One thing that's been bothering me as of late is seeing some projects that still operate in a way where they focus their curation based on who delegates to them.
I've made countless posts over the years discussing things and let me pre-phrase this by adding that you can curate authors based on many different metrics that are generally acceptable by the "community". I have biases as well, some friends I vote extra compared to some others who may be dishing out content of similar if not higher quality and matching their social activity and other requirements we as curators may place upon authors. I don't think there's anything wrong in doing so as long as that author's rewards they're getting are generally accepted by others and not seeming overrewarded. If the case that I were to overreward certain authors and the community rightfully points that out and adjust the rewards to the downside with downvotes I should not take it personally or become defensive about it as long as the reason for doing so is primarily the overrewarded point - I.e. if I've been pushing my bias too much in favor of those few authors. That is how we protect the reward pool and don't end up like other copycats where proof of brain/curation is merely a figment of their imagination.
To make it even simpler, here's the reason I upvote certain authors quite often.
- They produce not only great content of high quality in text, photos, etc, but are generally active socially and drive engagement to their posts even without my votes.
- They may be producing valuable activity towards our platform in ways that don't directly show on-chain and aren't obvious to people quickly glancing over their accounts - this could be sharing their posts on web2 to drive or at least attempt to drive traffic to their posts/our platform, building tools, communities, other things of value that will generally make this a better place for others longterm and lastly, they don't just constantly sell everything they earn. This last one isn't my most important point but naturally as people we do look and judge such actions over time because when hive leaves the blockchain it goes into the unknown and whatever you say may or may not be true about what happens with it. I say this because I know some people may need whatever hive they earn here for their day-to-day but that could also just be an excuse because they'd rather wanna bet on other currencies/stocks than believing in the hand that feeds so to speak.
- Having said that, if they're putting in extra effort with their free time and it is showing I generally want to reward that. The beautiful thing about this place is that you can contribute in so many different ways and we can make sure to reward that effort, time and contributions if we're around to notice it (yes that's kind of a diss to autovoters).
Alright, so what is it I find should not be accepted which this post was meant to talk about?
Curation to me means rewarding someone for many of the factors I talked about above. It is a beautiful way to reward work which many other chains just base it on close to useless calculations or only based on however much stake that account is holding. It should not matter if I know that person directly or if they're also rewarding me with their votes and the latter is where most of these projects tend to fail.
Let me give you another couple examples from my own projects.
@ocdb accepts delegations in exchange for sending the curation rewards as liquid hive to delegators on a daily basis minus a fee. One of the most asked questions lately from new users has been "if I delegate to your project will I get votes?" and that answer is and will always be no. That's because we curate authors on many of the factors mentioned above with stake from other users who are either too busy to curate themselves or don't mind the fee to delegate to us because they know we're putting it to good use. If we were to curate users who delegated to us it would quickly end up as a form of vote trading or excessive self-voting which I've also posted often about and is one of the main problems with these smaller but growing projects I've seen lately.
Vote-trading and excessive self-voting is bad because it ignores the factors mentioned above and focuses most of the new hive inflation back to those who already have the stake based solely on quid pro quo or stake. The content itself doesn't have to be amazing and can be minimal and often leads to authors neglecting the effort behind it in an effort to just collect the daily rewards while ignoring new users who may not have stake but are trying to contribute and grow a presence here. In many ways it also causes for centralization of stake since other users aren't receiving any of it even if they're on par in terms of effort, post quality, etc as those receiving votes.
Yet a lot of projects base their voting solely on who is delegating to them and ignore others. Sure they may add some kind of blacklist that if someone truly is abusing, posting plagiarised/AI generated/other form of abuse content they may block them from receiving votes even if they are delegating but since they profit off of that delegation in one way or another it's quite obvious that they would prefer not to have to blacklist people as much as possible. Much of that content and votes also does not get supervised because people generally enjoy earning passive rewards even when it comes to curation without any effort behind it. Who doesn't love free money while you're sleeping, eh?
Anyway, to not make this post too long, I'd wanna re emphasize that it shouldn't matter how much stake you have, how much delegation you give someone, how much tokens you hold of a certain curation project, etc, etc, to affect the votes you get. Sure we all may vote people based off of different things they say, things they stand for, things they do, etc, but it shouldn't be based on self-interested in terms of gains. I.e. if I vote this person he might vote me back - if I vote this person, he might buy my tokens with part of the rewards - if I vote this person, he might delegate HP to me/my projects. Naturally it's something we may think of at times and in desperate situations but HP already has many amazing usecases for us to go that extra mile to have to use it mainly in selfish ways imo.
Either way, what's your thoughts on this?
