First of all, this is not a rant. I find this post valuable and timely. In a way this give many of us, who are not artists, clarity on what is acceptable to the community in general and what is perhaps frowned upon.

I consider myself a consumer of art. I am attached to the local fine arts museum, and I buy paintings frequently.  I will have no problem paying $500 for the Broken Native piece... if my wall scenario is acceptable. What I am trying to communicate is as a consumer of art, I get to decide what I buy. Similarly I get to decide what I vote on the platform. That part is simple.

Where it gets complicated is because of a HW blacklist or ban, when a true artist gets discouraged by the manual curators from getting curated. For a lot of people, that is not only a hit at their true "reputation" (not talking about the strange number next to your name), but also at their earning, due to the monetary nature of this platform. I think anyone can make a mistake. An artist can make a mistake, similarly HW can make a mistake. As long as we are being adults and willing to correct our mistakes I think we can make a difference together.

I think artworks have to be treated differently, with similar guidelines as the main cryptoart marketplaces. This requires an effort in curation/moderation, which can be financed through a commission on the sales. I am afraid there is not an easier solution.

Another area I have of concern with @hivewatchers is their policing of recycled content. Fundamentally I understand where they’re coming from, but on any other social media platform I see professional artists regularly circling back and posting old works from their catalog that they might have already shared a couple years ago. I have zero problem with it there, and thus don’t considerate it wrong on Hive either. I think Hive works best when people use it like any other site or social media and let the rewards take care of themselves. I think it’s very clear when repeated spamming of the same content is egregious, versus normal social media marketing strategies of frequent posting, and re exposing popular work, and previous content that may be newly relevant or timely.

**Dear member of HIVE

**Supplement 23 June - The witness @pfunk can't help but flag the account. So all spam messages are now automatically sent from a server. Now there is also no possibility not to unify. The text will be reformulated and every new member on HIE will be warned to continue publishing here. Also I offer every user a free account on Stemm including a delegation. Thank you @pfunk that it has come so far**  

**Supplement June 19th - Some whales had asked me to stop with all the messages as they had written to @pfunk to tell him to support me and stop destroying the account. I have stuck to it and stopped. He has now sent more downvotes and from now on the goal is to comment on every post that is published about HIVE. We have about 300 HIVE accounts, which can be used alternately and will create new accounts daily. We will program different scripts, because every hour a post will be published in the upper 100 days. These scripts will be available for every user of HIVE if they want to use them.**

I apologize for the automated comments. But we will not get another opportunity to point out our problem. 

** For the time being this message will only be published for one hour, if the proceedings against us are stopped and the donations are replaced, we will stop this. Otherwise, this message will be placed below every post that is published about HIVE through hundreds of accounts.**

Are you sure you really want to post here?

For example, we have a small account here that belongs to a social club in Germany. Donations were collected here, and every month a few dollars were collected.

But since ONE person - the witness at HIVE called @Pfunk (a witness is actually someone who is supposed to represent the members) has problems with the founder of the social organisation, he makes sure that all donations are deducted from the small account. Others who also support the account are also punished, and all income is also deducted.

If you publish here, make sure that you only publish what is of benefit to the owners of the assets on HIVE. You must never express your own opinion or criticize someone who is a witness or owner of power.

You will soon find out that you only earn a few cents here. Others, however, sometimes enrich themselves extremely. Look around, you'll soon find that some people get 2 or even 3-digit $ amounts for small contributions, but you don't even get 50 cents.

Now that the account has basically become useless to us, we have made it our mission to inform all new members about what to expect here in the block chain.

There is no way to fight against the rulers of HIVE. You can only inform others and especially new members.

If you want to see how they take away donations for the association, you can see this here https://beeme.icu/?account=nesomi

If you ever want to find out what this is all about, you can do that:
https://peakd.com/deutsch/@nesomi/ve-the-blockchain-of-coldhearts-and-egomaniacs-ve-the-blockchain-of-coldhearts-and-egomaniacs-ve-the-blockchain-of-coldhearts-and-egomaniacs

and

https://peakd.com/deutsch/@nesomi/abuse of power and love-of-the-ship-witnesses radio or abuse of power and love-of-the-ship-witnesses radio

As soon as the devaluations on our account are stopped and the destroyed donations are replaced, these comments will be stopped.

Should this action not work, we will comment less than 1000 newly published articles with this text every day.

Unfortunately we have no other possibility to take action against such behaviour. Should you really stay here, you will soon find that there is no other way to fight injustice than with many messages.

To anyone who has problems with a witness about HIVE, I am happy to give the program, which automatically distributes hundreds or even thousands of comments.

**We will delete this comment if you wish. However, this may take a few hours.
Add a comment "Delete comment "**

# In the last 10 hours, the downswings have been over $100 Think if love, not hate, were to decide for some how much good you could do.

![](https://i.imgur.com/qbMBLwL.png)


![](https://i.imgur.com/sleOd2c.png)

This is exciting about the NFTs. I've minted a few in ethereum, but it's clunky and presently, it's expensive. Please keep us informed on progress.

