If you already know about the general proof of brain workings of Hive, skip to the "Now back to recent events" headline.
Before I get into the details of what I wanted to discuss today we have to preface this with Proof of Brain on hive being quite flexible and hybrid at times with the lines being quite blurry in terms of: are you voting an author as support or are you voting them cause you're friends thus supporting each other or are you voting them purely based on receiving a vote back in exchange.
The latter is of course something frowned upon because it's a slippery slope into becoming whatever Steem is these days and I assume Blurt as well where no downvotes exist.
Now why is blatant vote-trading bad?
It encourages people to vote on posts and comments based mainly on their earnings and ignores the content, effort and value of posts. Here's how vote-traders may discourage the network as a whole to operate better if all they do is just trade votes with equal stakeholder sizes.
Let me just get my 1 daily post out and get 10 of my daily votes back by having 9 other accounts included in my circle of vote-trading.
If we ignore other voters/trails these accounts may have earned over time, a blatant vote-trader receives 100% of his daily vote-value back in exchange. Instead of creating 10 posts per day which would be obvious what the intentions are in that case, they spend 9 of their votes on other stakeholders in their quidproquo agreement.
All these accounts need to do is create a post daily and receive the votes they're meant to curate with back on their posts by trading votes with 9 others doing the same.
These accounts now don't care about putting in effort into the post, don't care about engaging with an audience, don't care about attempting to bring new consumers to their posts from within or outside hive and in general don't care if their posts are being consumed at all.
Furthermore their stake isn't helping decentralize the network by rewarding newer and other users outside of their circle as it primarily increases their returns so they're getting 100% out of curation rewards and 100% out of their votes as author rewards.
While curation is generally easy to maximize returns on for an average 8.5% APR, as long as you don't upvote posts that are going to get massively downvoted. Attempting to maximize your author returns the same way isn't what proof of brain is meant to be used for because it incentivizes low effort and quality posts. Even if that's not the case when it comes to quality and effort, it removes the randomness factor of how much rewards your posts can earn and the effort to go out there and seek more connections to receive genuine votes or autovotes because accounts in this vote-trading circle are already beating most other accounts in terms of APR since they're not sharing their votes with other random accounts of all sizes.
Aside from the blatant vote-trading, there are other variations to this. One form can exist in what we experienced a few years ago where we accepted the bid bot system and ran with it (note, not everyone participated in this). This effectively caused the returns of stakeholders to increase by a lot because they'd sell votes directly, receiving up to 80-100% of their spent votes back in rewards. Most of them were lower than 100% meaning the authors would profit off of buying votes as paying for trending attention for the sake of the attention was in very low demand at the time with the size of our userbase.
Not going to get too much into that era but it has sprouted back up in different forms by bidding for votes through layer 2 tokens. Projects offering tokens as long as you delegate to them or buy the tokens from the market and exchange them for a layer 1 hive upvote. While they've remained active saying things like "we check that there's no abuse" it removes any effort into manual curation and focuses the voting power between the accounts bidding for votes while ignoring those not participating. As you can imagine this is quite similar to buying votes or trading votes, you're instead just delegating your HP out to receive a 10x upvote back instead of self-voting 10x per day while the delegation project/token gets a profit out of you through curation rewards.
Now back to recent events.
Some projects have initiated some kind of "premium" services and included l1 curation in the mix to alter how they curate posts/comments based on whether those stakeholders are paying a premium price.
As you can imagine it, this is already starting to step on the toes of proof of brain curation. If your project gives extra weight on people/posts sending you kickbacks while purposely or not lowering the rewards to those who don't you're already increasing your own returns unfairly compared to other projects.
Advertising that you're going to upvote posts/comments higher as long as you're paying for the project is the wrong way to go about this. Voting power is finite and your delegations are also finite so if you start focusing on those who give you extra rewards you're incentivizing people to delegate more to your project and pay you extra for that finite voting power. Now you may have people who remove their delegations/support from other projects in exchange for getting a higher return from yours at the cost of genuine curation.
It's a bit difficult to compare this project in question with others, services like @threespeak for instance have an initial cost to storing content you're uploading there so you know where your 10% beneficiary is going most of the time when you post there. @threespeak is also not asking you to delegate to them in order to receive curation to for instance help them with further development of the project which the example above may be using their curation rewards from delegations for.
