I essentially agree with this. I don't know how deliberate this outcome is and I don't think @blocktrades exactly needs more cash to the extent that they would shut down opportunities for developers - HOWEVER, at least based on historic outcomes, I haven't ever even planned to launch a proposal in Hive because the main gatekeepers to which proposals get funded seem to be operating in a centralised/cliquey way. Perhaps I am wrong and we are only ever seeing a snapshot of a situation via posts online. This is part of why regular video chats are so essential and so missing on Hive - from what I've seen. It's very easy to fill in the gaps with our imagination and reach wrong conclusions when all we see of some people is a few paragraphs of text.
In any case, I don't think having the author rewards pool returned to the proposals pool in a way that bypasses witness consensus is in the spirit of how Hive is designed. Granted, stakeholders have the ability to do that, but it definitely does seem off.
There is nothing in the "spirit of how Hive is designed" (or Steem before) that is contradictory with posts being voted to support development work, marketing, promotions, platform resources, or other such efforts. The original Steem white paper discusses "subjective proof of work" where stakeholders vote to allocate funding to "work", the determination of the value of which is entirely subjective, including examples of supporting charities or political agendas. It was never and was never intended to be only about content.
Prior to the DHF, voting individual post payouts was the only way of funding such efforts. The DHF adds another mechanism to handle these sorts of things (with a significant benefit being that it is easier to define a specific budget and payment schedule for a project, as opposed to the rather erratic way that post payouts do, both of which were recognized as major logistical obstacles with funding larger or longer term efforts through posts), but that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with using the original method to fund these things, including by sending that through the DHF (and thereby gaining access to the budgeting and payment scheduling system).
When I referred to the spirit of how Hive is designed, I was referring to the deliberate inclusion of a worker pool, designed to fund projects - alongside an author pool, designed to fund authors (of content). Granted, software can be content and can be subjectively valued, thus upvoted from the author pool - but as you have pointed out, that approach is shaky and not really fit for purpose.. Which is why we have the worker proposal pool.
Well that's fine, but this isn't Steem and almost every time I quote from the Steem whitepaper I get shot down by the authors of the Hive whitepaper who say 'This isn't Steem. Get over it'.
Yes, there is nothing that stops people upvoting software projects or infrastructure facilitation and yes that's how things were often done on Steem. However, I'm just pointing out that trying to correct a core failure of the blockchain to regulate HBD using a pool that isn't really meant to be for that use is always going to cause some controversy, especially among content creators.
It is well known in business/marketing psychology that people will care much more about losing something than they do about gaining something. This isn't an opinion of mine, but established scientific consensus based on numerous experiments. For this reason alone it is important to have clean lines in terms of the usage of reward pools. I am saying this from the perspective of personally knowing numerous medium sized web personalities (and many other smaller ones) who refuse to use Hive because of the perception they have of all of this stuff (which didn't come from me telling them btw - I actively encourage people to use Hive, including writing a full user guide for new users).
Ultimately, the big stakeholders will do what they want and will get the outcome as a result. I'm just offering my insights as a professional business systems engineer and digital marketer with a strong focus in psychology. Every time I have spoken up from this perspective, the Hive crowd has heckled and shut me down at key moments. In most of these cases time has proven me to be correct, e.g. the naming of Hive being controversial for numerous reasons and also causing an SEO failure due to the high competitiveness for all relevant keyphrases.. Differentiation is the magic of marketing.
What if a bunch of big whales buy into Hive and literally do nothing but massively upvote their own pet projects? They would dominate the reward pool and totally break POB in every way - but most especially in it's value as a marketing device.
I agree it is not Steem but I don't agree that means the entire subjective rewarding pool concept has been transformed into all content and nothing but content. That never happened.
If they own it, at least in a dominant way, they can do as they like. If there are other stakeholders who don't agree, they can downvote. I've always maintained that downvoting is essential to establishing a consensus on how the reward pool is to be directed, otherwise it all a shitshow of stakeholders, big and small, voting their own pet projects (including recurrent "content" posts, which is a form of pet project, after all), and which often doesn't benefit the broader platform very much.