Curation is probably one of the most powerful features we have on Hive to attract new users and increase users retention. It may also be the most powerful one, to be honest.
The ability to earn thanks to your interactions with the communities/projects/people you like is something (almost) unique and in an era where a huge slice of the population uses social media platforms AND often looks for alternative source of income, well, Hive seems almost to good to be true - if only people were able to notice it 😅
However, besides not using DHF funds at their best to properly market Hive outside Hive itself - it's something that blows my mind off seeing projects being funded for tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars for years without delivering almost nothing and without clear explanations on how they used/use those funds... -, we also - or at least I - often see people misusing their voting power. Which is something that seems odd to say, because it's their voting power and everyone should be able to use it as they like... if not that how we curate affetcs everyone else, and that's why I think there should be not rules, but guidelines on how to properly curate. And people should be encouraged to follow these guidelines.
And I agree on what you said about what shouldn't be done with your voting power: it's a tool to reward others, encourage activity, boost engagement, not a way to maximise your rewards no matter what.
Yet, I believe that the main issue lies beyond some projects using their voting power to attract new users.
I'm not saying this is good, just that, imho, this is a symptom, not the cause.
The cause should be sought in how everyone acts when they see really bad curating patterns: what does everyone do when there are users self-voting themselves with relevant stake? Or when there are posts with huge payouts and zero interaction (exluding that of those looking to be voted back)? Or when the reward pool is misused, abused and thrown away like Hive was a faucet to be exploited as long as it works?
And if the answer, for 95% of users is, "nothing", well, it shouldn't come as a surprise that some projects might start to use their voting power in a more selfish manner, or more people might vote-trade or selfvote, and so on.
If bad practices aren't discouraged and look profitable - at least short term - what prevents people to do what others are doing? And are they to blame? Or should the fault be sought in a system that more often than not doesn't do nothing to show people that being selfish doesn't pay on Hive?
This got out of my hand 😅 sorry for the long reply!
EDIT: this isn't an attack to anyone, just to be clear. I'm among those 95% users who don't do nothing and simply look elsewhere. I just believe that if we had some clear guidelines and a working system to reward those following them, that would be a way to make the chain a healtier place and more people would be working towards that shared common goal.
Thing is that being one of those getting in the way of bad behavior is not rewarding nor favorable. No one goes and tells the downvoter good job on making this place better if they've been using it well because they don't want to get involved in unnecessary drama and potentially in the sights of the downvoted user looking for retaliation.
The fact that downvoted rewards go to everyone is not something everyone notices because it's so small. If it was just us two posting on Hive and I'd self downvote my posts because I felt they're too rewarded compared to yours then the amount I'd downvote would directly go to your posts, thereby increasing your pending rewards by that much. However this is not something people notice due to the very limited amount of rewards that do get downvoted in general.
Just a few weeks ago I went and downvoted a user that was posting 2-3min clips of one event she performed on to make it last for 2 posts per day for 2 weeks all getting the same voters to a sum of $30-60 in rewards with 0-3 views per clip on youtube, 0-3 genuine comments per week on her posts and 0 comments of her own in over a month and all I got back was hate and drama and some people losing their minds in my posts about my actions. Why should I spend more time protecting the reward pool if there is nothing but drama and a bad reputation to gain from it even if uncalled for?
That's one of the big solutions we have to fix without making it so that people start overusing their downvotes for personal gain.
That's why it's crucial to address this issue, because discouraging a bad behavior must be rewarded and looked favorable. I guess that lots of other users are tired to look elsewhere to avoid drama and/or retalation.
And that's also why there should be public and generally approved guidelines, because none likes to be downvoted without knowing the reason, while most (reasonable) people understand a downvote if the downvoter shows them that there's a reason (which can be checked and it's not someone's very personal opinion).
We might even use something like the proposal system to write some guidelines and have them approved by the stakeholders: if they get above the return proposal, that would be the proof that the community approves them. If they don't get there, that means that they should be changed to meet the expectations of the community.
Maybe there are even better solutions, but right now it's very easy for a lot of people to ignore Hive-etiquette, as it isn't officially written anywhere. It's also easy to get angry and make a lot of drama, because downvotes can easily "feel" personal if none can point the downvoted author to something written and approved by the community clearly saying that he/she shouldn't be doing something.
Also, to avoid retalation and/or people feeling uncomfortable downvoting someone - I know what downvotes really mean, yet I admit I would still feel "bad" for downvoting someone: maybe "downvote" was a poor choice as a name or maybe we all tend to link that action to a dislike - someone could create an account whose purpose is exactly doing that: not nuking to zero rewards or acting like a sort of police (we already have that), but acting like a curation account.
You self-upvote? You might get a downvote equal to your own upvote. You vote-trade? Same as above: you get a downvote that counters that action. You are clearly splitting an event/argument in 20 short posts to reap 20 times the rewards? You might get a downvote to remember you that this is discouraged on Hive. Of course only if this actions are considered "wrong" by the community, not only by me and 3 others.
You are right and that's why this is a "battle" that should be fighted by the community as a whole, not by some lonely brave users who "sacrifice" themselves for a greater good.
Your comment is upvoted by @topcomment
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As someone who is newer to posting on Hive I will give this opinion to add to yours.
Curation is NOT well defined or explained to new people. It took me about 3 weeks of posting here to realize that Curation meant I could tip a article and then earn part of that posts earnings. And that some accounts are specifically setup to "curate". I was amazed that at least on PeakD I could not find in the settings or FAQ a good detailed explanation of it.
I was only voting on topics or content that I liked and wanted to reward the author for the effort. And to be quite honest initially I was only tipping accounts of people that I knew from other chains or projects because I was trying to just find more accounts that posted quality content. Obviously since I have expanded to follow and watch community posts and such and then also people I follow who reblog and all that other stuff kind of just compounds over time to get more exposure.
However, if person 1 decides to upvote only articles of people they like or know. Who cares? I can see where some people may get upset. Let's take Holozing for example.
If I delegate say 100 HP to Holozing right, I am earning ZING passively each day for that. THAT is why I would delegate to the Holozing project. I am not delegating to it expecting a automatic upvote on every post I post or even on every Holozing post I make. I think that is unrealistic and unfair expectations.
Like you said some projects/accounts will pay out HIVE rewards for delegating and if that is clearly stated then that may be why you delegate to that account. So unless a account specifically calls out that they are going to upvote all your posts if you Delegate to them, how can you be upset if they don't?
I don't know I guess people a lot of times just expect things when they shouldn't or have unrealistic expectations on things and then choose to be hurt over that and think that life isn't fair or something like that.
But, like I have to tell my kids nearly every day. Life isn't fair. Nobody in the history of the world has claimed that life IS fair so get off that high horse and live in the real world with the rest of us.
If someone is delegating to a account and that account doesn't auto upvote every single one of their posts... then undelegate your HP if that upsets you.
Hive is a free blockchain to do with what you want with what you own. So yeah if a project has thousands of HP delegated to it and it is only upvoting 2 accounts with 100% weight, it would look weird and it could rub a lot of people the wrong way. Well then those people should undelegate and move on. Projects live and die by their community and their users.
TL;DR is everyone is free to do what they want with the HP they have or the HP they were delegated. If someone doesn't like that then stop delegating to them. Easy Enough. Projects require a user base and so projects need to do right by those people but that doesn't mean give everyone a handout either!
The thing is that they shouldn't, giving someone votes, i.e. curating - shouldn't just be based on how much stake they have and how much of it they've delegated to you which most of the time the project takes a cut out of. This makes it a win-win situation for the delegator and the project and a loss for everyone not involved in their scheme because most of the time when someone delegates to one of these projects they receive a vote back worth 5-10 if not even more x what their 1 out of 10 daily votes is worth, so they are practically self-voting with all their daily votes on top of getting a return on their delegation while the project is just voting it in exchange to keep the delegation and earn a fee on the return which others they may vote for but don't delegate to them won't give them.
This is something that's been abused in many ways in the past, even going so far as to "silently" encourage community-members to set their account as 50% beneficiary on posts to get votes or be without votes and most of the time the content then ends up being bad to terrible, no consumption occurs, authors don't bother to engage and build connections and the platform looks dead and garbage in exchange - same thing goes for vote-traders pretty much.
The idea is that even if you have buddies you trade votes with your content and general activity on the platform still needs to be worth the rewards you are getting. This allows stakeless newbies to come in and distribution of hive and decentralization of stake to form in a way where you're rewarding contributions in different forms and not just because they're giving you an extra piece of the pie or scratching your back in exchange solely.
I realize you're one of the newbies so giving you a few examples.
Let's say I have 100k HP and there's 9 other users with around 100k HP I'm "friends" with. Let's say in total there are 20 users on this platform active and the other 10 have no stake at all and are completely new.