Another example would be @zing.fund which accepts 10% of posts posted in that community and encourages authors to send rewards their way to fund things like curation/moderation, further funding of @holozing and future social outreach on web2. If some authors don't send beneficiaries its way, however, even after being asked to, we don't completely ignore their posts from curation nor do we upvote posts less if they don't. Curation has to remain impartial regarding if the project is receiving extra rewards from the authors or not.
Point is, if at any time you start splitting up users based on whether they're giving you a higher return to affect how you curate them it has a cost on fairness to curation. If this becomes an accepted norm then you may start seeing another project pop up that asks for 2x more than what the "premium" cost of the previous one was but at the same time offers you 2x+ higher returns in terms of being curated. While the users participating in this see a return on their "investment" of having paid that premium, delegators and supporters remove their delegation from the previous project and add it towards the new one because they may get a higher return there from the increased premium costs and demand for extra voting power to make up for the cost.
There were additional other questions in regards to a new service this project offers, one being "encrypted" content where only those paying the content creator beforehand can view the content. I don't currently see how this would ensure the rest of the platform that layer 1 proof of brain is being used properly there without abuse. Maybe if the curation team behind the project has access to all encrypted content to ensure there's no abuse going from a closed group, but even there there's a lot of trust required from the rest of stakeholders knowing they're curating it according to the general rules of curation and that voting power isn't used excessively by ignoring previous content and users not participating in encrypted content.
I wanna make it clear that I'm not trying to "stifle" innovation with this post, it's cool that front-ends and dapps are looking for different ways to make curation and content production work here but the important part is that curation is treated universally for everyone and every dapp. If there are signs that certain apps are favoring users who give them more rewards in one way or another it unfairly encourages people to move there in exchange for returns rather than because they like the dapp and what it offers people compared to others.
Things like encrypted content are quite experimental so my suggestion would be that if they were to accept rewards for them it should forfeit layer 1 rewards while accepting layer 2 as the authors are already receiving payment for the encrypted content while blocking out the rest of stakeholders of layer 1.
Lastly, curation can be used as a way to incentivize people to post in your community/dapp but it needs to adhere to the general rules of it when using layer 1. Projects are free to spend their voting power only on posts being posted within their service/front-end/community and ignore others but going so far as to then further split your own community based on if they're paying you extra in exchange for votes causes a slippery slope back into bid bot/delegation for votes/token bidding for votes. There's some blurred lines when it comes to this as well similar to how voting works in this day and age. I guess it would depend what the additional cost funds are being used towards but since most of the rewards in curation exist on layer 1 there needs to be a transparent way of showing that the costs are being used to improve and give value back to that layer rather than just being extra income for a project/entity/layer 2 at the cost of fairness in curation of layer 1.
Anyway, I realize there's a lot of details surrounding this that may not be completely correct and a lot of additional notes that could make things clearer but figured I'd just share my thoughts on the matter as we're seeing a lot of cool developments happening in this space lately and I'd want curation to remain as fair as we can make it in the ecosystem. This post isn't meant to throw shade at any developing projects experimenting with new ideas and innovations, rather try and lay down my thoughts on how I hope layer 1 curation is handled within it. Looking forward to discussing things regarding it further in the comments!
Image from pexels.com
From what I understand, some of those services are presented as not guaranteeing an upvote. That being said, it seems to be a lot of the same people who tend to get the upvotes, so I don't really buy that. Then again, there are others that are just like you said. It's definitely a gray area and there will likely be much debate about it in the future.
I haven't checked but someone mentioned users paying premium were literally told they'll "earn more/bigger upvotes if they are subscribed" and I doubt most of the value of those is coming in l2 compared to l1. Noticed another post today by a big stakeholder mentioning they'll give people a 100% upvote if they subscribe to them, so I guess it's kind of brushing off on them.
l1 curation should definitely not be advertised as an extra perk if you pay for certain services, people should want those services for other reasons.
Ah, yeah, that's kind of sus then. Isn't interesting that no matter how much we try to get rid of it we always come back to vote buying or the whole bidbot thing. As much as I enjoy the content on Hive, I don't think most any of it is valuable enough to support pay walls. I guess value is relative though.