The current authors of the Hive Whitepaper like to sell the idea (which most people never agreed to) that Hive as a mechanism to reward content is wrong and that actually it is a more diverse platform which shouldn't be thought of as a way to reward even content. I find this totally insane, but that's what they have said to me. I didn't even bother going into why that doesn't make sense because the reasons are so obvious and despite one of them making a show of saying he'd do a meeting with me to discuss the relevant details, he just paid lip service in private and never did a meeting.
I don't pretend to know exactly what is going or why because there are too many people involved and I don't have all the information. I am, however, used to creating and marketing large systems which share that same problem and in general the way to deal with it most effectively is to capitalise on 'code is law' and to build in clear and transparent rules which prevent controversy that effects large numbers of people personally and thus helps sustain morale and sentiment. People are too used to being fully financially exploited and enslaved in the offline world to be ready to trust that any project like this simply won't repeat that same pattern. Great care needs to be taken (much more than has been so far) to address this marketing chasm.
Since I am on this topic, I spoke personally to Steemit inc's marketing guy for a while at Steemfest and was shocked at how totally unprepared for the role he was. It's good that we now have a pro marketing company in the US working on Hive, but User Experience goes far beyond what they are doing - it needs to start with the very core code of the blockchain and grow from there.
Yes and they can totally change Hive into something completely unrelated to it's stated intent - but it makes sense to take action to prevent this if we are to protect the TIME and investments made by 10s of thousands of people who bought into a concept that has specifically designated boundaries.
Heh, I don't think I've ever seen it, but I likely don't agree with all of it.
Well yeah, there were maybe one or two people ever at Steemit who were actually competent. And the results of the Steemit era showed that. Ancient history as they say.
Maybe, this kind of gets philosophical, like what is Hive and whether having functioning governance is a good idea or whether blockchains should strive to obstruct governance in favor of practical immutability. Okay as a theoretical discussion topic, but, in practice, Hive isn't set up to be immutable against the wishes of its stakeholders. At all. For better or worse.
Going back to the Steem white paper (sorry, but it is still relevant), the way you earn investment from TIME is by earning stake and keeping it, which makes you a voting stakeholder. If you earn a lot of rewards over the years and sell them, you consumed time but you did not invest it, and you don't have much of a say. That's fine IMO.
For me this is more about having a clear mission statement, which is essential for successful marketing. If you say 'Hive is x and it benefits you y without risking z', then you have a sales pitch. If you say 'Hive is open to interpretation and might totally change next week, depending on what the richest people want..' then you have a laughing stock for most people.
Anarchy is great, it is needed - but vehicles like this space are served by focus and some kind of agreed upon direction that is clear. It's not reasonable to expect anyone to feel comfortable investing their time and money into building a presence on a platform if the platform can so dramatically shift that it becomes unrecognisable.
ok, but my point is that whether you get reward payouts or not, you have put time into your presence here. if changes occur that result in you being unable to experience what you were sold and what you read 'on the tin' (in the web 3.0 shop), then you are likely going to be pissed and 'leave bad reviews'. It doesn't take much of that to kill a project.
I'm just frustrated that even I, as someone who studies Hive, am seeing such differing 'visions' of what it is from people in key positions, that I feel very pulled from one direction to another just thinking about Hive at this point. This is a big part of why most people won't use Hive at this point as far as I am aware. I strongly understand that the more certainty there is baked into a system like this, the more comfortable people feel using it (provided it is not so unchanging as to become stagnant). The idea of routing author rewards towards development funding as a key 'feature' of the system (via upvotes) seems hacky, unprofessional and ignorant of user psychology/experience. The struggle between 'engineering' and 'marketing' is ongoing - just have one brain hemisphere in one camp and the other in the other. lol.
It's not really what "the richest" want. There are probably people richer than me with smaller stakes and who knows I might be richer than some of the people with bigger stakes.
Nobody cares how rich you are, what matters is how much stake you have, and this matters for smaller stakeholders too. If all of the bigger stakeholders agree on direction, that's usually how it is going to go, but often larger stakeholders don't agree or don't care, and the influence of smaller stakeholders is magnified. This is all very much like any business with shareholders, and not all that strange once you recognize it for what it is.