The Downvote Economy – How to Steal the Value of Someone's Work and Get Rich Off Their Efforts

Imagine this story... perhaps it sounds familiar...

You create your content. You put in the effort, engage, and devote a lot of your time to building your blog and gathering readers. People upvote, share, and finally, you've created a gem! A strong article. The SEO of the domain where you publish skyrockets, attracting new users to the platform. You look at the counter. Your post shows $200 from hundreds of readers! You're happy, wondering how to spend the money you earned after months or even years of work, and you go to sleep satisfied. You wake up... look again... $0?! What happened?! Nothing extraordinary. Someone who doesn't like you and has a lot of money invested in Hive simply downvoted you.

Why? It's simple! Because they want that $200, all that activity on the platform, and your efforts to increase the value of THEIR stake, not yours. They want YOUR work to benefit THEM and only THEM. After all, if YOU cash out those tokens on the exchange, not THEM, the value of THEIR stake will drop by a few satoshis, not yours!

Does it matter that the value of their stake stays the same or even grows because YOU, through your work and dedication, make the platform stronger? That YOU attract new investors and new users to the domains connected to the network's frontends?

No, it doesn’t matter. Your efforts and activity that keep this whole enterprise running, ensuring other users return, engage, and use the network, thereby increasing its value, mean nothing.

Oh well, just accept it. In the end, you're just a slave working for investors for free. Nothing has changed, just like in web2. Nothing at all! Surely, you didn’t think that web3 on Hive was anything more than a slogan to deceive you, right? What’s wrong with you, man?

You got angry and wrote what you think about it? That was your last mistake!

From now on, not just that post, but every subsequent one you write will earn exactly $0. Worse yet, your reputation shrinks until it hits negative values. From that point on, your entire blog becomes invisible, and everything you publish appears as hidden!

This is how Hive users are robbed of their work every single day, enriching a few at the expense of many with the help of a rotten feature that the creators of this network implemented from the very beginning:

"The Downvote Button"

And all this under the banner of a platform that advertises itself as decentralized, censorship-free, web3.

The scam behind this idea is simple yet clever. For a place on the internet to thrive and make money, it needs users. For users to come, there must be interesting activity, people, engagement, reach, and utility. But how do you convince popular authors and influencers from other platforms to start using your tool and not pay them?

Simple! For those we don’t want to pay, we just take away their payment under the pretext of "protecting the reward pool, abuse, or spam."

This is how Steem was created and later Hive. A place where the earnings of authors and users are controlled by a small group of oligarchs, just like in any other centralized web2 corner. The difference is that the scale of abuse and demonetization has reached a higher level, with no rules or regulations left. Profiles are destroyed without warnings or a chance to seek justice. What’s your problem? Nobody “deleted” anything. The content is still “available,” right?

The Downvote Economy is a clever and brilliant system in its simplicity. The psychological effect is simple: if you want to earn, behave, write, and think the way we want, or we’ll destroy your account and reputation, and your reach will collapse. Did you earn "too much" in our opinion? We'll "adjust" your earnings, and if you resist, you’ll have it even worse. Play along with our tune? Then we’ll let you earn a little and maybe even withdraw it... but only during a bear market, not the bull run.

You’re not allowed to "ruin" the whales' token price!

It’s no different from deleting posts and banning accounts on Facebook. The only difference here is that your data supposedly can’t be deleted and remains your property. Great. Except that even though it’s still your property, being downvoted and shadowbanned renders it as useful as keeping it in your drawer or on a private disk

The difference is that if you haven’t published your work on Hive yet, creating your own blog elsewhere will get you more views, better SEO, and attract more users there.

This way, you’ll earn more from your content in places where there’s no censorship or downvotes, like Blurt, where you’ll receive payment from people who truly value your work. Your earnings won’t be erased by someone looking to profit off your creativity or someone who dislikes you or your content. The decision will be in the hands of investors who appreciate your work, fans who bought tokens to support creators like you, and people who see value in what you do and share.

Real web3 is not just about data ownership, fast transactions, and thousands of apps signed with your key. Above all, it’s about:

• decentralized finance,
• the impossibility of controlling the flow of money from one hand to another,
• no centralized supervisory structures,
• no possibility of censorship,
• and unrestricted opportunities to use the network, its reach, and express yourself and your views, based on what interests people and what they find right, not what’s deemed acceptable by narrow groups of technocrats, bankers, and "philanthropists."

You won’t find any of these qualities on Hive, so if you were looking for them here, save yourself the trouble.

Enjoy the ride, those of you who love being manipulated by this system. For everyone else, I invite you to Blurt. Let’s build a network together where web3 isn’t just an empty slogan to lure the naive.

Regards,

From an active user of these networks since 2018, now a Blurt Witness who saw the truth and decided, together with others, to help fix what was broken in the network we all beloved!