Setting up your own curation trail is not that difficult, all you really need to get started is a couple of hundred HP and a bunch of accounts you want to autovote.
There are several established curation trails on Hive that you can delegate to, but like any businesses they are designed to minimize input and maximize returns. And that is fair enough, that is how all successful businesses work, but if you set up your own trail you can have similar returns and actually support the content you want to see, rather than funding a bunch of crap you are not even interested in.
There are two main issues I have with big curation accounts:
Curation as censorship
Some curation accounts are using their big delegations to selectively downvote content that their owners disapprove of. They are driving some content creators off the platform, and in doing so effectively censoring the content that is seen on Hive.
The particular account that first brought this to my attention was Max Igan, (@maxigan) who is posting some really good content, and has a huge number of fans who want to watch his videos. He is being censored on other platforms, and it was a perfect opportunity to onboard his followers to Hive. But accounts like Curangel were giving his posts big downvotes and wiping out his payouts.
I immediately pulled my delegation to Curangel because of that.
Curation as a means to decide what content is encouraged.
Curation accounts are tending to reward certain types of content, rather than identifying content of high quality. So for example, they may upvote second rate crap just because it is posted by a new account, while totally ignoring long established accounts that post good content week in and week out, but are shunned by the big upvoting accounts because they are not in agreement with some deep set underlying agendas.
Or in some cases they are subtly promoting their own interests, so over-reward any content that is essentially just good PR, while ignoring in many cases far better content that rips holes in the latest bullshit they are promoting.
If I sound bitter and twisted here, it is because I’ve seen this happen, and go unnoticed, far too often over the past 4½ years.
Setting up my own curation trail.
So my response to all this was to set up my own curation account, @gimp.
The @gimp account was never intended to be an account for sharing much of my own content, but to see how it might work to set up my own curation trail.
I started out by following all the people I follow on my other accounts. So straight away, that meant I was starting out with over 2000 follows. But my old follow lists were from Steemit and went back a long time, so most of those accounts have never posted on Hive. That's OK though, if any of them come back I'll see them come up in my feed. And about 300 of them are active, so I have set all those active accounts an autovote.
My @gimp feed is pretty cool and includes a bunch of content I would have otherwise missed. It’s sort of like having a “latest post” feed, but with good content rather than the utter crap you see on the real Hive latest post feed. While I originally intended it to be all about autovoting, the feed is interesting enough that sometimes I look through it and follow new people from my frot account. Check it out here: https://peakd.com/@gimp/feed
Setting up auto-votes
To set up auto-votes I use Hivevote: https://hive.vote
I fine tune the amount to vote so that my vote mana stays around 80%, by adjusting the vote power as needed. At the moment it’s set at 8% and I’ve also been doing some manual voting which has run it down a bit.
So that is vote weight 8%, and the other settings I use are time delay 5 mins, weekly limit 14 posts, and daily limit 2 posts.
That is following 300 accounts (quite a lot), while for say 50 accounts (much easier to manage) the vote weight would be more like 45%.
The votes are not really worth all that much because I only have 20,000 HP delegated at the moment, but it’s a bit of a test and will be increasing over the next month or so.
What are my returns like?
They usually range from about 12 to 14% depending on if the voting power is being run down or built up. And they look low after I increase the delegation. But it’s not a business, and I just keep an eye on these things for my own entertainment. (Today's 12.8 is fairly low, and it has been up over 15% on occasion).
You can see the returns on your accounts here: https://hivestats.io/@gimp
(just replace "gimp" with your own account name)
If the value of Hive continues to rise, all votes will be worth more, and as the amount delegated to @gimp increases the voting value will go up as well. But adding more accounts to autovote will drop the vote value.
What sort of content am I looking for?
Creativity, colour, originality, humour, thinking, understanding, expression – so cool shit rather than boring as fuck nerd crap.
Comment below or follow @gimp if you have what it takes to float some boats!
Curation "groups", have made the steem/hive experience worse for the average user. The reason being, is that the "stake" or "power" has been "centralised" within some of these "decentralised" groups that involve the same people/curators in many cases, who decide what is good/bad, or the same idea of fake news fact checkers that takes place in the ridiculous mainstream social media space. Having different curation groups gives the impression of decentralised support to the average user, but unfortunately this has been used as a way by certain individuals/special interest groups for their own agenda and control.
I've said this openly on this chain before, which is why I attracted hate and scorn (as well as downvotes) by some of these people. They have turned these communities and curation groups into a self-interest "alternative" space for themselves at the expense of the average user. All of it is based on a superiority complex, where they believe they are better than the average peasant user, and for the most part end up being the ones who decide peoples fate. Not everyone can be a talented blogger, but there are plenty of bloggers who regurgitate garbage that are massively overrewarded because they bend and kneel to these influential powers like meek and submissive cucks.
