i love the freedom hardliners. thanks for all the fights you have fought on here on behalf of those who don't see the issue.

blessings!!!

The main challenge I see is to find a way to both reward good content (meaning content other people on the network deem useful, helpful or valuable) while also making it impossible for one individual or group to dominate the network through sheer monetary influence.

I am still thinking on this, a lot and I feel I am far from a solution at this point. One way would be that you cannot buy your stake only earn it through activity. Maybe a listing will be announced for X time in the future so that everybody can prepare accordingly and be free of monetary influence of the token price.

You have posted here for the long run, and I also have. We are all in agreement that quick riches is not what this place is about. The rewards should be a side effect of adding value to the community.

The issue with icp is that so many perpetual markets exist that can create huge artificial selling pressure that actually has an effect on the spot price. just like with the silver market. i really have to get into tokenomics more and find models that better represent a fair and free discourse platform.

This really all comes down to 
1 - granting everyone the ability to judge for themselves what they find worthy and not interfere with that
2 - helping everyone to see fraud when it occurs and let it be up to them to take that information to heart. 
3 - being ok if other people vote in a way you see as stupid or harmful

For example: I have zero problem with a bot that auto comments under a post that has been written 100% with AI, notifying those who would potentially vote on it to take that into consideration before voting. What I do have a problem with if someone can take it on himself to override the community's votes on said post, even for the right reasons. 

That is where we disagree also, you and so many on here say it is not "your rewards" until actual payout, but what this in effect means that even if many people find a post worthy and upvote it, someone else with dubious intentions can come along and zero that author reward and the curators' rewards out, increasing the non-zeroed out rewards for himself and his gang with the stake majority. This wouldn't be such an issue were it not for the fact that huge money can buy cartel structures on Hive which is exactly the same shit we have in the financial system at large.

Prohibition never works to reduce harm because of the social side effects, it would be much better to point out why a certain substance is harmful to the user rather than banning it for everyone.

Maybe I am idealistic and naive - two traits that have preserved my optimism over these past 15 years wading through a swamp of system lies - but the world I want to live in leaves it up to everyone to decide, a system that incentivizes to appeal to people's moral and intellectual standards to be convinced not to vote for something rather than muffling their voice.

All of this of course has only gotten more complicated with the rampant use of AI and bots. 

Essentially we are trying to solve the Kali Yuga task of finding a fair and proper governance system for human beings that somehow ALSO rewards people monetarily for their efforts and is at the same time immune to hostile takeover by some big nasty cartel players and intelligence agencies.

Will we make it? ahahaha, it's 2025, I don't know if humanity is ready. With steem and hive it clearly wasn't.

Well, I wrote above. Such a system exists on Blurt and works year after year, showing that it's working. You probably did not read what I wrote carefully.

I explain once again. Downvotes are like fighting weeds with herbicides. You may defeat the weeds and save 10-20% more time than with natural methods, but your food becomes toxic,  and the soil dead, sterile and devoid of nutrients. Eating this food makes you sick and eventually you die prematurely from cancer or other nasty things.

And this is what Hive has become, although it had the potential for wider adoption and a place where interesting uncensored discussions take place, currently all the people who really think and write interesting content have fled because this or that whale with a higher stake started downvoting them for something they did not like. The rest, on the other hand, sit quietly and are afraid to speak freely so as not to attract attention and only drain the pool with boring posts that they write mainly for tokens, about neutral topics like photos of their breakfast. 

On the other hand, those "politically correct" who always shout what the mainstream says so no one downvotes them, although no one "annoys them with their impudent thinking" are also really bored here because everyone just pats each other on the back and there are no sensible debates. So they fall into stagnation and go to FB to discuss, which paradoxically provides even more space for discussion than the "supposedly" decentralized,"supposedly" without censorship, Hive XD

No intelligent person wants to be here for any other reason than for tokens because the truth is that you can do it just as well on Facebook or Instagram to post photos of your breakfast and even make an influencer career on it where you can earn 100 x more than here, so why get familiar with some keys and complicated exchanges when you can also earn more on Insta and often more because there are bigger reach?

What most people were looking for here - an alternative - a space for free, unrestricted discussion, independent journalism and unrestricted blogging, is not here because there is no journalism without monetization reach, and there is no unrestricted discussion about how someone can destroy your profile if they don't like you just because they have more money. 

There are also no reach because you see... although some are just spammers, what you don't understand here is that they are also potential recipients of the content. If someone is interested in a post simply, even if they were just posting AI-generated content for profit, they will join the discussion under the post, take part in a contest or buy an influencer's product, and at that moment they will give meaning to the existence of their channel and make the influencer stay with you longer and attract more people and more influencers.

A platform for wider adoption simply has to have room for all social groups even spammers, low effort content and plagiarists(authors should fight for their rights not the platforms). There is no room for them on hive so there is no space for grow.

Downvotes, in turn, create a toxic, hostile atmosphere of mutual surveillance, judgment and threat. It's like living in Communism, everything you say can be used as a pretext to call you a traitor to your beloved leader and destroy the profile you've been building for years