Censorship and Leofinance
I used to have an optimistic outlook when I was younger - thinking that bad things were bad mostly because nobody had yet found the good solution!
As I advance in age, I find myself often repeating a quote I learned some years ago:
History teaches us that humans are reliably awful
I don't even know where I read it, but it sounds so true ...
My pinned tweet
Another quote real life often prods me to repeat is
Turns out, humans are much smarter than I thought they were when I was young (classic youngster hubris) ... They know what is good ... yet they choose to do evil. There is even internal motivation to act like that, motivation I never thought existed in the human nature ... I used to believe people's actions are motivated by the needs you can read in the Maslow pyramid - safety, self-preservation, reproduction, you know ... Source: By Androidmarsexpress - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Humans have a need to harm other humans
What Maslow missed, and nobody teaches you about, is the need to do harm unto their fellow humans. Although nobody told you about it, when you stop to think a second, it becomes obvious: by reductio ad absurdum, if that was not the case, then there would have been no need for the famous principle do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
This need will certainly not manifest in everybody to the same degree and you are excused for believing that, you personnally, are exempt of it. But it is bound to show up in a group of people. Any group, including our own Hive community.
Which is somewhat paradoxical, if you think of it, because we witnessed the evil of the others and thought of us as "the good guys".
Steem and Mark
Remember how we began as Steemit.com and we were "the knight in shining armor" who rose up to fight censorship and the bad guys, and among the baddies was this guy and his "book of faces" ?
And how we were all up in arms that he created a "walled garden", that everything created on the platform stayed there and was not available unless you were a member, and that on the platform, his minions retained the power to show what they wanted, to who they wanted, regardless of what the intent of the actual content creators was?
Hive and LeoFinance
Well, look what happened a few years down that road! I wrote several articles about crypto and finances and published on Hive, for the benefit of the whole Hive community. I've used LeoFinance in the past but in terms of ergonomy and user-friendliness I consider it to be "not up to notch". So, after trying it out, I moved on, using whatever Hive front-end I felt more comfortable with.
As it happened, the rewards for some of my latest articles seemed a bit inconsistent with the interest of the content - two articles in a series being rewarded very differently, when logic indicates that they should have been of interest to the same audience. Discussing this, someone told me:
"Your articles are about finance and investing and crypto, you should have used leofinance.io because those who access Hive through this interface or mostly through it will never see your post, it will never appear on the LeoFinance interface!"
-
Wait -
source - What? -
I hadn't realized that, so I went to check ... and sure enough ...
Here's what my blog looks like to people who access Hive through leofinance.io
So people who are interested in crypto investing and finance topics come to read Hive content thinking leofinance has their interests at heart and is going to select for them, from all the hive content, that which is more relevant ... Perhaps they read and appreciated my series on DeFi from ... 3 months ago ... they come back and think "oh, nothing new ..."
Yet my blog on other Hive front-ends looks somewhat different ...
As it happens, since my DeFi series, I wrote several other articles which could have been of interest to people caring about crypto investing and finance topics: How to buy Hive with €uros A bilingual article (FR / EN) about the Crypto.com credit cards An article debunking the often levelled "crypto is for money laundering" argument, and especially an article analyzing and comparing the return on investment from different "delegatees" for creating a passive income stream with Hive.
Plus of course the newer articles which you can see in the picture above, including, a few days ago, the follow up to the "ROI" analysis
It is clear that I am myself interested in crypto investing and finance topics, I am part of the community which leofinance.io claims to serve and through my content I aim to offer something useful to that community ... I believe communities of interest are a very powerful concept which could help the whole Hive eco-system immensely and they should be encouraged. I'm all in favor of front ends cattering to specific interests, it's good for the average user to have a team which she can trust to select and show her all the articles in a certain area, and perhaps also leave the rest of the articles available, but with a well-calibrated visibility ...
And yet ... let me see if I get this straight ... I am a content creator and create content for fellow Hivers who are interested in similar topics, such as crypto investing and finance ... But the interface which is supposed to serve precisely that audience chooses to hide my content from my audience ... and implicitly holds me to ransom in order to use that interface and no other ... ?
Take this very article - in order to spark a discussion in the community, in order to engage the LeoFinance community it's not enough to share their values and their interests ... I also have to use a specific front-end, leofinance.io, or else I will be gagged, none of them will be able to "hear me screaming"
LeoFinance: "Post through leofinance.io or else ..."
Does that recall the despicable tactics of Facebook ? Is that akin to censorship? What do you think, @leofinance ?
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
