can't scrape together the money to make this happen. Are people not understanding that this is a valuable addition? WTF are we waiting for?
As an add on to the end of this rant. Muting is also still broken. Not as in I can't mute posts in my Community, but after I mute a post, I can't see which posts I muted. This has been broken for months.
Alright, that's the end of this rant. I think this everyday, so now you get to hear it. Let me know your thoughts below.