Sorry for the very delayed response, it's been busy, and I guess I was kinda hoping it would get better, but it's gotten even worse! Probably I also knew that saying something was exposing myself to downvotes, but it's just too ridiculous. I don't know what kind of review you had, because it is ridiculously obvious, less than 1 week comparing what gets upvoted to what gets posted is more than enough. Of course, when you've been following the tribe very closely for 4+ years, long before this curation started, it's just painful to see this every day. With 300 to 400 active daily users, the fact that except a few outliers, OCD upvotes go to maybe 30 people ("the Chosen Ones"),statistically it seems like an anomaly in itself, but when you actually read the posts, now that's just ridiculous. There are so many examples of posts getting these $10+ upvotes because of favoritism, I don't have time to list them all, and I also don't remember them all, but let's try and list a few things.
- Every day, posts way outside the guidelines of the Actifit etiquette getting the upvotes. That would be fine if it was random, but again, always the Chosen Ones. And these guidelines are quite simple: good quality pictures, 150 words...
- One user never getting upvoted suddenly getting upvoted at least once a week with very average posts (one had just one bad quality photo, along with the text like 'Too tired, I have nothing to say today', nothing else). For a few weeks I wondered what was going on. And surprise, I saw later they met with the curator in real life.
- Other users suddenly getting upvoted very regularly without any change to their posts. And a few months later, it stops, again with no change in their posts. Not quality based, the curator just took a liking to the user, and then not anymore.
- Users getting upvoted for a few pictures of the aisles of their supermarket, and for text 'We went grocery shopping'. Even if we consider that's worthy of a $10 upvote, then why is it that other users posting about the same (actually often better photos, and more text) don't get upvotes, always the same ones. English is my second language, but I do know that's the very definition of favoritism.
- Same as above with restaurants. I remember one with 2 blurry photos of the inside of a restaurant, and 2 photos of the menu, and the entire text was 'We went to this new restaurant, it was good'
- Many posts that would be frowned upon in any other community getting the OCD upvotes. Then you check the user, and you see they interact often with the curator's posts
- Some users getting the upvotes almost every posts. Usually they're users showing up once in a while only, with sometimes decent posts, not great, but for some reason, always upvoted. Often, their topics are nowhere close to Actifit, and that's okay. But in these cases, it's sure that if they were posted in a better suited community (like the foodie one), they would never get any extra upvotes.
- Users keeping their content for outside the community. That's perfectly fine of course, but they still get the OCD upvote! One of the worst instance I remember: a single photo, and the only text 'I went there, I will describe it in another post'. I am sure that other post was great, but how in the world did this Actifit one deserve an OCD upvote. That same user received many other OCD upvotes for similar undeserving Actifit posts.
- Something I find interesting: some of the Chosen Ones have been given good visibility for more than a year. At least once a week, they get a $10+ upvote, which puts them in the trending posts for the community. And yet, outside of OCD upvotes and trail, they only get a very few upvotes (literally 2 or 3 in some cases), even after all that time. That is very telling about the quality in my opinion.
- Something similar for the curation reports. When they started, they used to get 60/70 upvotes (before the OCD upvotes) and several responses (always ignored by the way but that may have changed). Now they don't even get 20 upvotes sometimes, and often very few comments. People don't care about it anymore! They just ignore it. That's a good confirmation of what I think. I know it's not self voting, but in the end, it sure looks like it, but worse, because it's with delegated HP.
- The only two responses I ever got from Actifit (coincidently the only times I tagged OCD) seemed to indicate I wanted the upvotes for myself. They like to upvote posts with only selfies, so maybe they think everybody's as self-centered. But with over 100 upvotes on average, I am quite content with my usual daily stepping posts. That being said, I find it funny that when I am lucky enough to go somewhere interesting, or do something different, my Actifit posts often get the worldmappin and/or travelfeed mentions, but they're not good enough for Actifit. Also, before this curation started, there was a somewhat weekly post with the Actifit team favorite reports. Some users and I appeared regularly in it. None of us were ever OCD upvoted since then. And please don't tell me it's because the quality improved. If anything it went down because users not in the Chosen Ones understood it was useless to try, and The Chosen Ones probably understood there was no need to make any effort, they will get an upvote anyways.
- There's one I just can't explain. Some of the Chosen Ones actually do post some great reports often. And yet, in most cases, their not-so-good ones get upvoted. It's almost like it was their turn in the Chosen Ones rotation, so they get the upvote. It happens quite often with one user in particular.
- Again I am not sure how you reviewed, but any kind of review should involve people outside the community, and even outside of Hive. I happen to know a few people using stepping app to get rewards, the so-called move2earn. They're not on Hive, or any other kind of web3 stuff, they just want to get a few bucks for all the steps they normally take. Naturally I told them about Actifit, and two of them actually took the time to check (I told them to go to https://peakd.com/c/hive-193552/created, which is what I use daily to go through all the Actifit posts). Again, they don't know about curation and stuff, so I told them to simply check the posts and possible rewards. Their response was the same and along the lines of 'Looks interesting, but the rewards are all messed up, some get $10 for no reason'. That sounded so familiar...
Anyways, it's getting way too long, and it's late. You can believe what you want, the fact of the matter remains: this curation is absolutely shameful, and very obviously almost entirely based on favoritism. There is no doubt in my mind that it has hurt the Actifit community way more than it has helped it (except the Chosen Ones of course): the active user retention has been flat or even downwards, and more Hiveans outside the community say we're just spam on the blockchain. By the way, I think that's pretty much the opposite of what OCD tries to do, isn't it? My stake isn't high enough to do something about it unfortunately, and since it seems it is condoned by OCD, I don't expect things to change. So I guess I'll just have to do like many others and ignore it.
A lot I could say about this but without a direction at the authors or posts being curated in what you say is favoritism with content that shouldn't be curated by us compared to others posting in the community would be a good first step to take a look at things rather than beat around the bush and keep talking about everything that's wrong without helping us where to look or what the exact examples are. People can easily create alt accounts as well in case they want to remain anonymous when doing so in fear of getting in someone's "bad list". We'd love to fix what we can but it is difficult to remove the "human" from curation completely, there'll always be some favoritism and friend voting, it's difficult to completely remove that from the curation game but since we reward curators extra to do all these things we'd really want to strive towards the curation being focused on the content, user social activity and engagement towards their posts as those are what's valuable here.
I'm pretty sure people delegating to OCD expect OCD to keep an eye on their curators, not some random users from one of the communities being curated, but okay. I forget most of the times, but a few weeks ago, I started a list anyways. I am running out of space quickly, many posts make the list. Today was a perfect example:
https://peakd.com/hive-193552/@ducecrypto/actifit-ducecrypto-20250125t043403142z https://peakd.com/hive-193552/@drstealth/actifit-drstealth-20250125t065519055z https://peakd.com/hive-193552/@asia-pl/actifit-asia-pl-20250125t155529594z https://peakd.com/hive-193552/@suezoe/actifit-suezoe-20250125t170507798z https://peakd.com/hive-193552/@souta-sw/actifit-souta-sw-20250125t202520725z
No time for more, but I'll try and prepare something later.