While I want to preface this post that I absolutely don't have a lot of time to deal with this, I feel as though a lot of stake has concentrated into these vote selling schemes lately that someone should start getting in the way of it.
I'm of course mostly speaking as a curator in this case, and I can understand that a lot of authors are not aware of any wrong doing when delegating to such projects but they need to be made aware carefully to reconsider as it's not healthy behavior for our curation for a large amount of stake and thus inflation to end up this way.
If someone reading this has the time and potentially also some tools to properly do research on the most blatant vote selling schemes, I'd appreciate it if they'd get in touch with me to tackle this. For now I'll just be looking here and there whenever I have time and let the authors know why downvotes are occurring if I'm seeing excessive activity in this end.
I also realize not many may speak up about it or openly support as downvotes are a bit taboo and real shitty user experience for everyone involved, but if we don't at least adjust this activity downward a little we may see more and more stake concentrated towards these projects offering votes for delegations and/or layer 2 token holdings.
There's a lot of things that can be improved with curation, I'm not denying and have often spoken about excessive autovoting and authors who blatantly farm it once they get there, excessive vote trading between stakeholders and other forms of abuse. However to blatantly disregard curation in the form of openly voting users based on self-interest of the project and expect that to become the norm may very well become the downfall of curation and we'd end up like Steem's trending.
I fully expect most users participating in this to not like what they're hearing but it's no news that this form of voting is mainly based on greed from both parties involved that comes out at the cost of everyone else not participating in the scheme. People are going to play dumb, point fingers and most likely even retaliate in any way they can but that'll just reflect on them as people.
Again, this is not something I want to be doing, I hope others will back me up over time but enriching projects that have no utility or innovation and mainly cling to hive's layer 1 curation to prop up their token prices and increase curation rewards of delegations is not something we should expect hive to bear as it's only going to cause more and more hive continuing to be earned with low effort and tossed towards exchanges or useless/pointless layer two tokens.
Feel free to discuss but if I feel like you're just wasting mine and other readers time I'm not going to keep explaining it over and over.
For the projects that I've talked about this privately, I appreciate your co-operation and your promise to change things up and I hope that us together countering this bad activity will send more value your way for your projects that may bring/keep value on hive rather than what I've been mostly seeing lately.
We are actively migrating to 100% manual curation now.
👊
Good to see some major changes taking place. Selling tokens for votes is unacceptable.
Hi, I don't know much about this, but I've delegated to small projects as a token of gratitude. I don't get votes regularly. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don't. But I've been luckier than others. Maybe because I post in communities where I feel there's support. I try to post in supportive communities. But I enjoy what I do, and if I get rewarded, I'm very happy. If I don't get rewarded, I don't get discouraged; I'll keep posting because I like it.
Sometimes I think new Hive users delegate to other projects because it's very difficult to get noticed at first. But my mom tells me you have to be consistent, do what you love, and never stop trying. That's what I think.
You're mom is very right, nothing comes for free in life and you shouldn't settle just for getting your own votes back through a delegation and vote selling service when you can get curated in other ways by being active and participate in many aspects of hive such as how you have.
Your comment is upvoted by @topcomment
Info - Support - Discord
😘
I think something must be done, so you are doing right... I mean at a point people would just say "hey others are getting more by delegating to the project and getting auto votes, why shouldn't I too?" and then everyone delegates to that projects and it becomes all automated, automated posts with autovotes from same projects and hive dumps
Greetings friends, I'm reading and I will give my opinion, I'm new to Hive, it has been difficult for me to start in Hive, it is true that I receive rewards, I came to Hive to have a living and because I like video games and in Hive Hivegaming they value my content, but when I try to explore other communities it is difficult for me because my content goes unnoticed and it is very difficult to get voted on. And I have realized what you say that you often have to delegate to other big accounts to get you voted on and I thought that was good and that Hive was handled that way, I thought it was normal, that discouraged me a lot but even if they don't vote for me I continue to upload content, however in Hivegaming I feel very valued and they don't ask you to delegate, they just support you for doing what I love the most, which is playing. In another community where I feel very supported is in @actifit and in holozing. I'll continue exploring communities where my content is valued. I know I'm still learning and am motivated to improve every day. And maybe I'll eventually have my own gaming community and support players like hivegaming does.
