Is Hive censorship-resistant?
Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
Yes, Hive is censorship-resistant - A look at the censorship-resistant properties of the blockchain.
There’s no doubt that the concept of censorship-resistance on Hive is one of - if not the - outright biggest selling point of our blockchain.
It is however, a point that is too often misunderstood and therefore misrepresented by even many of us here using the network day to day.
With the idea of creating an evergreen reference point for the future, let's dive right into the meat of this post that answers all the common questions surrounding the censorship-resistant properties of Hive.
Is Hive censorship-resistant?
The short answer is yes, Hive is censorship-resistant.
In saying that however, it's extremely important to understand that it's only the underlying, decentralised blockchain that is censorship-resistant.
The front-ends that display the blockchain's content on the other hand, are nothing more than centralised businesses like any other, that can and do choose to display things however their owners damn well see fit.
Front-ends do nothing more than read and interpret the underlying blockchain's data in the way the centrally hosted website tells it to.
As such, the website owner can make calls on what is shown or not shown at any time, using whatever set of rules they choose.
That's right, front-ends can 'censor' you on THEIR front-end.
Don't like it?
Well you can always publish to the blockchain using your account and view that content on one of the many alternative front-ends that choose to display content from the Hive blockchain in a plethora of different ways.
Or if it's still not to your liking, you can even build and host your own!
It’s all right there on the blockchain.
The ball is in your court as to how it is displayed.
Is downvoting to remove HIVE rewards censorship?
So now that we know that front-ends, are nothing more than private businesses, let's talk about downvotes.
No, downvoting to remove rewards is NOT censorship.
It sucks to see rewards at zero, but once again the decentralised Hive blockchain means no matter how many downvotes you get, nobody can take away your ability to publish to the blockchain itself.
While many do, it's entirely up to the front-end's owner whether they implement a mechanism to not display content that has been 'downvoted'.
Like by adhering to the hive watchers blacklist for example.
But the blockchain removing and redistributing rewards on any piece of content is still not censorship.
With the keys to your account, you are free to use a different front-end that uses whatever alternative content display mechanism that is more your liking.
Or build your own.
I have always wondered why there isn't a pirate front-end that simply displays everything that is downvoted to zero.
And 'censors' all of the stuff with positive rewards.
Wouldn't that be something!
Now, let's dig a little deeper into what downvotes on Hive really are.
What is the role of downvotes on Hive
In order to explain the role of downvotes, we have to explain the role of the HIVE token itself.
Remember the other day when we talked about what gives the HIVE token value?
That the value of HIVE comes from the fact staked HIVE (HP) allows you the ability to transact and influence governance on a truly censorship-resistant network.
The HIVE token will always have value as long as HP gives you the ability to operate on this immutable network.
In order to give the best chance of spreading Hive's governance token as far and wide as possible, it employs a stake-weighted voting system on content to distribute inflation via a rewards pool.
Users are able to upvote (and downvote) content to spread the token's inflation and secure the network by encouraging new stakeholders.
To the blockchain, that is all a vote in either direction is.
It is front-ends that apply their own sets of rules around what's considered to be 'valuable content', plagiarism and the like.
These front-end imposed social guidelines if you will, not only ensure the front-end's owner is legally compliant in their jurisdiction, but increase the quality of content they display.
Funnily enough, while this ultimately helps spread the HIVE governance token because it encourages a wider audience of new readers to come back, the blockchain itself still doesn't care about the makeup of your content.
And certainly not the rewards that were up or downvoted.
What about the argument of functional censorship on Hive?
The concept of functional censorship on Hive is an interesting one.
It’s up to each front-end to individually choose whether to adhere to blacklists for example, but as I mentioned above, most choose to.
Especially the more popular front-ends like PeakD and Ecency.
So while front-ends blocking content is not technically censorship because its still on the blockchain, an argument can be made that for all intensive purposes, you're functionally censored.
If 99% of people read Hive based content via PeakD and Ecency which implement the same content display mechanism and user blacklist, then isn't that all that matters?
My reply is, this is where we get mixed up in an ideological debate around Hive.
People expect all things Hive to be this bastion of censorship-resistance at all costs.
But I repeat that front-ends are nothing more than private businesses like any other, with responsibilities to the jurisdictions they are based within.
It's not the responsibility of Hive's front-ends, no matter how popular they are, to offer a free, open platform for discussion if they don't want to.
Again, anybody is free to build a front-end that displays downvoted content in a different way if they want to!
In a way, a system of functional censorship does exist right now on Hive due to the popularity of PeakD and Ecency.