I've asked this question before and while I personally have grown to enjoy a lot of content from authors on Hive that I'd definitely pay for to continue consuming it in the future, it's not really a necessity when we already have inflation rewards and feeless tips.
Generally it feels like inleo is copying ideas from X who are generally moving in the wrong direction. For instance removing basic functions people have been able to do on Hive in forever unless they buy subscriptions/premium. Now I read that X won't share adrevenue with people unless they have at least 500 premium followers, it's literally all just about getting more money and it feels like leo's following that trail at the cost of layer 1.
Hope to be proven wrong, though.
Encrypted content shouldn't be stored on chain and thus shouldn't receive l1 curation IMO, imagine looking at trending/your feed and seeing a post/comment in gibberish getting hive rewards. Just doesn't make sense. (I don't even know if that's what they're aiming towards but it seemed that way reading a few posts regarding it)
@threespeak however offering encrypted images/videos is a different thing cause they can't be stored on-chain, but will be interesting to see how that evolves and if they'll want to reward paywalled content with layer 1 as well.
Definitely some good points there. I definitely can't fault them for looking into a business model that is more or less working for someone else but I also won't be surprised to see it fail either. I think all of these things should also be taken into account when it comes to DHF funding. Sadly though people don't seem to care. Personally, I won't be putting my content behind a paywall. I hope the majority of the people I regularly follow feel the same way.
"not guaranteeing an upvote"
wink wink knudge knudge
Are you referring to tokens like SORT and BRO? Where you buy the tokens and they either give you an upvote or pay you a dividend in tokens.
BRO has been around for ages. Surely these types of tokens evolved precisely because bid bots died on Hive. (That kind of business moved to layer 2 instead of Steem, and their value is they trap Hive on hive-engine).
First time I'm hearing of SORT but BRO has generally a good reputation and I hope it's not just upvotes based on who holds it/who sends them bro tokens in exchange for a vote.
In general starting projects that rely on layer 1 curation but gamified in a way to make detection of direct vote selling harder should really not be encouraged. Many go to these projects because they want the APR but if both the author and project profit off of it, you gotta wonder who's losing out on it which generally is regular curation/rest of the stakeholders not participating in this.
Just last week I received a lot of annoying bots and when I saw, I realized that it is a circle of votes. I haven't had time to investigate it in detail though.
It's annoying that they use your post for farming and neither comment nor vote for you.
ugh it's one thing to farm those useless tokens but another to get hive votes for that...
I would like to diversify my blog from Splinterlands focused to Fitness and Photography subjects. Is Actifit a legitimate DAP? I don't see them doing any of the shady things you mentioned here. What are the best resources for blogging for the above subjects?
Haven't heard of any shadiness there, they are also incubed in ocd which according to some people seems like it has encouraged better posts being created in their community/through their dapp.
For photo there's quite a few communities too and most aren't tokenized.
Thank you. I will start with Actifit and will add photography in the future, takes time to learn things to produce higher quality content.
seems like you were already welcomed by the actifit team! nice to see!
and thanks for the witness vote :)
Whenever reward is involved it attracts some who do enjoy pushing button too far, tried those bots in early years and really did not enjoy the experience.
As a person we should try be real at all times, those who wish to gamble find a casino, just my impression.
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I completely agree to your thoughts, however, unrelated to all this, I think, we need a better way to incentivize people, without having them to write big posts. Like playing a game, or even a lucky draw every day to randomly choose few, to take this to masses. Hopefully all the games being developed will take us in that direction, but Spinerlands did no good even after being so popular. So we need to think, how we can have a good use case to attract the mass.
Hey @acidyo, this is the type of post that really proves to me it would be so helpful if someone could set up a weekly type of Discord hangout where us Hivians could meet up and discuss all things related to Hive and the wider crypto scene. We are in desperate need of a show or hangout like this.
As you know I am new here but have been in the crypto space for seven years now, with Steemit being my gateway into crypto. Back then there was an abundance of thriving Discord servers where you could drop in and just listen all evening to people chatting and asking questions about crypto.
We also had the awesome PAL network back then with a very lively Discord presence. This is sadly missed and no it's not coming back despite me trying my best to get Cork back on it again!
We need someone more senior and established in this community to step forward and set up something regular on Discord. We need a live chat informal hangout to bring us together and discuss all things Hive.