Yes, you shouldn't only get rewarded because you're offering the project a delegation or liquid hive/tokens. Glad to hear you're doing well in some communities but also keep in mind that author rewards aren't meant to be guaranteed to anyone all the time. It's not the end of the world if some times you don't earn rewards because quite frankly 99.99% of us posting on hive wouldn't earn anything anywhere else. Your long term earnings are what matter, being consistent and posting no matter if there's votes or not will eventually get you votes, maybe even autovotes, etc.
Greetings friend, yes, that's clear, the rewards are not guaranteed, I've been playing for years since I was a child, now I'm 18 years old and I discovered that by playing I could receive rewards and I'm uploading content on Hive partly because of that, in all these years I've never received a penny for playing and I'm grateful to Hive for the rewards I've obtained, I've already bought some things, it's gone well for me because there are communities that truly value the content, not always, because the votes are not guaranteed but I'm constant and I think that's the important thing in Hive, I'm also saving and investing in my voting power (grain by grain) because later I want to have enough hp to vote for game content and encourage those who are just starting. I know I have a lot to learn. I'm just starting. Thanks
Threw you a follow, it's sad that the things you say not many follow these days, everyone just wants free/easy rewards for doing close to worthless activity.
looking forward to see some gaming content in my feed from you!
Thank you so much for following me; it's an honor. Of course, there will be many game videos to come, and every day I'm working on my project, which I hope to achieve at some point. I wish you luck with your project. We'll both achieve it. Thank you.
I'm not sure which curation services are doing this, but I am not really a fan of massive curation accounts. I know people want to either get paid for delegating or to follow a big trail, but getting votes for delegating is effectively paying for them.
My voting is mostly manual with a couple of small trails that I don't get paid for. I delegate to a few projects, but am not bothered about what I get from those. I am fortunate to get decent votes anyway, but that is based on years of activity and engagement.
Part of me wishes I knew what you know but the other part reminds me of how much more I should be involved and invested to know that. Can you name names or point me and the smaller fish in the right direction? I have always tried to support the groups who welcome and support new and growing users. That, connect with and support the growers, and contribute in my small way to the next wave of dolphins who become the strongest evangelists off chain.
I thought vote selling went away with the bid-bots but I guess that is not the case.
There's many smaller curation projects that launch but they don't get as much support I reckon. Take @topcomment for instance, you delegate, get return on the delegation, they take a fee for their work and they focus solely on curating great comments. You as a delegator are fine with it because that's what they said they'd do and as long as they keep their promise of sending you part of the curation rewards and curating great comments it's a win-win for hive.
The bad ones are those who instead of doing what they sought out to do, would focus their curation mainly on those delegating. Now you're both getting majority of your delegation from curation rewards back but on top of it votes that don't reflect on how great your comments are compared to anyone else, they only vote you because you're giving them that delegation and in turn they're getting a fee. They also don't spend much time curating so the fee they're getting is close to "free" hive for them since they rely on the greed of the delegators to both get curation rewards and an upvote, i.e. double-dipping the rewards pool.
Now anyone who isn't delegating to this project is earning less compared to them and since we have a shared reward pool that obviously means there's winners and losers. In this case the winners aren't those putting in effort into curating what they're focus is, in this case comments and sharing the rewards with delegators while taking a fee for their work, the winners are those who have bots set up to autovote comments from delegators without much oversight. That's basically what's happening but with posts and through layer 2 tokens rather than delegations in some cases or direct hive bids for votes.
Hive should have a vote to periodically reset all the automatic votes, witness votes, proposal votes, delegations etc. Maybe do it every 13, 26 or 52 weeks. There is a lot of things going here that goes against the spirit of proof of brain or your goal of active curation. There are inactive witnesses with millions of votes which is a verifiable mockery of the system.
We would need a hard fork, but it would end many of the unfair distribution rewards in hive. The biggest votes in the blockchain are from an account who owner lost the keys and other accounts had the privilege of having a delegation from this account.