If all we 10 with 100k HP stake do is only vote on each others daily post, we are quite literally just self-voting ourselves 10x per day (10x 100% votes daily mana-recharge rate) which means the new users will get no rewards from the newly generated tokens and the 10 "whales" keep getting all the tokens. In this scenario it doesn't matter if 10 of the new users are curing cancer and reporting it on our platform first, it doesn't matter if they're very active socially, trying to engage with the other 10, using dapps, telling others about hive, bringing traffic from outside to their posts, etc, etc, because these 10 whales are stubborn about making the most returns they can both in from curation rewards and author rewards. They're not interested in potentially getting an 11th whale that powers up hive from an exchange to enjoy their content so much he votes it because they're already "set" with the 10 daily votes from ~1m HP so they don't bother to be more active, engage more, attempt to bring traffic to our chains, keep the quality of the content up, it just becomes a farm to them while disregarding everything else.
While that example is extreme, I can tell you a fairly large percentage of stakeholders do this in one form or another and most if not all on other chains like Steem most definitely do only this.
The cost of stake being used this way, where you disregard everyone else except the 9 friends or 20 friends or 30 friends that vote you back is that genuine newcomers find it hard to get votes - and I'm not saying they should be getting votes instantly and not put in effort to get there - but you can imagine that over time this repetitiveness means that they're outpacing other authors who do share their votes around with many other deserving users who do contribute in different ways and potentially even put more effort into the platform even though they don't have any stake. "We" and by we I mean anyone who doesn't just vote the same few people daily or delegates to a curation project or a token that actually curates (not just votes) or follows and autovoter trail that puts in effort behind their curation for a fee or just to make this place better and the token more distributed is losing out to those few not sharing their votes and being content about just auto/voting the same few people time and time again.
Autovotes are a big part of this too, I receive many from people I never even upvote, some I do upvote myself so it's not like I'm completely no-vote-trading but in my opinion they deserve the votes and continue to put in effort and have earned and continue to receive the attention on their posts no matter if I vote them or if they're on hot/trending list or not. Auto/blind votes have generally become kind of a problem and the only way is to try reach out to those stakeholders and ask them to update their votes by checking if the authors they've placed on their receiver list are still worth it or the thing no one likes doing, using your downvotes to deter them from continuously upvoting which gets you enemies from the authors who are used to the votes and some times the autovoters are so AFK they won't even notice or care about the reduction in curation APR so you change nothing and you now have a few people who'll go around being loud about you being a big mean bully abusing downvotes, stealing people's rewards, etc, etc.
As I said in another comment and I'm sure many have echo'd around the years - while downvotes are nice to have and work well the way they do now, they are still going to need to be fine-tuned in a way where it doesn't cause so much drama and doesn't feel so shitty to receive.
Sorry, long comment, I'll put part of it in my next post so I can farm some more author rewards. ;P
as a newbie.. I appreciate the big picture view you can give me because there is still much I don't know. And what you are saying makes perfect sense!!
It also makes me feel better because about once a day I head to Explore and search by latest posts and scroll through and find people posting what looks like good content with no upvotes yet. I vote and sure my vote is worth like 0.003 per vote but I know how those early votes meant the world to me that I want to pay it forward to others to convince them to keep posting!!
So while I have much to learn and experience I can at least say I am not knowingly an @$$hole when it comes to voting and such :) lol
(also why I had to stop posting everyday because I didn't want to get burned out or get too annoying by posting just to post) Now I just post WHEN I have something I want to post, not because I feel like i HAVE to post something today.
P.S. I'll be sure to vote on your next post too 😉 lol (all 0.004 HIVE of my vote hahahahaha)
Hehe, btw I do look into reblogs of people I follow too, so your vote and reblog may end up being worth more rewards in the end! (just don't spam it daily as there's limited voting power and feed space 😂)
An interesting read, your insights are always to me a bump up the learning curve, when I first entered the hive my guru on here advised me against doing certain things, one of which was self voting, something I understood and have stood by. I guess there are those on here like life in general who believe that they are entitled and can act as they want and see fit, outside the tent pissing in as they say.
I personally do not see the hive as a cash cow, I just enjoy being here and meeting people so remote from my own lifestyle that I would not know even existed on this great flat earth!
There may come a crisis one day where I need to cash in, who knows, if it doesn't happen then when I pop my clogs my kids can take over and do what needs to be done.
I occasionally get downvoted and it does piss me off LOl, again my guru winds my neck in and calms me down. What would pacify me and others perhaps, is that if to "downvote" someone then a mandatory comment must be made on the post explaining why, something like " I think you are a twat, or this is plagiarism or, you have been over rewarded"
I do prefer the simple things in life!!
Your comment is upvoted by @topcomment
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Some friends on my list, I upvote every time I find they have posted something. Especially because I know they are writing original short stories of fiction.
They get almost no upvotes from anyone, because they don't go around for much of any other purpose other than sharing their work here on a free platform that accepts them. They barely even know, or care, which tags, communities, or contests would gladly swarm them with followers and rewards.