I did suggest something a little while back but you never responded. I know you must be very busy especially with all you do on here but can I ask you what your thoughts are on this idea? And if you can't help me set this up, because I am more than happy to play my part in making this idea a reality, could you direct me to someone who might have the time and inclination to re-establish a regular Discord hangout for Hivians to chat purely Hive and crypto?
How would Discord be better/different than having the discussion here in the comments and on other posts that explore these ideas? I would be reluctant to encourage more discussion on Discord - not everyone is involved with Discord, or wants to be. Here it's on the chain, anyone can find it.
There are so many advantages to real time chat over on chain discussions, speed being one of the key benefits. Conversations are more fluid in real time and less is left to interpretation.
Of course blog posts are very important and play a crucial role in the discussion, but they can be complimented by live chats on Discord. Discussions can easily start on chain and then continue in Discord.
I have now published a post proposing a new weekly hangout to discuss all things related to crypto and Hive. We really need a show like it.
You can have real-time chat (alongside live broadcast) using an InLeo threadcast.
What do you think of this option?
Personally i din't use Discord on principle due to it's centralised nature & censoring.
i don't really use threads atm. due to a bug when using a non-google keyboard on Android, but i hope this is fixed soon and would use it then. @tsunsica
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Facts have been said here. It's left for you to pick the point.
I don't think it's entirely bad. We need to change how it's is done. Have more options to customize how your vote is automated. If I had more HP I would be taking advantage of it to grow my account. As my account grows I invest in more projects. I don't post a lot if at all because of mental health. Having these services are beneficial for people who don't have much of a following because of not enough engagement. It's nice to know that I have a guaranteed vote of a certain value when I do post. If we force engagement we lose the quiet ones that want to read but not talk.
For example there was a streaming platform I was a mod on. They had a chest that gave out rewards for watching a stream. One group abused this because they were in a poor country. As they tried to combat the abuse they slowly destroyed what made the platform great. As a result everyone made less because there wasn't as much going around. Everyone lost because the platform decided to change who was responsible for filing the chest. As a result it changed who was getting abused. The amount of times I had to mute/ban because of that change was ridiculous. It created a very toxic environment because the abusers never left, they just changed their tactics.
We shouldn't take away this feature because people are abusing. Because I think we will lose a group of people that aren't abusing it, that brings benefit to the platform. We should be focusing on making the abuse have less impact over stopping it. Since they will just find something else to exploit.
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Not entirely sure what part exactly you're pointing it, I'm guessing automated voting? That's been generally fine, although there was a service that would quite literally pair you up with others just to exchange votes and that's not good. A lot of people hopped on it and later proved to be here for the wrong reasons.
We're all here for rewards and stake, we can't deny that. There's however a difference to how you grow your account and post rewards shouldn't constantly be the same and from the same voters else there's very little point to curaiton to begin with. Everyone could just make a post as a placeholder to distribute inflation with one another while excluding newcomers and those putting in the effort to want some rewards for their time and contributions regardless of their stake and past earnings.
Nothing should be a guarantee is my point, similar to how our posts are earning a fraction of HBD as they did at the top of the market, you shouldn't constantly earn the same amount of HP regardless of what you post. Autovoting is okay in moderation and we definitely need more encouragement for manual voters as that also takes time and effort to make trending and distribution of inflation wider and to more users compared to autovoting without the occasional updates on who's on the receiving end of them.
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The topic of curation is complicated, friend, there are many options when casting a vote. Yes, for someone like us, it is difficult. I don't want to imagine what it must be like for a curator to choose the most appropriate ones to be worthy of a vote in favor.
a complicated topic about curation and as you say the important thing is to decentralize so how to help more potential new users to enter #Hive by rewarding their publications
Because of the encrypted content I have an idea on who this is. I find the whole thing interesting. Is it possible for it to be a mutually beneficial setup? Do those people that pay for the subscription get enough in return for what they paid for? If there are a lot of people that subscribe, I don't think the group's voting mana can handle all of them, and some might get less back.
I wasn't really a fan of the premium services, but I think the encrypted option can be good for decentralization purposes. I am on the fence on the curation part since on one side they are still on the blockchain and people can vote on whichever one they like, but on the other, I think 'buying' votes is frowned upon.
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