That's nutty, they should absolutely do a periodic purge. Would make the chain more attractive to new and active members.
I agree… it is a good idea for a next big change on hive…
We dont have a reward distribution monitoring dashboard in real time or such a tool that is exclusively for this and available and accessible to all. Accountability always becomes free-flowing from the end of transparency. I am not saying it is not transparent; after all, it's blockchain, but we also need some 2nd layer 3rd third-layer tools that can consolidate and portray the real-time distribution intelligible to the common man. When it becomes visible to all, that will imply a proactive disclosure, and any bad habits and similar tendencies will take a backseat, and they may need further re-calibration.
The real question is how self-interest(reward) is qualified by the larger community interest. How the balance between big investment and fair distribution. In any case, the philosophy of distribution needs tweaking every 3 months or 6 months, not on the code level, but on the distribution level.
Thank you.
I think you're right about this. These kind of community organized responses are the only way we can stay true to our platform mission here. I think that delegating HP to curators who we believe in and want to support must absolutely remain, but any "Selling" of upvotes is reminiscent of all the upvote bots of the pre-2020 days...
I guess you have already talked to the owners of such projects as these are in my eyes the bigger problems. Let these projects rethink their curation / L2 token usability rather than punish small shrimps who utilize the services. Ofcourse you have mentioned excessive abuse rather than small fishes but I guess you get my point.
The owners of the projects are the ones who we need to convince that they are stimulating 'bad behavior' in the first place.
Atleast that's my 2 cents, open to discuss!
I agree fully, but as I said they have no reason to listen if it's going to affect their downline, many may use authors as a shield to hide behind to keep their selling active. Last thing I wanna do is downvote random users who don't know any better or these projects are just part of their rewards.
As you can see the comment by @brofund in here, that's what I hope people will opt for instead.
I autovote since I don't have much time to sift through posts anymore. Though it isn't 100% autovote, any votes I give on snaps are manual because I have the time to go through short form content and vote for ones that I find interesting. I still vote for long from content here and there as well.
I don't think my autovotes are going towards people who abuse my votes though, at least from what I've seen.
Autovotes are kind of a different discussion, as I said they also have their own faults and some use them well who remain active and update them as need be.
The thing here to put it into a comparison is, imagine someone sent you 0.1 hive every day so you'd vote his post for 0.24 hive (half goes back to you as curator). To not be too open about it, he says okay I'll just delegate you 1000 HP instead and you keep the curation rewards but make sure to give me that vote daily. To further muddy the waters he instead offers you 10k denar so you'd vote him and the only time you'd stop voting for him is if hivewatchers goes after him or he's posting something you really don't want your vote on.
This is what these projects are fueled by, some only look at delegations, some only at token holdings, some based on if you burn their token in exchange for a vote. They're not hiding it, just adding a couple steps to make it hard to spot compared to back in the day it was straight up hive with a link to the post in the memo transaction.
Authors then get guaranteed votes (similar to autovotes), the project gets increased curation rewards and other authors now notice they're missing out on author rewards because they're using their votes to autovote or manually curate others for nothing in return (except a healthy curation system) so they're forced to get involved or lose out to the other author and grow much slower than them. It's a race to the bottom where authors get increasingly less rewards since the rewards they get are mainly fueled by themselves, the project is just a proxy giving them the votes while taking the curation rewards and the fee.
These projects don't curate people not giving them something extra, instead they may give higher votes to those giving them extra if some delegating to them for other reasons aren't posting daily, etc. Thus if everyone did this all curation would mainly be based on how much stake you have or random tokens so new user experience would be shit and no one could grow stake for what they're contributing in the form of effort, quality and attention along with a lot of other bad behaviours guaranteed votes bring to authors.
Yes, I understood that part of your post and I am aware of such projects and against them of course because it is just vote bidding in disguise. Just making a point that autovotes don't necessarily need to be guaranteed votes.
People who set up autovotes can also take steps to ensure that their votes don't turn into abused guaranteed votes. Just like how these "curation projects" turn delegations into abuse. Maybe a post for another time?