But with an alternate way to always publish to the blockchain and display that content one way or the other, it's not actually censorship.
More of an inconvenience.
And it's at this point of an inconvenience where I want to wrap things up.
When you drill down into when people are crying about being censored, it’s actually not their ability to publish content that they care about at all.
All they really care about is their ability to earn a slice of the Hive blockchain's reward pool.
With the major front-ends having an active user stranglehold on Hive content that drives the most eyeballs - and therefore upvotes - to content, functional censorship certainly matters in this regard.
But as this post has explained, the reward pool is nothing more than a way to distribute the blockchain's governance token and has nothing to do with the actual content itself.
So I repeat, this is NOT censorship.
Final thoughts on Hive's censorship-resistance
The bottom line is that Hive is extremely censorship-resistant and affords Web3 Hive account holders a level of freedom of speech that no other platform can technically provide beyond a promise.
Hive's layered system is tremendously effective at offering users technical censorship-resistance, while affording front-ends the ability to filter socially unacceptable/illegal content from their centrally hosted servers as they see fit.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
All roads lead to Hive.
Best of probabilities to you.
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The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @attentionneeded, @atma.love ) sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.
Hive's value proposition is unique. We have Hive.blog, Ecency, Peakd, and many tribe sites. Hive Decentralized Fund funds both Ecency and Peakd. So being censorship resistant is not a coincidence.
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I'm interested in your opinion on Ecency and PeakD receiving funding from the DHF?
Personally, I can see positives and negatives.
Positives being that they're by far the most popular front-ends and using them to distribute the blockchain's governance token as far as possible is advantageous to everyone.
But at the same time, they're nothing more than private businesses and we can see PeakD taking advantage of the community funded growth via add-ons like their NFT marketplace (of which they take a cut on each sale).
So why is it fair they receive public funding and say LeoFinance or the plethora of other stunted front-ends do not?
Once PeakD reach sustainability as a business, will this public funding stop?
Would it be better to instead offer all Hive front-ends that have been in existence for 6 months or something, the opportunity to receive an equal cut of a single DHF proposal?
This could potentially remove the issue of functional censorship I spoke about in the blog, as it would give alternative front-ends the means to quickly and effectively scale up.
While also encouraging a path to self sustainability via layer-2.
Sorry, you've spurned so many follow up questions in my mind here haha! ;)
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I do agree Hive is censorship resistant as well the fact that no account can be shut down or prevented from interacting with the chain makes Hive unique in that regard.
The talk about whether Hive is censorship resistance or not often arises most when downvote is at play and like you mentioned the frontends/DApps built on Hive can censor anyone if need be.
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I agree that Account Ownership, is an important aspect of anti-censorship on Hive.
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That is a unique aspect of Hive.
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Yep.
So Hive is censorship-resistant at the blockchain level only.
But like I said, it's not "censorship" that most people care about.
It's that they aren't receiving the cut of the reward pool that they feel they were entitled to.
But that's not how stake weighted voting works...
Anyway, once Hive's ecosystem of different sustainable layer-2 rewards pools are fully mature, worrying about HIVE downvotes will become less of an issue.
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Haha. This part is funny. But I hope someone takes it up. 😃
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I got a laugh from that also.
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I am glad I am not the only one who found that funny then 😃
It's funny at first glance...
...but would be an absolute legal (not to mention moral) minefield.
Just picturing the type of people this would attract is giving me shudders.
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I tend to disagree with this point as there are different layers of censorship. What’s going on with hive for some posts is essentially shadow banning. It’s the same as the big platforms like Twitter and Fakebook. The content is out there but people don’t see it unless they physically visit your page. I think the same is true on hive where a whale may disagree with an authors perspective for what ever reason and down vote it, regardless if the content is valuable to the users that are interested in it. This then hides it saying “this content got low ratings, click to show” or something of the extent. A passerby is likely not going to click on it sadly and significantly reducing the potential audience.
I get the disagreement with rewards end, sure the person may or may not take their money off the platform but I’ve sadly seen incredible journalists on here get blacklisted and now they don’t post here any longer and have removed hive from their list of platforms they promote to people who are looking for better platforms than the mainstream ones. These journalists are struggling to survive and reach audiences because of big tech censorship and I feel like we are doing the same.
In the end my point is so many people tout censorship resistance here but sadly I think that’s a load of horse shit if you get to the wrong end of a whales opinion on a topic and they find it within their day to down vote it. My personal opinion is if the topic isn’t for you, move on as long as there isn’t plagiarism of content or images, or threats of violence.
