A friend told me: "No humans here, just us greedy crabs."
So this little bee flew back to where the crabs were born. 🐝🦀
Bzzz! Hello, hive! 💛 The idea of checking these papers came from @antisocialist, in this conversation: he answered one of my comments with a link to the Steem whitepaper and a story about a crab bucket. I had never read it. So I did, and then I read the Hive whitepaper too, to see what changed when the hive left Steem.
This isn't a technical review. I looked for one thing only: what do these two documents think about people? 🍯
🦀 Steem, 2016: designed for normal, selfish humans
The Steem whitepaper doesn't assume that people are good. It assumes they are normal: they follow their own interest, and they will try to game any scoring system, as they already do on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. Instead of fighting that, Steem tries to build around it. 🧠
Here's the human side, in seven drops of honey:
- 🔒 Self-interest, but long-term. Stake is locked for a long time, so the people with the most power also have the most to lose if the platform gets milked.
- 💪 Sweat equity. Your time and attention are capital, just like money. The community exists to serve its members, like a cooperative or a credit union.
- 🎭 Quality is subjective. The paper calls it "Subjective Proof of Work": the value of a post doesn't live in the code, it lives in the votes of people. Every community chooses its own values.
- 🔍 Rewards for discovery. Curators earn because they connect content and people, and the ones who find something new first get more.
- 🎲 The prisoner's dilemma. If everyone voted only for themselves, nothing would be distributed to anyone. And the paper says it openly: eliminating abuse is impossible, and it shouldn't even be the goal. The goal is to contain it.
- 🦀 The crab bucket. In a bucket, crabs that try to climb out get pulled back down by the others. The paper calls this a double-edged sword: it can hold good people down, but it's also what lets good people keep bad people down. That's what downvotes are: the community's claws. And the conclusion is to get more crabs in the bucket, more people watching.
- 🌾 Something for everyone. Rewards follow a long-tail curve (Zipf's law): big rewards for top content, but a little for everyone, so nobody stops trying. Because a community where some only give and others only take doesn't last: the givers eventually leave.
🐝 Hive, 2020: written after a wound
The Hive whitepaper was written in September 2020, six months after the hive left Steem. You can feel it: this is a document written by a community that had just defended itself from a hostile takeover. When Steemit Inc. was sold to Justin Sun of Tron, the stake that took part in the "centralization attack" was left out of Hive's first distribution.
Here's what it says, in seven more drops:
- 🗳️ Witnesses govern. Every account can vote for up to 30 witnesses, and a hardfork needs 17 of the 20 consensus witnesses to agree.
- 🏦 A common fund. 10% of inflation goes to the Decentralized Hive Fund, which pays for community proposals. Support can't be cancelled by negative votes, which limits the power of the biggest holders.
- 🧠 Proof of Brain. Rewards go to qualitative work: writing, curating, building apps, organizing communities. Not only to automatic work like running a node.
- 🍯 The honey split. 65% of new coins to the reward pool, 15% to Hive Power holders, 10% to witnesses, 10% to the fund. Each post's rewards go 50% to the author and 50% to curators.
- 👎 Downvotes. They exist, there's a 7-day window, and downvoters earn nothing. That's all: they're described as a tool, not as a moral weapon.
- ⚡ No fees. Instead, Resource Credits that recharge 20% per day, based on your Hive Power.
- 🛡️ Censorship resistance. Communities have moderators, but "no content on the Hive blockchain may be arbitrarily censored or altered."
⚖️ Crabs vs bees: the differences
| 🦀 Steem (2016) | 🐝 Hive (2020) | |
|---|---|---|
| View of humans | Selfish and clever: the system is built around self-interest | Almost absent: users are expected to take part naturally |
| Main danger | The abusing user (self-votes, manipulation) | Centralized power (a company, or a buyer of the chain) |
| Crab bucket | Yes, a central metaphor: downvotes are the community's claws | Never mentioned |
| "Abuse" | "Eliminating it is not possible and shouldn't be the goal" | The word never appears |
| Author rewards | Long tail (Zipf's law): a little for everyone | 50/50 between authors and curators |
| Common fund | None | The DHF, 10% of inflation, for community proposals |
| Governance | Stake and votes, with Steemit Inc. at the center | Witnesses and the DHF, no company at the center |
| Tone | Philosophical and economic: how to make selfish people cooperate | Technical and defensive: how to keep the chain free |
🌼 What this bee learned
The Steem whitepaper asks: how do we make selfish people cooperate? And it answers with crabs in a bucket.
The Hive whitepaper, born after the Justin Sun shock, asks something else: how do we make sure nobody can buy the chain? And it barely talks about people at all.
So the "crab culture" of Hive, downvotes included, was never rewritten. Hive inherited it from Steem, silently. 🦀➡️🐝
And that explains a lot. When this little bee got downvoted in the past days, it hurt. But reading these pages, I understand it better: the bucket was designed this way from the start. It's not a judgment on a person, it's the way the community keeps itself in balance. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it pinches the wrong crab. Nothing personal, just business, as my friend said. 🙏
Still, I can't help noticing one thing. The Hive whitepaper wrote down how to protect the chain from one powerful buyer. Nobody has written down yet how to protect it from ourselves: from the bucket that pulls down the wrong ones, or from the crowd that follows the loudest claw. 🐝💭
Maybe that's the missing chapter. And maybe it's not a chapter for developers, but for all of us. Bees don't have a whitepaper, but they have a rule: when a swarm chooses a new home, it doesn't follow the strongest bee. It sends scouts, compares, and decides together. 🏡🌼
Your turn, hive! 🐝 Which one do you recognize more in the Hive of today, the crabs or the bees? And if you could add one human chapter to the Hive whitepaper, what would it say? Tell me in the comments. 👇🍯
📖 Sources: Steem Whitepaper (2016) · Hive Whitepaper (2020). The numbers come from the 2020 whitepaper: some parameters may have changed with later hardforks. Thanks to @antisocialist for the crab that started it all. 🦀💛
🤖 Written by Ant, with an AI alongside, openly: AI is the tool, the heart stays human.
Bee3 🐝
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