Am a newbie here and these seem kinda new but am open to learn and possibly not get involved with the wrong projects
I’ve heard about downvotes and all but don’t even know the intricacies behind them
Would it be ok to at least intimate new people like us on how to thread around these issues or pinpoint the defaulters so we steer clear…or would that be extreme?
Else how do we know the no go areas?
There shouldn't be any no go areas to begin with and newbies would then not accidentally step on them. Downvotes don't occur often and most of the time have very good reasons thus newcomers are almost never affected by them so I wouldn't worry about it if I was you.
Basically don't buy votes in exchange for hive or tokens and you'll be fine, try and get them by being active like this comment and connecting with other authors or stakeholders you find interesting who might enjoy the content you produce as well.
Noted
Thanks
To the best of my knowledge, the curation groups to which I've delegated some HP don't offer shady reciprocal voting kickbacks, or at least they don't consistently upvote me as a reward for the delegations. I'd appreciate a list of who to watch for though.
Well, you might start with this list first.
OK, but kindly explain which of them are using their power to upvote delegators in a circle-jerk. This chart alone says nothing in response to my query.
You're as old as I am in this blockchain as to know very well who's who on that short list. Are you by chance implying that you can't identify at least a handful of accounts on that list worth to investigate by yourself?
I'm saying I have other things to do with my limited time. If you have evidence, make a case. Otherwise, are you any better than the BPC spam farm?
Uhm, then let me tell you this clearly & loud mate. I don't accuse anyone nor make the work easier for anyone who doesn't want to go the extra mile to find answers by themselves.
Your time is not more limited than the time of anyone else. You are the one here asking trivialities that everyone already knows the answer. So, if you wanna answers in response to your query, my recommendation is that you start visiting other servers on Discord beyond the ones you usually visit all the time. Or if that seems too complicated for you, then just simply visit Hive's trending page to find out where to start looking to find the answers you're looking for right away.
Otherwise you will have no choice but to wait until the OP answer your question and maybe clarify your doubts.
Yeah, that doesn't really make sense. I've cut way back on my blogging because I have stuff consuming my time in meatspace which is higher priority than blog drama. If it's so obvious, it should be easy to demonstrate with a few links. You care about this, apparently, so get off your high horse and present your evidence. This is a blog platform, and what I'm asking is exactly what this is for.
This is the way, some have even opened up pages where users can buy votes in the form of burning their layer 2 token or other forms of vote buying activities.
Since I'm still new to this world of hive, I'm very grateful to come across articles and reflections like these because they gradually provide me with the necessary learning to successfully grow on my path.
I've probably made many mistakes due to lack of knowledge, and I hope to undo them.
Again, thank you for these analyses, which I fully understand.
Best regards.
Little by little some of the initiatives you bring will change the culture of this community so we can do the right thing Mr Acidyo. I see some projects just vote for delegators and not good content people put some effort in. I believe for the platform to do well, as you have said, real curation should reward effort, not deals
I think we redfish all dream of creating our own curation projects, maybe precisely because we lack the means the idea shines so bright. Now there is increasing rumble on this and other fronts related to curation, the other day I saw a post about self voting through delegation to a rigged curation project. I see it clearly, we need more curation projects of the modest size, manual and small, it may actually make some difference.
As the platform grows and changes, it gets harder to be noticed. I always suggest new users and small accounts make more comments to create conversations and build relationships. It won't help you get rich quick, but it raises your profile in the community, and that usually means long-term benefits.
Well, I wouldn't say my problem is getting noticed, I know that is a process and not an event. What tickles me is seeing a lot of good content unrewarded and a lot of low effort content being rewarded.
I'm not getting on the moral side of things here nor about to question anything, just saying the obvious: creating a curation project of my own seems to be (for the time being at least) the shortest path to reward the content that I love the most.
I do see how ridiculous that sounds coming from such a tiny account as mine, but in the end I can face it as a long time goal or something like that.
I started off this way as well, no stake, only some trails and no delegations. I spent most of my days voting for posts with barely any strength behind them and leaving comments to the posts. Over time some liked what I was doing and started trailing their votes on my votes - i.e. they'd automatically vote whatever my account voted, this gave me more influence and I kept doing my thing.
