#### Who knew that complaining like a punk would have such splendid and efficient results!
It's only been a week and Peakd has gotten rid of those super annoying x-downvotes (and all the other bullshit zero-risk troll downvotes used to trigger people and get attention). I was informed on Discord by @ecoinstant. @asgarth does good work.
Now my question becomes:
Did they make sure not to eliminate the downvotes that actually matter?
Indeed they did.
What about https://Hive.Blog ?
It looks like Hive.Blog was always 'curating' downvotes correctly by sprinkling in the downvotes with the upvotes (but I never use Hive.Blog so that's not really relevant to me personally; Peakd and LEOfinance all the way). I don't necessarily agree with this UI because seeing that little minus sign sprinkled in with positive upvotes is a bit tricky, which is probably why Peakd started doing it the other way to begin with.
What about LEOfinance?
Boo!
Still showing nothing downvotes on the frontend, but honestly it's not as big a deal on LEO, because downvotes aren't nearly as triggering on LEO as they are on the main chain. Those of us who've survived a flag war or two (back when they were called flags and not downvotes) know what I'm talking about.
Analysis
It's such a small change, but I think it's going to make a big difference. Whoever was doing that bullshit with the x-downvotes did it for a reason. Super troll move and it triggered a lot of people. Now that trigger troll power has been taken away on the front end.
Frontends are centralized
In fact, every node/server is centralized in nature. The only way something can become decentralized is if there are multiple nodes validating the state of the database and changing/rolling-back the information when it is incorrect. Consensus by definition means multiple servers comes to the same conclusion and making sure to all store that same information as the truth for the rest of eternity.
A lot of people don't understand that a single node (like PEAKD or Hive.Blog or LeoFinance or Ecency or Splinterlands or...) is totally centralized and that node can send you any information they want. They could tell you you have a million dollars in your account very easily. Does that mean you actually have a million dollars in your account? Not according to blockchain consensus, which is the only thing that matters in these cases.
This creates several weird edge cases where trusting the wrong frontend/node could get you into quite a bit of trouble. The frontend could easily trick you into sending money to the wrong place (main attack vector). How many of us actually double check the transactions that Hive Keychain brings up. I know for a fact most of you just blind trust it and click the 'send' button.
Nested points of vulnerability.
It's also very important to note that Hive Keychain itself is a centralized node. In fact it is a centralized node that many many other nodes connect to and is a huge point of vulnerability. We should thank our lucky stars that it has a long history of being trustworthy. That being said it is almost guaranteed that one day one of these nodes will get hacked (or a new blackhat node will pop up that people shouldn't trust but do) and bad things will happen. At the end of the day you only know for sure if you run your own node, and even then it's possible that your own node gets hacked. Don't trust: verify.
I think at the end of the day the only way to make Hive as secure as we need it to be is to create an offline device that can sign transactions through an air-gap and never connects to the Internet. Such a thing would be a huge gain for the network. I've theory crafted such a device in my blog 3 years ago but I'd never be able to create such a thing unless I was a millionaire with a company on Hive like Khal or Theycallmeday or Blocktrades etc. One day!
Conclusion
Again, shoutout to Peakd for fixing this problem immediately. Pretty cool.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Return from Shoutout to Peakd for instantly removing 'curated' downvotes from UX. to edicted's Web3 Blog
