V 4 Vendetta

Do you ever get so mad at someone that you make it your life's mission to get in the way of that person?

No? Welcome to adulthood.

Some people however like holding grudges. I could name quite a few and the reasoning behind them what I can assume, but most of the time it's quite childish stuff that in the long term, much like they themselves, are going to seem insignificant.

Just as insignificant as my Reddit karma points.

I remember the story of a Reddit account called Unidan. This person was Reddit famous for quite a while. He studied biology but had a very large range of knowledge to share with other Redditors - some times a bit suspiciously large range of it. Before I get to his demise, let's look at one of the reasons it may have gone on for so long to begin with.

Reddit activity is closed off from public view. You don't know who downvoted or upvoted you, it's "anonymous" to regular users and moderators, only people working for Reddit may have access to their database to check these things. They may check on them from time to time to avoid bots using Reddit as a marketing platform and that black market purchases of votes may not thrive in that regard. Potentially many other reasons as well ever since it became as big as it is now. This I doubt is something they manually just check now and then out of curiosity or to make sure everything is on par with their voting ideology as there's just way too many users and votes - I'm sure there's algo's and bots taking a look at things for them lately which may cause their own issues such as shadowbanning if you do something their bots may not like or straight up banning/deletion of your account. Used moderately however it may go over most of these checks and Reddit admins for quite a long time.

Another reason would be, why would someone try and game the system for "Reddit points"? Which is an understandable question and earlier in the day even more weird of a thing to farm or brag about when Reddit was much smaller and there were no potential retrospective token airdrop/rewards looming which r/cryptocurrency and r/fortnite introduced.

Some just like the attention I guess.

Eventually, some people noticed some strange things with Unidan's activity. Whenever he left comments or posts, they started to monitor his activity better and some strange upvotes kept occurring. I may not remember this story fully, I'm sure it's easily searchable somewhere these days, but to give you the gist - something unnatural seemed to occur to the amount of upvotes he'd get. It started to become even more adamant when discussions were heated and Unidan maybe wasn't completely correct about certain debates and was met with discussions from others also very knowledgeable in certain fields. Yet the "wisdom of the crowd" always kept siding with Unidan.

Maybe it's cause of his Reddit stardom he had amassed a large following that upvoted no matter what he said? Maybe they all just happened to be there at the right time to side with him almost every time? Or maybe Unidan was starting to push it a bit too far with his suspicious activity - which he later admitted to. A few users who noticed the strange upvote activity started to also notice a strange downvote activity towards his "debaters". It got so strange and far that eventually they thought it'd be better to contact some Reddit admins to look into the activity from an angle they couldn't - who are the accounts that keep constantly voting this user around the same time very early to give him that "boost" into attention and endless upvotes from others later who not only consumed and liked the person but were now just following the trend to upvote whatever he said - no matter if he was correct in that regard or not because so many others had upvoted it and downvoted the others - thus he must be right, right?

Turns out after many having asked his activity to be looked at and a Reddit admin finally deciding to do so - Unidan had been using bots and alt accounts in his favor all this time. It may have started innocently enough - "let's just give myself a kickstart into more upvotes", but eventually this power had gone to Unidan's head and he started using it maliciously to downvote others who annoyed him or made it difficult for him to prove them wrong.

Why I wrote that whole story is simply to make it obvious how web2 activity is hidden for most people and we may never know what truly is going on there. For most of us it may not affect us in a wrong way but if the power is there and ready to be used and only a few people employed by the websites have access and control over it, do you think they're not going to use it in their favor - either personal or professional?

At the same time we're entering weird times with AI lately and the "dead internet society". How many accounts are solely being operated by AI lately? How much misinformation is being spread today compared to 4-5 years ago during the pandemic by regular people but now also multiplied by AI help?

Do you think websites like X, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, etc, etc, all with hidden activities are not going to use AI to fudge the numbers a little here and there? What's the harm when you think about it? The customer is happy cause he feels so many people have seen their post, the advertisers may not be as happy but the returns seem to be the same on every platform so they don't really have much of a choice and the platform itself seems to continue to be alive and thriving, activity inflating just like fiat.

For many of you it may be better for you to not even know about all this activity if you somehow could access it.

There's been some people who've asked me why my comments keep getting 5-8 downvotes or why my posts keep getting 600+ upvotes even if some of them barely get 100 views on a certain front-end. Naturally it's a bit difficult to compare Hive's dpos mechanism to web2 where 1 account 1 vote is meant to be key to the algo and not stake-weighted voting but you can imagine there may be a lot of alt accounts over there similar to here too.

The main difference is, here you can see every vote and activity by accounts.

It's easy to check history and notice that the account ctime is someone who ran into issues with downvotes and wanted greener pastures over on the blockchain called Blurt where downvotes cannot occur so now he's downvoting a few people here for some reason. It's easy to tell that someone who keeps downvoting me with a bit more stake on my posts may be mad cause I called him a dunce once after consistently attempting to defend vote-buying and continuing to buy votes. It's all stored immutable on-chain and anyone and everyone can often times easily figure this out - not that you have to as long as it doesn't affect you, but we can easily see whenever a new downvote occurs the downvoted user will quickly go to the downvoter and as them why they're downvoting them if the action is unclear why it is occurring.

This is not something that is possible on web2.

On web2 they can delete your whole account and you'll have to start over, not even any proof left that you ever existed. This can't happen here as everything is stored on-chain forever.

Now going back to vendettas. This may happen here more often partly because things are so open and because some times heated discussions may surround earning potential and pending rewards. These things however also happen on web2 for dumber things and those places have a the largest pie of internet social activity hence you can expect any and all kinds of users to exist there.

I remember some user from /r/cryptocurrency who'd always comment on my shares there because he had had a bad experience on Steem so he'd always downvote something I'd post there and comment something negative about it while downvoting my comments. I couldn't prove it of course but it was quite obvious from my perspective. Here I can prove it, I can send people wondering why certain downvotes are occurring to the originating posts and discussion and let them take it in and judge the situation by themselves and then they can be the judge if they want to help counter the downvote or if they think it's fair and maybe they should downvote me some more.

People don't have this choice on web2.

They never will.

Because web2 uses this against people, ideas and opinions over and over.

It's too much power to give up and put themselves in danger of public research and curiosity. They'd rather continue using it for their own gain or to respect their shareholders or country they reside in and their political preferences.

Anyway, kind of a long post and probably a very deep topic to even try and cover in one sitting on a slightly sleep deprived brain but not sleepy enough to fall asleep - but maybe some food for thought for some newbies out there or users who may not have thought about this one difference Hive opens up to users that web2 doesn't.