Hello Hivers,

you may know, that I write weekly reports in different communities. There I post about statistics of Hive tokens.

The money-printing machine

I have been working on the collection of these stats for about three years now (Details see below). And yes, my motivation was to create a money-printing machine.

created with https://deepdreamgenerator.com

But is this reprehensible? I can also create these stats by hand (and I still have to do some hands-on). People want to see them. I have been asked several times to enhance my stats also for other tokens and I denied it because I have no time for it (until the machine is finished). So there is a market for my stats. A market means, there is a demand and I can supply it if I get a reward. So I have no guilty conscience getting upvotes and earnings for it. Especially not, because of forwarding the revenues to my other account @anobel, which donates it to needy people (my actual motivation to create a money printing machine).

The Problem

Hive is a system that has no intrinsic value but the community. As with every system, it is worthless without a meaning, given by people (or other creatures with awareness). So if you want to compare $HIVE with $USD for example, it only gets $USD-value, as the first person starts to buy it with $USD. If I want to create a sustainable donation system out of Hive, then I need to find people that bring in $USD, as long as I want to pay out people in need with $USD. So even if my donation system, which I want to establish with @anobel, would work, it still dries out the Hive system, as long as no money comes in from the outside.

What has happened

In the last weeks, I got downvoted by @spaminator. I got punished for creating "spam" and "plagiarism". I put both in apostrophes because I don't see it as this. OK, maybe spam, because I create a lot of double, static text. So I changed my template and deleted as many as possible unnecessary words. So, I should be clean with this. But plagiarism? All my reports have valid, new, unique, clean content, that was created by me. I am responsible for every word, number and figure, even, when they come out of a script. I wrote these scripts and I am very proud of what I have reached. So I started struggling with @spaminator on Discord. He says, that I create text, which differs only in some numbers from other posts, which is plagiarism. For him, it looks like abusing the Hive system. I explained my situation - and he listened to me (which I really appreciate!). But we don't come together, because he has his filtering tools and I don't want to sacrifice my (in my eyes) good idea, that keeps me moving on so hard in the hive ecosystem.

Outages of Discord

Short Excursus: How do I create my Reports

I have created batch scripts, that read some content from hive Engine and put it into an ElasticSearch database on my local RaspberryPi: I have configured Kibana to create some beautiful figures from the data, figures, that take out messages. In earlier times I copied and pasted them into the reports by hand (which was a huge amount of regular work). But now I have enhanced my developer skills and coded a Javascript program with Selenium, which does this annoying job for me. So only a few hand movements are left to do. My code is public on github.

Stalemate

And now?

In the end, I can go on and just ignore the downvotes of @spaminator. He is not almighty. But is this the solution? I laid down all my options. I made a piece of paper:

I told my wife about it. I prayed about it. And yes, during my prayer I got a warm feeling about the following idea:

I create one report per week, that is added with some free text, and take the rewards for it and send them to @anobel. For all other reports, I accept his "option C" not to get rewarded any more. I am going to work "for free" for that. This destroys my dream of the money-printing machine, but I accept this, because I agree now, that this dream doesn't work (as I do it right now). (I have another, better idea for my machine, that hopefully brings in some money from the outside.) I will add an ask to establish auto-upvotes for my accounts (to get at least some rewards with other posts). I will donate 100% of the rewards to Hive-Fund for these reports. This should bring me out of the target for the downvotes. This has the following consequences:

• Disadvantage:
  • I still work, but only get a small part of my earnings
  • My dream of my money-printing machine is over
• Advantages:
  • The reports go on
  • I don't get downvoted
  • I will win a reputation in the community
  • I stay "friends" with @spaminator and the people, that stand behind him (I also stand behind him and the idea to stop spam and plagiarism.)
  • I don't weaken the hive system

Conclusion

I hope the struggle with @spaminator is over now and I can concentrate on new features for my donation system with @anobel.

Regards, Achim Mertens