So I make sure they get my full support as appreciation for their hard work in an underappreciated genre.
Anyone who posts anything creative (with nothing to do with their wealth strategy goals here, or grandiose plans to grow in their own narcissistic popularity), I feel is greatly undervalued to begin with. There is a need for more simple content creators to share in various niche genres, with more interest in their content, than the wealth and popularity it brings in.
Generally, I am a casual curator, upvoting only a few of my favorite posts 100% most days, mostly from my friends feed. I really feel this is how this blockchain platform was intended to be used for most people. And for those who want to min-max (less time, earn more), there are tools in place that allow people to use their curation in that way.
It is still a bit controversial to state that an automated curation approach to reward others who will reward back automatically is the fastest way to earn curation income here, though I suspect that is probably true. It doesn't bother me that they want to play by different conditions, as the rules allow, as long as they are not harming others or the value we store here.
And there are community watchdogs in place to punish the worst offenders of poor content, so I am less concerned of this corruption becoming a majority, as most people do not enjoy being publicly humbled in this way.
Just like in life, I stay true to myself, and prefer the slower, more honest way of complimenting others (or curating here). Only those who I feel are honestly deserving of such kindness, they will randomly receive it on some days, and so it often feels like a better reward when they notice my unexpected response.
One of the special joys here is appreciating the smallest rewards, because we noticed they came from some of our favorite people.
Thank you for your great work in the curation game, My delegation has always gone to Ecency by default when I wanted to earn Liquid hive with my Hive power, I hadn't really considered other options.
Delegating to @ocdb account is correct one right?
Thanks and no worries, diversifying delegations into curation projects is also a good option as long as they curate well so best to keep an eye on that to make sure your delegation, no matter how big or small compared to the whole of a said account - is being used to grow the platform!
Yea @ocdb automatically sends rewards out twice daily and also includes some niche returns like reward.app and beneficiaries and soon even @distriator kickbacks to delegators so some times you may even get some hbd which is where that's coming from!
Acid - I love the honesty here and I think what it boils down to is:
"Curation is an amazing part of Hive because it is a way for an account to earn large HP Votes based upon Quality of posts and Community Interaction/Engagement."
It has nothing to do with, or rather should have nothing to do with:
"But did you delegate to me??"
"But did you vote for my posts???"
"But did you support my project??"
"How long have you been on Hive??"
"How much are you staking??"
That's what I enjoy about Hive - I can write about anything I want... but the posts that "Add Value" or "Teach Something" seem to receive the largest upvotes.
While receiving autovotes is cool and helps sustain the write-reward]dopamine button - the Manual Curation aspect is what really keeps this place... Human 😊
Yeah, personally and no offense to the creators I don't even necessarily care too much about the KE rating, it's what you contribute and effort you put in I care. I don't know if you're living off of Hive, if you really need the income for something so I'm not always going to judge how much you sell if you're constnatly active, contributing, trying - spending as much time and effort as a person investing in a niche small platform (currently) potentially could - I'd still vote that person and there are a few who've been here for close to as long as I have but have no stake to show for it but have kept up the "value generation" in ways I deem acceptable to continue to earn my votes or be a part of my projects, etc. And the reason I said "not always going to judge" is because this is hard to ignore if someone similar to the one above always sells and has been and is active, etc, but then also flaunts some random stuff I find dumb like "thanks Hive sold all of my stake to buy this new 85" TV I didn't really need but yololol", at that point-- yeah, maybe I'd stop voting that person if they prove they didn't really need those rewards and pick up someone else because there's always someone else and will be.
So yeah, all those things you mentioned and that one too I don't care much about - it's your history, activity and general vibe/intentions on hive I do care about, like you and @cherokee4life who is also in mine and many other people's comment sections being active and learning/engaging and became active on hive recently after being involved in splinterlands for years prior.
That's the best part - all the things we mentioned... all the metrics... all the tools...
They are all there to be used, or not... at the account owners/curators discretion... nothing is "mandatory" but having the tools at our disposal is useful...
