My recent experience with Hive Watchers & update on my Krakow trip
Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
I know that mixing these two different topics in one post is kind of weird but my Hive time has been increasingly scarce lately and I also don´t want to spam your feed with more posts than 3 posts per week so I decided to put them both in here.
Let´s start with the less fun topic. Over those almost six years that I have been here on Hive, I never had any problems with any of the anti-abuse groups patrolling our blockchain. Until about a week ago when I started to get downvotes on my comments from Spaminator. The downvotes were rather symbolical and "harmless" at just 0.25% and they first appeared to be just random. I didn´t pay much attention to them first, I thought it might have been just some kind of temporary bug. But then, the downvotes started to pour in massively and my stats at HiveTasks looked like this:
At that point, I realized that something was wrong and contacted Hive Watchers (Spaminator is a part of them) on Discord to find out what was happening. They responded very quickly (which is something I appreciate) and to my surprise, it turned out that the reason for all those comment downvotes was that I "didn´t remove authorities from some old Steem apps". It took me a while to understand this because my Steem account has been dead for years. Just like most of you, I left Steem shortly after the hard fork, withdrew all my Steem, converted it to Hive and never went back to the old chain. That´s why I thought there cannot be any links between me and Steem anymore. But apparently, if you manually don´t revoke authorities for the apps that you once used on Steem (like for example DLive, Dtube, TravelFeed etc.) they still exist and even though you don´t use Steem anymore, it can be a problem. I had no idea about this and I do understand that Hive Watchers don´t like that and that they want Hive users to remove these old "Steem authorities".
However, the way of communication is something I don´t understand and don´t like. It took days and dozens of totally unrelated and unnecessary downvotes before I figured out what was happening. I mean it would be so much easier if Hive Watchers contacted me in a simple comment or Discord message, saying something like: "Hey @phortun, we found out that you still have some granted authorities to old Steem apps, can you please remove them?" I would say: "Oh wow, I had no idea guys, thank you for telling me! All removed now!" And that would be it. No downvotes, no drama, no confusion, no investigation of what might be wrong...
Originally, I didn´t want to share this experience with you guys, not to sound like an offended whiner but some of you noticed the downvotes on my comments and asked about it. By sharing this experience, I would also like to let you know how these things work and maybe save you from having to deal with the same kind of situation. You can check out your granted authorities on PeakD in Account Settings -) Keys & Permissions -) Authorities. Mine now look like this:
That´s also where you can add new authorities and remove the old ones. I removed all of the old ones and kept just those four (SteemAuto is Hive.Vote btw)
So yeah, that´s my recent experience with Hive Watchers. I don´t know why they cannot just tell people what their problem is instead of downvoting unrelated posts or comments but it apparently is the way how it works so my advice to you guys is when you get downvotes from Hive Watchers and you don´t know why, go ahead and ask them on Discord right away. Don´t wait. They communicate fast and you will be soon able to find out what´s wrong and fix it ;)
Maybe the reason why they cannot contact everyone individually is because there are simply too many scammers, spammers and abusers on Hive. I sometimes deal with them too in my contests so I know how hard this fight is and I do appreciate that we have anti-abuse communities like Hive Watchers here, even though not everything they do is perfect and necessary...
Now on to the more fun topic. As you might now, @gtg joined forced with @hallmann and his community of Krakow Hivers from @krolestwo and they will be hosting a little (but apparently not so little :D) spontaneous Hive gathering in the beautiful Polish city of Krakow this Saturday, October 7. The event is officially called HiveBeeCon and you can check out all the info about it at @hivebeecon.