The hive platform has thankfully come a long way for sure but I tend to disagree with this censorship resistance notion. Shadow banning is most definitely censorship.
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What is the Hive community?
One of the biggest issues I see is that people see PeakD and Ecency as ‘the Hive community’.
But they’re not.
To me, we just have the wording all wrong.
There’s no such thing as “the Hive community” that you can plug into and have access to EVERYONE.
Hive is just a blockchain that stores data from millions of entirely autonomous accounts.
It’s front-ends like PeakD that are actually communities.
People see the way PeakD displays Hive content, the way it bases its content display algorithm on the stake of connected accounts, how popular it is and ultimately conclude that it’s “Hive”.
But PeakD is nothing more than an independent micro community that allow people with Hive accounts - and who most importantly follow THEIR legal/moral/community rules - to come together.
If you don’t follow their rules - which right now feature censoring content that has been downvoted by accounts with large stake - then losing your ability to interact within that community hurts your reach.
But with the ability to simply take your account, with all data and followers attached and plug it into another front-end (community), it’s certainly not censorship.
And yes, I totally agree that not being able to put your message in front of the maximum amount of people because the major front-ends use the same rules sucks.
Your issue is with the micro community and entirely private company called PeakD - Not the censorship-resistant Hive blockchain.
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Can a journalist use a censorship-resistant Hive account?
A Hive account ALWAYS affords journalists a censorship-resistant avenue to publish their message - To the immutable Hive blockchain.
But front-ends (communities, remember) don’t always afford journalists a platform or community to amplify this message.
Again, we have the wording all wrong.
When we say Hive is a ‘platform’, that’s incorrect.
They’re fundamentally misunderstanding how dApps that allow Hive accounts to connect and interact work.
In this case, PeakD is the ‘platform’ that these journalists were trying to use to get their message out.
But PeakD chooses to censor content that has been downvoted by accounts with large stake and as such, they were censored on their platform.
Yes it sucks that those in the PeakD community didn’t like their message and that the owners of the PeakD dApp allowed it to happen.
But that is PeakD’s choice.
However, thanks to their Hive account, the journalists retained full ownership of their account data, their entire list of followers and the ability to plug it into another front-end community with a set of rules they find to be more receptive to the cause.
Something that couldn’t happen on Twitter where if they are censored, that’s game over.
Wait until someone builds a journalist-friendly front-end that displays stories by tags and hides downvotes and ignores blacklists.
I know that you said these guys left, but they literally proved Hive’s effectiveness as a censorship-resistant tool for journalists.
The future of Hive for censorship-resistant journalism is exciting!
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Can a Hive account be its own front-end?
I talked about an opportunity to build a journalist front-end in the previous section…
But what about purely a plug and play website that turns your single Hive account into its own community front-end?
People right now see peakd.com/@accountname as their own.
But it’s nothing more than a website on PeakD’s servers.
Therefore, it’s not theirs at all.
What if for example, your Hive account becomes the community in itself, and your followers become all of the members.
You retain full control over how your personal community’s content is displayed (because its only you publishing to the front-end as posts).
Those interacting are connecting to your front-end and are only allowed to comment.
Of course you would have to pay for domains and hosting, therefore adhering to the legal jurisdiction of the servers.
But that sort of out of the box front-end solution that makes your account its own community could be a game changer.
Think about how this could be used for something like an OnlyFans alternative.
Game changer!
—
I’m sorry that this reply turned into a post in itself, but the questions and points you made allowed me to add a ton of supplementary content.
Thank you for keeping the conversation going! :)
Hopefully you got to the end and it at least made you reconsider your position on Hive's censorship-resistance.
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I just got to understand what I didn't. I have been getting it all wrong. My question is, (may be totally unrelated) who are the HiveWatchers and where do they belong? Among the front end companies or are they of Hive itself?
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Damn that was a post in itself :D I need to digest it more!
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I think even that is very powerful. That's a way to build and promote 'your channel' (i.e. profile page). Maybe one's content won't be shown in the feeds of interfaces if one gets blacklisted, but that's an opportunity to grow a following of people interested in the respective content. Directly following the profile or even notifying them of new posts being published.
I respectfully disagree with your dismissal of how damaging downvotes are to Hive. It could be considered censorship under some definitions and even if it's not censorship, it IS something equally (or even more) harmful.
Downvotes allow centers of power to maintain and grow that centralization which is antithetical to the ethics of decentralization and freedom. It allows one person with a large amount of HP to negate the votes of hundreds of others and simultaneously prevent them from increasing their HP. This just creates an oligarchy where the peasants have to be careful to not upset the elite.