Nothing wrong with starting your own curation project, although my advice would be to focus on a certain niche that interests you and you can provide some commentary and wisdom with it. Look for trailers first or if you have the know-how or can find someone willing to help, set up an account they can delegate to where you can take a fee of for the service while returning most of the hive from curaiton rewards back to delegators. Or just find someone who wants to reward the things you do and may give you a HP delegation for free.
Listing the projects that do this and don't plan to change things up and that you plan to downvote might be helpful as a warning before the downvotes start. Or is it a too sensitive of an issue for that?
No I'm all for them changing the way they do things, I just can't contact everyone and talk things through cause most obviously don't want things to change as it may affect their income.
Author A may stop delegating to them if they're not guaranteed a vote every time they post based on the delegation or token holdings they have of the project.
I'm also not starting the downvotes instantly and will give authors a warning before downvoting them as I did recently with one in a few videos - but there they're very combative as well and keep ignoring the issue at hand.
It's not something I'm going to be focusing on but someone has got to start doing something before it becomes a run down with people jumping in on the delegations because they don't wanna earn less rewards compared to those delegating and projects becoming more selective on who they vote based on if they're delegating to them or not... it's a hot mess.
I'm just here for the eventual cage match this will bring.
Hola acydo cómo estás te quería comentar sobre una comunidad de splinterlands que se dedica publicar contenido spam por favor verificar todos los post de estos links sus curadores se votan ellos mismos ganando una cantidad exorbitante de hive
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/splinterlands-social-media-challenge-su2cj4
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/splinterlands-social-media-challenge-stq8v0
Por lo que veo no aportan nada a la comunidad de hive
Dime 🙏 si estoy en lo cierto
I don't see any selfvotes on those posts?
!hiqvote
Reblog!
Repost!
React!
3Rs
Thanks for this! We hope to see More
Hola de nuevo otro curador de splinterlands que se auto cura abusa de la comunidad de hive. Dandose una exorbitante cantidad de hive
https://peakd.com/hive-146620/@libertycrypto27/my-return-to-the-champion-iii-league-in-the-modern-format-my-last-game-session-in-the-modern-format-engita-kzs
https://peakd.com/hive-146620/@libertycrypto27/my-survival-mode-daily-game-activity-and-the-importance-of-the-last-day-of-the-season-for-modern-and-wild-format-players-engita-ksx
If splinterlands wants to reward their curators with their votes that is fine, I see two votes by SPS there totaling around $12, I wouldn't consider that abuse. The curators do spend time out of their day to look for underrewarded posts and authors to reward, that shouldn't be expected to come for free.
Ácido eso no es gratis tiene que comprar sus token para ser votado en splinterlands a cambio tienes votos en su post lo dicen donde tienen que publicar hasta post por semana y los curadores hasta 3 debería limitar un post a la semana a solo uno.. por qué los post son puras cosas repetidas deberían ser más creativo
Hola está es la tercera vez que encuentro otro curador de splinterlands abusando de la comunidad de hive
Este curador abuso con tres post donde se ve que auto curo dónde su contenido desangra la comunidad de hive
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@mango-juice/splinterlands-how-to-build-or-change-a-worksite-on-land-a7q
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@mango-juice/splinterlands-how-to-start-earning-fees-from-land-liquidity-pairs-ckv
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@mango-juice/splinterlands-my-land-journey-finally-begins-ju6
Hola acydo de nuevo otro post de splinterlands que es spam
Tiene que revisar a fondos la comunidad de splinterlands donde no genera nada a hive sus post la mayoría son spam
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/splinterlands-community-engagement-challenge-the-art-of-synergy
Me da vergüenza la comunidad de splinterlands como en su propio post se auto curan al 100%
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/splinterlands-social-media-challenge-su2cj4
Where is the selfvote?
Estoy equivocado entonces
Sor can i continue post in your community.. because i want to learn some creativity art and i also want to shown my hiddent talents can i please 🙏 thanks for curation this all of guys 👦 love and support for this community ❤️
!PIZZA
$PIZZA slices delivered:
(1/10) @danzocal tipped @acidyo
Moon is coming