Juliusz Slowacki Theatre in Krakow, photo taken by me in 2020
Some two weeks ago, I wrote this post where I expressed my wish to attend the event and where I also tried to find out who else from my friends might be going. To my pleasant surprise, it turned out that quite a lot of familiar names and faces will be there. As I mentioned in that post, my presence at the HiveBeeCon mostly depends on my wife who will give birth to our daughter very soon but so far, everything looks good so the chance that I will be able to come to Krakow is quite high. In fact, I already bought a train ticket from Prague to Krakow so if everything goes well, I will arrive to Krakow on Saturday at around 2 P.M. That means that I will not be able to go for the Wieliczka Salt Mine Excursion that is planned for the Saturday morning but I will be happy to join all the afternoon, evening (and night? :D) activities :) I would also spend the night in Krakow and went back to Prague on Sunday. Don´ t know when exactly yet but I hope to be able spend some more time with my Hive friends on Sunday morning and maybe even a bit of the afternoon too. I just need to get back to Prague by Sunday (late) evening. So that´s it from me for now. Hopefully, I will confirm this plan on Friday. See you in Krakow! :)
This post was created by me for the Hive blockchain exclusively. All rights reserved.
Congratulations, your post has been upvoted by @dsc-r2cornell, which is the curating account for @R2cornell's Discord Community.
Yeah, seems like they could have left a comment first or something. I am going to have to go and check out my stuff now. Thanks for sharing this. I am glad you got it all sorted out too!
Yeah, exactly... Better check it out to make sure you don´t find yourself in the same situation. I think many people have no idea about this thing (old Steem authorities).
I removed all of them except the one that is tied to the new Hive voter. Hopefully that is enough to keep me safe. I did still have some other old ones in there.
Cool. Anything that runs on Hive should be ok. Just old Steem stuff shouldn´t be there. Makes sense but like I said, I´m sure many people don´t know about it...
Crazy! As if there were not 10 better ways of communication this fact about that authorities!
Yeah. I can imagine some people, especially newbies, might not be interested in investigating why the downvotes are coming and may just give up on Hive... Unfortunately.
It's great you got things sorted out with HW in the end. And hope we can we meet on Saturday
Yeah, all sorted out now but the communication could have definitely been better... Thanks for your help btw ;) Cannot wait to see you on Saturday!
Exactly, that should have been the way. What is that steemauto ? I do see, I too have it.
SteemAuto still has the word "Steem" in it but it actually transformed into Hive.Vote (https://hive.vote/) after the fork. It´s the app where you set up your autovotes, curation trails etc.
hive.vote
Oh, @sione might have the very same issue then :)
Thanks @godfish i will focus on it nad try check it.
Radši se jich zeptej přímo na Discordu, může to být cokoliv...
It can be the same issue indeed but it may well be something else too - from what I learned, the procedure is usually the same, no matter what the reason is...
Sorry about that and this really shows me how much Steem and Hive are connected. I also don't like the approach
They should have done something else instead of down downvoting your posts
It is not nice
Well, Hive was born from Steem so no matter how much we hate the old chain for what happened there and what it turned into later on, there still might be some links between the two chains. Better check out the authorities section on PeakD too.
Yayyy! 🥳🥳🥳
I arrived today by a train from Przemysl to Krakow and its route goes futher to Prague. And I thought like - maybe you could come by one of this trains.
So great to hear you are coming!
And thanks for the first part, I think I need check my authorities as well.
Take care and see you soon 😉
So you are already in my beloved Krakow? Niceee! The city is beautiful in every season but autumn is really special over there as there many amazing parks in Krakow. Enjoy your stay and hopefully, see you on Saturday my friend! :)
I agree with you. This way of communication is not kind and there should be a simple way to let the user be aware of it. It is obvious that you or someone else who has been here for years would not be evil-minded.
Well, even some old users can be "evil-minded", there were such cases here too. Hive Watchers are working hard on revealing and punishing scammers, spammers and abusers that try to parazite our blockchain and maybe there are just so many of them, that the "individual communicational approach" is not possible here. I don´t know.
If reaching by downvote is possible, then individual communication could be as well under a post.
Well, that´s true...
Wow! Thanks for this info!