Advocates for downvoting will argue that no one is entitled to make money from their blog posts. It's not just about money though. Using your own words about the utility of HP, downvoting allows centers of power to arbitrarily decide to:
I truly believe that downvoting is the one thing that will hold back HIVE the most. We might be building something worse than traditional social media if we are creating a future where sharing a negative experience dealing with a major corporation results in an account funded by a business association downvoting all your posts to zero for the rest of your life. Either it will have to be reformed in a hard fork or posts and comments will have to be moved to sidechains or custom_json transactions where downvoting can't occur.
Downvotes only influence your specific share of the reward pool.
You are not denied the ability to transact or influence governance at all because you're always free to buy and stake HIVE.
Nobody can take that ability away from you.
The reward pool is certainly not big enough to be a network security issue.
Not to mention HIVE’s current distribution - even amongst whales - is wide enough that even if a group colluded, combined targeted up/downvoting AND bought more stake…
…it STILL wouldn’t be enough to take control of the network ala Justin Sun.
With the nuclear option of forking always possible and thus financially disincentivising whales from destabilising the network in this manner.
Whales - who by definition have a fuckload of cash tied up in HIVE - have a pretty big monetary incentive to grow the network.
Hive has a LOT bigger issues than the petty reward pool squabbles we see.
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The future of rewards on Hive
Every point you’ve made here is really about users losing HIVE rewards…
Not about having the network itself destabilised and certainly not about having your content truly censored.
I get it sucks to be downvoted and seeing money disappear.
Trust me, as someone who cops downvotes, I get it!!
But that’s not censorship.
It's just inconveniencing what you see as a business opportunity.
While you’re quite bearish on Hive’s future due to how rewards can be allocated, I look at things a little differently and am actually extremely bullish .
Check out my previous post on how we can maximise the value of content on Hive via layer-2.
To add to that post which primarily talks about layer-2’s ability to monetise content purely via ads, try and envision a future where layer-2 businesses take advantage of even more external commercial opportunities than that.
Content is just one way dApps on Hive can monetise their business and thus drive value to their layer-2 token (if they so choose).
I can easily picture a future where we have multiple layer-2 tokens that are all worth MUCH more than HIVE itself.
Once this happens, worrying about the monetary value of HIVE rewards like you are here, will become a non-issue.
As long as the network remains decentralised - in the not-perfect but still technically censorship-resistant way that it currently is - Hive can go to the next level.
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Super thorough post! You have to be aware of all the moving parts to understand why downvotes are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY in the ecosystem...and like you said, if you don't like it use the tech to build your own.
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Nice analogy you've got here! I also made the same point a while ago on Hive's decentralization, that Hive is decentralized only in its foundational codes which offers users the freedom of a decentralized system, but at some point, there will be some level of centralization coming up, like an individual level, community level and even as you've highlighted, on the frontends.
In fact, looking up the meaning of censorship-resistance here is a notable point:
So, censorship-resistance doesn't mean a lack of rules, but requires that all members of the blockchain adhere to the set rules. Just as excellently highlighted by you, there is no relationship between votes and censorship. After all, some form of penalties are required to help people maintain best practices.
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Good thoroughly, I agree with you hive is censorship-resistance but govern by different set of rules from different Communities, frontend as highlighted.
Let me use my experience as an example, there was a time I was downvoted for mistakenly post photobomb challenges and photofeed to @photographylovers I don't noticed this until the admin notified my that not the content to be published to the community. I don't have any idea how cross-post work since it's not a good idea to delete, so I thought if I cross-post it will appear like I mistakenly post it there, that was I thought.lol
In nutshell, I get muted. What I'm trying to say is that hive is censorship-resistance, the community don't remove the banned till now and that don't stop me not to use other Blockchain. I was just banned from their platform not Hive.
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People can spend as much time as they want fighting over the word censorship, defining, coming up with neat solutions on why others shouldn't care, but the fact is.. People do care when they are downvoted, and if targeted by large accounts - it makes them leave.
Most people on twitter and facebook are not removed or deleted they get lost in the algorithm.
Name it whatever you like, but when you use tools to suppress content from view- to the end user the result is the same unless they are just trying to document something.
In the case of actual scammers this is an important tool, but too often there are other motives involved.
The stakeholders have the right to use their stake how they want and I am certainly understand that downvoting is a necessity, it's a huge turn off for end users and even those who stay. It's a fun stealer and creates a dull culture.
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