'If you enjoyed this article please upvote it and I will return the favour.'

Ewww!

Perhaps @arcange can give us badges, 'Honorary members of the $0.00 club'?

I want a special one that says "Honorary members of the $0.00 club who also self-downvoted his first shitpost".

Man am I glad we've moved away from all the bid bot trending, quadratic voting curve and all other dumb shit we used to have that now seem so ridiculous in hindsight.

I remember when I first talked to @tarazkp in steem.chat and his posts looked quite similar to your early ones at the time, which sucked and showed how curation was lacking even though we did have quite a few curation projects around, most of the stake was still in whale's accounts and delegations had just become possible I believe. Guess you were just unlucky or not enough curators out there incentivized to look for such content from newcomers to reward, it's kind of a miracle you stuck around either way - probably thanks to @steevc's engagement and follow.

This is also something I've argued as to why we run things in ocd the way we do, where a small % of our daily voting power goes towards curators, moderators and other initiatives that are a net positive for hive's user retention. Now without the "curation sniping" curve it's even more important, cause let's face it, most people with stake aren't going to do the grind where they're out there looking for new authors to check if they're legitimate, post properly, are socially active, etc, to upvote and hope they stick around and have a better starting experience in their hive journey than we had, especially when there's the autovoting/trailing option that costs them way less time and no penalty to their apr. Similar to authors I think curators and moderators need also be rewarded for their time and effort to make this a better place, even though I know there are some who still do put a lot of time and effort into doing the grind even though they have a lot of stake, @steevc is for instance one of them.

Either way, with better distribution, so many years since the early days when you, taraz and me joined, it has gotten a lot better already which means that projects like ocd and others won't have to be relied on as much because there's going to be a lot more people with stake and when the prices are higher their upvotes are going to mean a lot more rewards and more people siding with curating manually than just going on auto and letting the rest do all the work. The next bull market will be crazy, hopefully we'll have a lot more options of getting into hive easier and faster and sticking with it by then.