You are welcome amiga! :)
Firstly thank you @phortun for this information and details brought here regarding some misunderstandings, I'm very glad that or resolved.
I am very glad that it is possible to be present at HiveBeeCon, if time allowed I would have come too, the location is not so far from Romania, but my plans are already made until almost the end of the year.
In the future if such meetings are organized here in Europe and not very far from Romania (to be able to come by car) I would like to participate.
Actually, if some of my Hive friends including you didn´t ask about the downvotes, I probably wouldn´t write this post. But now, seeing the response, I´m glad that I did that. Seems that it can indeed be helpful for others.
I know how much you love traveling so I have no doubts that you will join us at some European meet ups in future :) Cannot wait to meet you!
If all goes well in the future I would very much like to meet you in person and not just from behind a monitor.
I'm sure these meetings are constructive and socializing is the key to getting to know each other, you've seen how much we have in common even if we are not from the same country.
The situation you went through can be a lesson for others, from which we can learn a lot, even if I don't have so much experience here on the platform and for me it was something to learn.
Yeah, meeting your fellow Hivers in the real life is always nice, I have already had the pleasure to meet some. I´m also happy to see more and more of these little regional Hive meet ups popping up all over the world. I´m sure we will get to meet each other too one day ;) Cheers!
I will think about and look forward to the day when we see each other in real life too, I'm sure it would be a great experience.
Cheers!
Well bro!, I thank you for writing this post, because we all want to be well and do everything right in the community and the example of one serves us all. I am going to review this and more aspects of my configuration in PeakD, it is good to be constantly updated on every detail. On the other hand I'm glad you solved this, I could not live with that intrigue hehe. Happy day!...
Thanks for your feedback! I´m glad to know that this post has been helpful :) Hope you checked out your authorities and removed the potentially dangerous ones ;)
Happy to hear that your chances of coming to Krakow are HIGH!
Hope to see you soon there!
Hope to see you there too guys! All of you! I already know that this meet up will be epic and the location cannot be better, Krakow is such an amazing city :)
Yay! 🤗
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Awwww... An enlightening post!!!... I observed what was happening and I didn't understand why, because I know that you are a serious #Hive user and a top-level author... But! I'm very happy that everything has been clarified and resolved @phortun friend!... And thank you very much for this post! ;)
Oh!.... Your baby is about to arrive!... What a wonderful thing!... Let's hope you can go to Krakow then and that it goes very well there in HiveBeeCon!
Lots of blessings to you and your wife! (and of course for the baby from now on)
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@phortun! Your Content Is Awesome so I just sent 1 $BBH (Bitcoin Backed Hive) to your account on behalf of @jlinaresp. (3/5)
Thank you very much for your kinds words and support my friend! Yeah, the big day is coming fast but hopefully not too fast so that I can still enjoy some real life fun with my Hive friends before that happens :) Greetings from Czechia to Venezuela!
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@jlinaresp(9/10) tipped @phortun
I hear a lot of these stories in the past weeks...something I really don´t like and honestly one reason why I do not post that much anymore. I´m at a decision point and thinking of leaving but really can´t decide as I have put so much work into this account since more than 5 years.
Oh really? I hope you will decide to stay! As far as I remember, you haven´t had any issues with HW yourself, have you? I know that some of their actions and approaches have been controversial but we do need these "police accounts" as the methods of the abusers get more and more cunning and it would be impossible to fight them effectively if we didn´t have these organized groups that spend many hours every day just working on revealing all kinds of abuse happening on the chain. I really hope you will stay mate. Hive is a great place and most of the people here are good people. You know that ;)
No I haven´t had any problems so far and hope it stays like that. I read a lot from other people and also "lost" two epople I met through here to the downvote police.
Anyway, I´m not leaving I just took a break but think I slowly start posting again since I still got all my photos from our trip up the tropical north of australia.
Glad that you stay :) Most people here on Hive are amazing. All of us who went to the Krakow meet up would confirm that...
He is absolutely right, but there is no need to justify the way they act, because that is not how things should be!!
Greetings
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts with us.
Hey Phortun, my understanding is that Spamminator downvotes are not always bad. In your case, it's better to receive a micro downvote warning than to have your account hacked. You've seen the Sepa666 case and how many accounts it hacked. A simple posting authority given can result in spamming the chain with hacking/phishing links which might result in active keys getting leaked. Of course, it's not practical for HW at the current stage to leave a comment as per my limited knowledge. Also, in many cases, people ignore comments by HW and only notice micro downvotes on their comments. There are a lot of technological and psychological perspectives as to why it happened, but it was for your own good.
Although I truly believe a better approach is possible, until we reach that stage, people should understand that not all micro downvotes are bad and can simply serve as a warning indicator.
(I am not a part of the HW team)
Hey there, thank you very much for this valuable feedback. Many valid points here, including some I didn´t even realize before. But talking about the psychological perspective, the fact is that downvotes are still mostly perceived as punishment here in our community and when you see an account that gets regular downvotes from big renowned accounts or anti-abuse projects like HW, you automatically think that the downvoted user must have done something really bad... Few people realize that downvotes, especially the micro downvotes as you aptly call them, can actually be just a well-intentioned warning or heads-up. I hope this post helped spread awareness about this thing though :) Thanks again for your contribution to the debate, I appreciate it :)
https://twitter.com/jewellery_all/status/1709802691831210446
Great news you will probably make it to Krakow. I hope you will have a great time!
Thank you! I´m sure I will, I love the city :) Are you going to be there too?
I would like to, but maybe on the next one. :)
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 32/62) Liquid rewards.
https://twitter.com/LovingGirlHive/status/1709878209779736998
It's just like if a person makes a mistake then he should be forgiven then a person can come out of it and the way we see your trip is going very well and all these places are very beautiful.
Thanks for your original comment as always. Have a nice weekend :)
No to jsou mi věci (spaminator). Člověk po sobě nechává spoustu starých věcí na které už dávno zapomněl.
Tak ať ti výlet vyjde. Snad to lil "neuspěchá" :-)
!LUV
za použití #aroundtheworld
@phortun, @bucipuci(3/5) sent LUV. | connect | community | HiveWiki | NFT | <>< daily
! help(no space) to get help on Hive. InfoJsem přesvědčen, že stejný problém (roky zapomenuté authorities) má většina účtů, které ještě zažily Steem, ale z nějakého důvodu na to byli "upozorněni" jen někteří, včetně mě...
Díky, snad to všechno klapne :) Do Krakowa se těším, mám to město moc rád.
I am happy to hear that everything was sorted out. It is good that you made this post so other can understand what really happened and how things work.
I hope you can make it to Krakow. Have a great time if you do.
Thanks for your feedback, I´m really glad to see that people find this post useful :)
Thank you for your wishes. Will you be in Krakow too?
I just learnt about Krakow from your post - so I will not be there.Have a great time.
Hi @phortun for a long time I have not passed by your blog. I am sorry that you have gone through that bad experience, because from a distance and in silence I admire you a lot although I have missed the map of many excellent blogs on Hive, like yours. But the good thing is that you were able to clarify the situation and I fully agree with you on the need for effective communication and above all timely, especially when it is from people who have a reputation that the first thing they indicate when we see them is problems or worse, blacklist. I hope that in the future these people can make the necessary adjustments when applying sanctions, according to the cases. Otherwise, I wish you the best in all your plans and especially in the upcoming birth of your baby.
A respectful and virtual hug 💙
!LUV
@phortun, @parauri(1/1) sent LUV. | connect | community | HiveWiki | NFT | <>< daily
! help(no space) to get help on Hive. InfoThank you very much for your kind comment! I really appreciate that you find a while to stop by my blog again :) Saludos!
Thank you guys!