These platforms were supposed to be about finding and interacting with people of common interest to create real communities based on those ideals. That is NOT happening, when you have groups such as these controlling the overwhelming majority of the stake and exploiting its user base.
Let the downvotes begin...
P.S. Great post, and I agree with your sentiments.
Amen.
I said this at the time they was ganging up, too.
I got a curie vote the other day, I bet somebody clued in whoever it was that gave it to me because I haven't gotten another.
Ganging up to increase rewards shows a lack of class, iyam.
Is tipu better? I ask because I have thought so but havn't had a good check
Anything that involves paying for more rewards from the pool is vote buying/selling, we forked those people out, but didn't clean up afterwards.
We need to clean up, iyam.
Delegating for profit and renting stake to increase curation rewards are forcing the pool to pay you.
That lacks class, imo.
Tipu adds lots of new users, so I'd save them for last in the cleanup efforts.
I thought you might say that - tipu doesn't seem to be into down voting or promoting an agenda so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
Every stake holder has a duty to downvote abuse, it is a necessary part of the game.
We won't be able to tackle the abusive whales and orcas without teaming up.
After steemit I'm as anti downvoting as it gets
If they downvote someone i go and upvote 10 of that persons other posts and comments
But I don't fight whales with only 200k of HP... They would rip my nuts off!
And i don't do duty, that's a socialist thing, and im more anarchist.
I'm just starting to realise the full extent of it!
Right now I'm not even naming the worst example I've seen because they have serious downvote power and are not afraid to use it..
Oh, there are more examples for sure. I could see this building up a long time ago with these groups and some of the seriously shady behaviour (including direct confrontations in the past) that tried/convinced many to give them their delegations in return for "rewards" or ROI. That's how it always works. If you know how to psychologically manipulate the masses with a rewards based system, then it's all easy peasy from there. Remind you of something 😉. The very same tactics used by the peoples enemies are being deployed on these platforms as well. Not much you can do about it, and it's a natural part of how these platforms work, and the rewards system that incentivises this type of behaviour.
There are plenty of other shady tactics that are used, but we will leave that alone for now.
It's sad to say that's it's basically too late to rectify any of this at a fundamental level, unless the entire rewards system is completely overhauled. Changing the rewards distribution from 75/25 for author vs curator to 50/50, only made this worse. Most people have no choice now, but to grovel at the feet of these curation groups/or influencers, or make content that only suits their "communities" that mostly benefits them in the end. Basically group think for rewards in return.
It's a real shame, because I still really like these platforms, and the entire idea behind them.
If you haven't already done so, go and read Dan's last few posts. They are very revealing about some of these facts, but are stated in a "diplomatic" manner.
I'll check out the posts. If even he has to be diplomatic, it's a worry!
Well, it also depends on your interpretation of the content and context that I got from it myself. I am really referring to his most recent post on EOS. The parts about governance and how and why certain witnesses are voted in and how that impacts the platform.
I can't help but be reminded of this scene when I think of @gimp (seeing the tagline I think I realize you already had it in mind. lol)
And I am also well-aware of the anti-conspiracy-realist downvoting activity. Seems they think they must engage in this sort of behavior to make Hive competitive with legacy media but, in doing so, they diminish one of the greatest selling points of the platform.
Being a haven for freedom of expression and discourse unfettered by the boundaries imposed by the technocratic elites. Instead, these heavy handing "curators" spurn the spirit of open-mindedness that would have otherwise been a beacon to the deplatformed many.
But what do I know??? 🤷♂️
Gab picked up a million new users in one day when Twitter blocked Trump.
It's clear that being anti truth hurts the platform, but I think the agenda goes well beyond that.
Yeah, I'm obsessed with that Pulp Fiction scene 🤣
Hmm... I was just thinking about buying some hive and create an alt account for curation purposes... Will try to wrap my head around Hive.vote first
Might as well try it out. The only problem I've had setting them up is starting off with not enough HP to change the default settings - 50HP is too low, but I'm not sure what the minimum is.
120 seems to work OK, but you need a lot more to start paying worthwhile votes and returns. I'll be increasing gimp from 20k up to 50k over the next month
Just followed @Gimp... Indeed I do see some kick-ass content reblogged.
Well, I think I'mma wait for my next paycheck and pump up to around 2000 HP to start off with, that would be ~ $0.03 worth of a vote I think, do manual curation first, dig deeper, follow creators I like, pump up HP again, and use Hive.vote by then.
Good post though, I love your content... Keep on 🎼
Congratulations @frot! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Your next target is to reach 18000 upvotes.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCheck out the last post from @hivebuzz: