Well I see a few realistic options for realizing some return on my voting power:
- curating other accounts content either by my own browsing or via a curation trail.
- upvoting my own comments, with the caveat that I don't post spam comments
- selling my excess voting power via bid bots
I view 3 as quite damaging to the network and its ability to curate good content. I delegated to bid bots on Steem, but have not yet done that on Hive. I already do 1.
So what about 2? I don't see any reason why I shouldn't upvote my own intelligent posts. First, it's an incentive for me to participate on the network, and I think if you read all my content you'll see my participation is above average in terms of quality and contribution to the network.
Also I've invested in the power, and now I should be able to use it. I think it's best if I'm transparent about self-upvoting rather than hiding it via sock-puppet accounts or through bid bots. Since there's no good technical solution to prevent self-upvoting (or disguised variations of it), I think we should accept self-upvoting of quality content.
Do you see things differently?
It is a commonly held misconception that simply holding VP entitles you to a claim on a directly correlated share of the reward pool. This is simply untrue. Holding hive power only entitles you to inflation. Rewards are an entirely different beast, because of all the game theory surrounding them due to being a commons. Self-upvoting comments has been considered abuse by many, including myself, for as long as I've been on the platform(Steem, etc.). I hope you will stop on your own, but that will not stop me from disagreeing with your use of the reward pool, and expressing that disagreement with my downvote. You seem entirely reasonable, so please don't take it personally.
If you want to earn a respectable return on top of your share of the inflation, @ocdb and @curangel can provide you that along with directing the reward pool to actual blog posts.
I agree.
This is where I disagree. I think it's more valuable for me to create intelligent comments on topics I care about. And when I do this to also upvote those who interact with my comments as well as upvote my own comments. See my thoughts above, but it seems that far too few rewards go towards comments.
Since you and a few others have reached out, I will cease self-upvoting as a trial. My worry is that I will have less incentive to interact on Hive. Therefore, I'll also stop upvoting comments from users who engage intelligently with my comments. And a human brain will be removed from curation and replaced with more automated voting, with niche and peripheral content being completely overlooked by the reward pool.
I upvote users who comment on my posts but do not upvote my own save two exceptions:
While that is an intriguing argument, is it enough for me to apply a different standard than I do to everyone else who has a clear intent is to milk the reward pool for their 'just deserts'? You've stated your intent is different, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. Bear in mind that post HF 22, you have to leap past a rather large penalty for comment upvotes to be worth anything at all. While I am personally willing to take this hit in order to reward the comments of others, taking it to reward myself just seems wasteful.
We have a similar amount of hive power on the aggregate, so we are relatable in at least one way. Ask yourself this: At our level, should we seek to create value here or extract it? I believe that I stand to gain so much more long term by rewarding visible content, rather than I do some comment hidden under a post. That being said, I want to reward others for interacting with me, so I definitely see the value in incentivizing the comments of others.
You stand to gain so much more by looking at the bigger picture and somehow tapping into curation, while at the same time keeping this passion you have for interacting. Nobody can get you past your baser instincts of needing an instant reward for interacting with people but yourself. To me it seems like such a waste.
In any case, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and I am glad you are willing to try something different. I hope you can recognize the difficulty in applying different standards, attributing intent, and creating exceptions for something that is generally frowned upon.
Can you explain? I searched a bit but couldn't find a good description of how HF 22 affected comment rewards.
Is this because I benefit when Hive as a system becomes more valuable? I.e. the whitepaper argument that whales will do what's in the best long-term interest of the network rather than their own short-term self-interest?
Or because comment upvotes don't produce good curation rewards?
Or because self-upvotes on comments will be erased with downvotes?
When I look at the posts I'm supporting through curation trails, they tend to be content I don't care about. In fact, most of the posts I auto-upvote through trails offer little original content or provide something that's already available in a better format elsewhere on the internet. However, the comments and posts I manually upvote provide content that I personally care about and that are of high quality.
So I guess my bigger question is are we pushing users too much towards curation trails?
Trouble is, other may not think your comments are intelligent. Even if they are, why they should be rewarded? Option 3 do not exists on Hive thankfully. There shouldn't be any bid-bots in hive. If they exists we WILL destroy them.
Yes I do see it differently. Many have invested a lot more than you (including me). So if we all go voting our comments at 100%, that will be abuse of this common reward pool. Not to mention, it is a poor short-term vision for the project.
Sticking to option 1 is the only way to go.
I agree that self-upvoting does undermine the curation potential of the network and is a clear failure mode of the Hive incentives. As is vote selling. I fear that your downvote initiatives will ultimately fail to prevail against strong protocol incentives for self-upvoting and vote selling.
Ultimately, I think we need more intelligent protocols for rewarding content, like weighting voting power by reputation / quality rather than just vests. One thing I do as a scientist is think of mechanisms for rewarding good scholarly content. Therefore, I'm excited to see how far your can push curation in productive directions with anti-abuse initiatives.
Let me know how I can help.
Now in closing, I'm going to upvote my own post here because I think it's intelligent, original, and took time to create. I also upvoted your comment for the same reasons. I tend to upvote comments on posts (by others) at rates far greater than average on the platform. So yes, I am guilty of self-upvoting, but hopefully you can judge my contributions as part of a larger picture of positive contribution.
And I would downvote the same, for the reason that I disagree with you taking that reward from the pool. As per the white paper of this project, this is perfectly withing by rights and abilities. I appreciate the discussion, but I do not think this warrants any rewards from the pool. Since this is DPOS, and my stake is higher than your, my downvote will nullify yours. I love your passion for science. I am a scientist myself, so I am sure we will enjoy our future discussion. Thanks!
I agree with @jrcornel's comment from the discussion you two had:
I don't see why this wouldn't also apply to comments? I think the litmus for whether to remove rewards for comments should be whether the rewards clearly exceed the value of the content. And I think you ought to give broad leeway for others having a different perception of value than yourself.
Anyways, as long as you're hounding me, I'll have to stop self-upvoting, since it'd only be wasting my voting power. I just hope that doesn't diminish my interest in contributing to the Hive platform.
Or an alternative would be for me to be split up my power amongst several smaller accounts that engage in voting rings, vote selling. I worry your hard efforts will only spawn undetectable self-upvotes and rewards abuse.
Your comments are quite interesting. I must apologize that I don't know you or your work that much. I didn't get any time to do any research as someone forwarded me your details regarding self voting.
Let's make couple things clear. Your thought on jrcornel is perhaps slightly out of context. But I will address it briefly. That discussion was regarding abuse of reward pool on this blockchain which I and many others like me try to protect and prevent.
Getting back to your comment on "hounding" ... I have no intention of doing that. Seems like you are a talented individual and you are generating valuable content. So I do not see any conflict.
I am not sure where is the comment voting idea came from, but generally most people here do not vote their own comments. Normally comments are short. But there can me cases where people self-voted comments to make them visible.. even I did that on some rare cases. However, generally it is not done. Others can vote your comments.... that’s perfectly fine.
I appreciate the discussion here.
However, and as you can probably guess, I am also not keen on the self-voting of comments. Your actions were brought to my attention by this post:
https://peakd.com/enagagement/@dalz/comment-rewards-or-how-is-comment-voting-doing
As you can see, you stand out like a sore thumb and rate highly amongst those rewarded by their comments. With Hive, we have a new opportunity to promote good behaviors and I think that voting on the comments of others will in time attract people to your content, likely with votes in return.
Interesting. I hadn't seen @dalz's post.
I take a different interpretation to those numbers... the amount of comment voting on Hive is embarrassingly low. There is no different between a post and a comment besides that a comment is guaranteed to be in reply to something. In that sense, comments can create more value IMO because discussion is what engages users. For example, take my recent Reddit post that was highly upvoted and look at the number of highly-specific and contextual comments.
I think posts get higher upvotes because much of the upvotes are automated with things like Hive.vote. We should all be trying to focus on upvoting comments to create discussion rather than automated upvoting of posts. The analysis by @dalz found "a total of 64k USD rewards on posts vs 1.1k USD rewards on comments." Do you really think only 98.5% of the value in content is from posts rather than comments?
I'm one of the only users on the platform that seems to spend the majority of their voting power on comments. Yes, some of that power does go to my own comments, which I invest time into creating (and due to the lack of comment voting are rarely rewarded sufficiently by other users).
Is there a way to see the percent of my comment upvotes that go to myself versus others? If you look at that figure, you'll see I do a lot more than self upvote.
I vote up a lot of comments, especially those on my own posts, but I do not self-vote on Hive. Who am I to decide if my contributions have value? A lot of my incoming votes are automated, but I value those who actually interact and that is to be encouraged. With a higher Hive price we can give out even more votes to comments.
Our community is small and those who appear to be selfish will stand out. We need to grow and that needs a better rewards distribution. We can earn pretty well from curation, so why not prioritise that? If the community grows and the price keeps rising then we stand to benefit.