It is still up to the human behind the screen to decide whether or not they want to Upvote or Curate - and that's why I love Manual Curation accounts 😊
Everyone has their own perspective on curating, and very few whales are making a handful of authors to be rewarded so heavily. I have explored some interesting facts that I would not have expected, and after all of these, I have stopped diving deeply and ignore everything now. Some curators only vote for relatively higher-reputation authors blindly but less for new authors despite having excellent content. There are a handful of authors who don't power up their rewards but lend a lot of HP, and they just interchange their votes among themselves in each post; I don't find any wrong here as they have made their own strategy to build up their portfolio. Even for me, I would vote for those authors first step who vote for me on my post. Still, there are many good curation trials like ocd, curie, block trades, appreciators, and others that support quality content, but many others follow their own strategies most of the time with less support for quality content. The good thing is that everything is diverse here, and everyone has the freedom to do whatever they like.
if you find authors you connect with its all good to share votes with imo, the issue is when some just do it based solely on the vote strength they receive back even if they have nothing in common with that account. If it becomes all about just getting as much rewards on the posts it ends up as abuse imo and should be adjusted down a bit.
Yeah, you are right, I also try to keep away from such accounts when I feel such abuse, and many big players are trying to adjust the abuse in rewards, but the number is still very low; in my opinion, more players should come into action.
Personally, I like to think about how a post benefits the Hive ecosystem... is it likely to drive traffic to Hive - could new people find the blockchain through this post and then want to get involved because there are other valuable posts here?
I know that Hive can be lots of things to lots of people... and can be useful for lots of different groups on the internet - but I'm not always sure what Hive should be known for. We think of social media as immediate information, Reddit good for help solve problems or answer questions, etc etc. I personally use Hive to catch up on what the friends I've made here are up to, but I do try to vote content I think would drive traffic here too.
There is a difference between personal curation and a curation service.
I try diversify my upvotes with my personal account to distribute them among a larger group of users. I mostly use the communities feed for that because that are the posts I'm mostly interested in.
But when my VP is high I often fall back to upvoting people on my following feed. And then it will be mostly the same group of users that frequently makes quality posts.
But when you run a curation service you need to diversify your votes.
With our @topcomment curation service I've set up scripts to find quality posts and also allow people to nominate comments their selves.
PeakD Analytics (https://peakd.com/me/analytics) has an overview of both your incoming and outgoing votes. This can be interesting to check every now and then.
Well I'm not old here but my thoughts are that curation should be about rewarding real effort, not just a "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" system. Seeing projects focus only on delegators kinda looks like gatekeeping creativity. Honestly I get why people like passive income, I wish to have everything in passive and active on my passion, but if it ruins the platform’s integrity then that could be a problem unfortunately. After staying here for a while maybe I'll understand more thanks Mr Acidyo this is good topic to be 😁
I think it's definitely hard because groups that want to curate and make it worth it need to have that delegated HP to really have it not be a waste of their time. As you said, there are certainly other ways to do it, but I can see why many of these projects follow the model they do. Unless you have some whale benefactor in your back pocket you are basically living off those delegations until you get to a certain point.
People who have more stake are taken more seriously and people who self vote or join voting circles are a little selfish. As long as they are producing good quality who cares, if you don't love yourself, who else will...
Must admit, I have a slight tendency to be bias towards posts which have cats in them 😹 on that note, how is Mew doing?
Heh, mew is doing great! Need to post some more pics and clips of him soon! :)
How are you?
Can't complain, waiting for the weather to improve to enjoy the outdoors
I think your posts are very educational. I became aware of the rewards extraction in Splinterlands contests from your posts. While it is not perfect, Splinterlands community changed the rules of the contests and worked hard to improve the stuff that was going on. I think it is much better now.
This issue of delegating in return for votes is new to me. I like to read and upvote posts myself, I learn a lot over here on Hive, less than a year ago I didn't even know that it is not OK to upvote your own comments and now I am not even upvoting the best of my posts.
Anyway, I am not delegating to anyone because I am 100% focused on building up my Hive stake. I used 50% of my author rewards in the past to buy SPS, but after I refocused on building up my Hive I am 100% power up. I also bought Hive with fiat to replenish my Hive that was spent on SPS and bring down my KE ratio down to 0.74 meaning that I have more Hive staked than I have received via author rewards. You can read more about KE ratio invented by Azircon and check your KE ratio here: https://beebalanced.streamlit.app/
I notice that OCDB rewards my quality Actifit posts, which is nice they also don't award the short posts that I make to just keep track of my fitness progress and I don't expect anyone to vote on those. And I never delegated to OCDB so it works as it is supposed to. I know some people consider Actifit posts spam and a lot of the posts are, but there is no option in Actifit to set the tracker to post in Ecency waves or PeakD snaps, I wish there was that way users wouldn't spam posts and can do simple tracking of activity without "shit posts"
Hive eco-system is very large and there is a lot to learn about it, it can easily turn into a full time job if you are trying to do multiple things, so sometimes I just don't have enough time to do everything I want.