Me enamoré de la claridad y la forma que le das a tus palabras para hacer entender tu punto de vista... Gracias por mostrarte claramente detalle a detalle... Soy músico y siento este post como una aclaratoria para todas las artes que conjugan en hive...

@juliakponsford 
Thank you for this.
I have also witnessed this. I mentioned it on a post on Twitter but no one engaged me. 


![Screenshot_20200625-013419_Twitter.jpg](https://images.hive.blog/DQmciM9gwtaB1z6NvJdNdSmm8qeA8cg9iqbP2GRRDMYgoKx/Screenshot_20200625-013419_Twitter.jpg)

<sup>this user has been unbanned</sup>

I spoke to a user I know who has never plagiarized. He started using autodesk to make digital art but did not reference the source. He was downvoted and banned. He went to @hivewatchers to complain about his art as original. But it was considered a pass off. He told me he had to plead guilty because he was scared. He has been any from the platodr for over 3 years and he was scared of not being able to make money. He is serving 6 months on blacklist.

I also had to sop digital art manipulation. I have been called ot by another user that what I am doing is not art but I was never downvoted because I sight my sources from Pixabay.

Whatbif I started a series of art on stick man drawings- would it be considered shitty art. 
Many other users that are capable of creating digital art are scared of @hivewatchers.


Many are afraid to speak because they don't want to get flagged.

This js a decentralized platform and I believe every user should not be afraid to talk especially when it is an important topic that could help this platform.

I have brought artists to this platform who never sighted their source but didn't get a downvote because of how great their art is(realism)

@hivewatchers you are doing a great job but you guys are to quick to place a ban or flag users. 

The accusations does not only hurt reputation but also the person mentally when all they did was to create  art in their own way and then called a fraud.

Together we can build a great ecosystem and fish out the real *frauds*

It's better not to get any upvote than to be blacklisted.

`Dante is here no fear`

*cheers*

Excellent  -- I think you are spot on here ... Hive does have these moments of thoughtless blacklisting and such, and every one of them is dangerous for mass adoption.  Art is a particularly tricky area, of course, tricky because of course we want people to not plagiarize but also people are making decisions who are not familiar with collage and other collaborative forms of art.  People need to understand the chilling effect that acting without understanding can have on this platform we are trying to grow here... but it does take times and "rants" like this are necessary to push that!

On another topic, I look forward to hearing about the NFT project ... I have been looking at Mintbase and some other spots, but I will wait to see what you come up with!

I wonder what HW would think of Duchamp's ready mades? There is art that specifically defies common sense definitions of art.
Derivative works is always a grey area - normally the deriver owns rights in their derivation but not in the original. Courts make this a subjective test. Music largely sorted this with a system of license fees for samples. I've yet to see something similar for visual arts though the stock image sites are trying.
Sorry for wall of text. I think where that leads is that art, and it's value, is hard. Best leave it to the community (and mods) to police but give them a hotline for calling in help when there are bad cases.

Downvoting is killing the future of any social media tool in my opinion. Sure when money making is involved we can expect fakes or copies just like in real life (ebay/alibaba). I would try to investigate the artist and this would influence the price I am willing to pay. No need for big brothers using downvotes. Better would be that "reputation" like on Ebay would be used but that too can be faked in this techno world …...

I am SO GLAD you wrote this! I think all the hivewatchers activity that is involved in the art communities should go through an established art curator such as you or a group before they auto post such accusations, and put these creative artists on any blacklist. It needs to be done in a much better way. Maybe we can form some group to help out with this? What is your suggestion?

Did you post this link in the Hivewatchers discord channel?

>working with a team to launch an NFT art market on Hive where artists can tokenize and sell limited editions of their artwork

I just can't wait for this excellent. I hope the Hivewatchers issue can be sorted out. I think the art community and the selling of artwork NFT's a gamechanger for Hive. Keep hammering away!

Interesting to see where this goes; perhaps the community could provide a an author whitelist to  @hivewatchers for posts inside that community? 

So many good points here! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Thanks for making this post it's very good to a post like this because the way hivewatcher and hivewatchers treat people it's really bad 

I've been blacklisted for over two months now for a small mistake I made with my other account kggymlife and in turn they Blacklisted this account for no reason

I've took all steps to get off the (fake) Blacklist but now I'm just being blanked while still receiving downvotes on my original content and also hivewatcher spams the same comment over and over all day long the funny thing is they ment to be fighting against spam 

Not spamming them selves I really hope that something gets done about this and if anyone reading this can help me get off the blacklist I've been wrongly put for two months now i would really appreciate your help

I saw the other day that someone did cide a Yoda source on Hive and they seem to have gotten flagged for that D: This is really worrying, and I already got 1 flag for accidentally posting my post twice- when I had lag before, I changed community and clicked post, so it actually posted twice. Now I'm careful about that, but reference sources, who doesn't use reference....

Also I'm excited for Hive NFT, it seems I wasn't accepted on knownorigin and makersplace and maybe it's for the better :D 
Good luck with the project, looking forward to reading more about it ^^