Yeah all actifit posts are definitely not spam, sure many use them just for the app and that's fine, it's the curator's job to make sure not to over-reward or to potentially downvote some that may make "too much" if there is no content in and of its own since using the app your focus should be the points/tokens from the app and the hive rewards are just a welcomed bonus if you walk the extra mile. :P
We incubated actifit like a year ago and I think/hope it has also pushed some of the authors over there to go a bit further for better/more consumptive (is that a word?) posts so curators could reward them freely.
I also share your bias. I think that if one has friends and one wants to support them, one way to do so is to vote on their posts and I see nothing wrong with doing so. However, if one of my friends, so to speak, makes a post that I consider inappropriate (spam, plagiarism, etc.), I would not vote for him/her, despite my planktonic voting power, I also have criteria to define what to vote and what not to vote.
Well, considering that in this place you can contribute in many different ways and that we can make sure to reward every valuable effort to both content creators and curators, have you come up with the idea of presenting a formal proposal in the Decentralized Hive Fund(DHF) to the whole community to explore and implement new ways of curation in a cooperative and coordinated way? I think it would also be a possibility that what you have observed and written about for a long time (some projects still operate in a way where they focus their curation based on who delegates to them), could perhaps vary or change in certain ways. Metrics could be built to evaluate those changes. And, on the other hand, you could also evaluate everything that has been done in the community in terms of attracting and supporting new users. Does that sound like a viable idea?
It's hard to tell who's manually curating or not, it'd have to be decided on in some different ways if you mean the DHF would reward them additionally compared to autovoters, votetraders/selfvoters through delegations, etc, which this place is swarming off.
I haven't been a big fan of the DHF, there are a few things I could imagine asking for help for there to help hive out but have attempted to scrape some rewards off of the posting reward pool for now in a smaller scale to see how things develop - for instance POSH, onboarding and curation&moderation.
This is exactly what I mean: reward them more than automatic voters.
The higher the manual healing activity, the higher the reward should be. Of course, as you rightly point out, it is difficult to establish indicators or metrics that make it easy to measure that kind of activity. I don't know if in your observations you created your metrics (of which this place is rife) that show you numerical results. I don't know, maybe it's 70% or 80% of all daily posts on Hive😅.
There are ways to at least notice the automatic votes. By consulting Hivestats, you can log in and perform a search for an account you suspect of receiving mass votes. If a recent post receives votes in less than five minutes, this may be an indication of automation. You can see that in the table called “pending curation rewards” in the “voted after” column. This column shows the difference between the time the post was published and the time the vote was cast. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes, it is a matter of analyzing it carefully and drawing conclusions.
But be careful, this does not mean that everything is automated. Let's take the case of a publication that has an estimated reading time of 6 minutes. If I, as a manual curator with a voting power of 1HBD at 100% of the hand, notice that the publication is very good and it takes me 2 minutes to read it completely, I would undoubtedly vote for it immediately. That also needs to be taken into consideration when performing curation. This can also be analyzed with HiveSQL or with the API.
The point is that you could create clusters and thus sort publications and curation activities into different levels, for example: from least to most automation. But the goal is always to make those distinctions to have good filtering and to dig for those publications that focus on manual curations. For that reason, I state to you, “I don't know if in your observations you did your metrics.” This example I've provided you is one way to do that.
But let's focus on getting activity in publications more related to manual healing. Something called “Proof of curator (PoC)” could be created. PoC, by definition, would be a system designed for the purpose of incentivizing and rewarding manual curators, taking into account their degree of participation in content selection. One could also include curators' comments (the **commentrewarder **project does this, but not under the name PoC and in a different way) or, also, reasoned arguments supporting the criteria by which they cast their vote for a publication, but I think the latter would add more complexity.
And it also occurs to me, apart from designing a system like PoC, to make a change in the curation pool of publications. I don't mean “Rewards Distribution”, I mean reducing the amount of curation rewards for auto-vote and automated votes, including delegations. If a user self-votes with a voting power of 1 HBD his own publication, let's say it is halved and he will receive 0.50 HBD. This, in practice, would be equivalent to wasting your voting power, when you could have used it in another way, by curing manually. If you vote other publications and make sure you do it right, your voting power will remain at 1 HBD without suffering any reduction for self-vote, except what deducts the mana for each vote cast.
However, this is also compatible with the delegations. If I delegate voting power to a specific project and that project autovotes my publications, for example, say the first time, it reduces the amount of rewards to half proportional to the voting power I assign to a delegation.
And the other aspect would be automated votes. This could also be included in the reward pool. Automated votes could “continue to exist”, but over time their voting power would be penalized for not betting on manual cures. Of course, all of this I think needs to be thought through in more detail.
Total, the idea that occurs to me is to add to the “rewards pool” a system of decreasing rewards that considers the aspects I mentioned or what you have observed for a long time, or else, consider the Proof of curator(PoC) as a proposal in the DHF.I am curious to know if you have come up with any other ideas after reading my comment. I'd be happy to read you. And I apologize for the great length of the text.
I don't think we can directly reduce self-vote/curation returns of autovoters at the blockchain level, it would become kind of messy. I prefer the other route by increasing the rewards of active authors and active curators and I'd be open for additional tools and methods to help with that. I think most of those rewards would have to come from the author reward pool or DHF since curation is hard to adjust aside from downvoting where one would deem votes to be mainly auto and author undeserving as well.
I also thought about it, it would be messy, it could generate complications that would affect us all.
But I think the second way to increase the rewards could come from the DHF or author (you have to determine the one that generates better results) is easier to implement and manage in the short term to incentivize and reward manual cures and the creation of quality content.
You have touched precisely a nervous and worrying point: “a lot of autovotes are just bloat and we the manually active ones are carrying the weight of them more often then not getting the same returns as us”.
One of the ideas of @commentrewarder is to in a way also reward manual voters more indirectly, because manual voters may also often leave a comment. This is something I wanted to post about next, so if authors were using the project more to forfeit part of their author rewards to the comments, then also only upvote the comments that seem genuine, they would in a way reward the curators as well.
I'm all for rewarding manual activity more, a lot of autovotes are just bloat and we the manually active ones are carrying the weight of them more often then not getting the same returns as us, so author rewards is one way to beat them at that at the inflation level.
Ah, had only read halfway until I commented the above, I see you mention it now.
As everyone has different ways of thinking and different view points but having high voting power means having high HP will cause you to get more curation on your post..... And i think the option of self vote should be banned on hive because i see many with high voting value vote themselves on their post which isn't good
I quite honestly didn't even know self voting was allowed lol. I know the button is there but I never clicked it on my own posts solely because I thought it wouldn't even go through... because why would it?
So yeah knowing now that self-voting is a real thing I think it should be banned as well. But also giving yourself a little kickback isn't that bad... within reason but I doubt the majority of people are using it in moderation though :)
Yes but some people use this button in the wrong way for their own purpose
It's kind of pointless to ban it cause people can just go around to create alt accounts if they really wanna do it.
ah true, you never build a system to block 100% of scammers or cheaters because that is how you end up blocking 20% of non cheaters lol (or not blocking but negatively effecting them)
Cheaters gonna Cheat!
Most self-votes aren't bad, 1-2 per day is not the end of the world. It becomes bad when they delegate their HP away to receive 10x back in a vote from other delegators on that project which practically makes it 10x daily selfvotes just concentrated in one post. Projects that solely curate those that delegate to them are encouraging these 10x daily selfvotes while taking a fee from the delegations so the higher the delegation amount grows the more they earn so they don't care to actually curate users not actively giving them delegations aka profit.
I wasn't aware about this. For now, i am not going to use this service.
I don't especially look for quality post and vote. It depends on other factors too. And i don't self vote.
I am part of good curation trails, but i do manual curation.
Yup. :) I am much happier now that I changed how I feel about getting ANY rewards from either posting or commenting, curation, etc.. hive is just awesome despite any particular, single reward.
and yea, it's like u said.. there might be another reason for the rewards (or lack of) rewards that is not always obvious to us..
👊😉🤙
I think those are very good points to go by when dealing with curation, Good content and being socially active is what brings more people here.
I think it's part of human nature, in an ideal world, it would be like you say, with all the good points mentioned, but then our nature kicks in, as you say you tend to have some bias with friends, as for projects, they want to have more and more HP delegated so they have more vote power, so they earn more and what you need to do for this? Vote who delegates to you (not declaring it explicit), so you don't lose the delegations and others see and delegate to you to get the vote too and you earn more because the HP keeps increasing... In the end it's like in real life, we are humans, we are greed
I delegate out to spread my vote out (their vote value is higher) and grow my stake. The service may be voting on something I am not going to vote on myself but helps the platform grow beyond what I'm interested in. I use to delegate more than 50% because it earned me more HIVE than what I would get from my own vote, then I discover @apis.hive which has a requirement of less than 30% delegated to use their service to grow your account.
The problem itself is very complex, and the situation is somewhat similar to DPOS. In Internet content, there are still some problems, especially content ranking. At present, in the hive community, several major clients have not been able to solve the problem of content sorting and display.
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Hive.Pizza upvoted this post.
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Please vote for pizza.witness!
I think that effort, perseverance, commitment, honesty, quality content and the contribution we make every day to make Hive a better place should be rewarded.