Hive is a social network. The society of which we are part rewards content creation according to the subjective valuation of members of that society. To maximize the strength and value of that society, which underlies the value of our Hive tokens, we should strive to find and upvote such content as we prefer, per our biases. IRL we all know people that take, take, take, and give as little as possible. Those people tout their own accomplishments and diminish those of others to make their own seem even greater in comparison. We call those people narcissists, and they devalue our society parasitically. Self-voting is comparable to that RL behaviour, taking the maximum possible from the rewards pool, puffing up their reputation as much as they can, likely pandering to anyone with stake, and so forth.
Those users and actions decrease the strength and value of the society of Hive users IMHO, and this reduces the value of Hive tokens. I have long advocated against curation rewards because these rewards similarly reward pecuniary interest instead of subjective valuation of content, replacing 'good' (however our bias leads us to call content 'good') content with emunerative voting strategies. At it's worst, this gave us a trending page consisting of nothing but votebotted posts. I haven't looked at trending for a long time. Some years IIRC, because I found no posts of interest there, but only posts that were profitable for some reason or another related to curation rewards. I have advocated instead for savings accounts that enabled folks seeking ROI to attain it thereby, rather than through gaming curation and befouling content valuation.
I was greatly encouraged when HBD savings accounts with 20% interest eventuated, but curation rewards remained available, and folks haven't stopped perverting curation based on financial interest as a result. Still, I think HBD savings helped to reduce curation rewards farming, and probably improved trending marginally, likely less so now that the interest rate dropped to 15%. HBD savings compete with staked Hive and curation to create ROI, and those interested more in money than society are more likely to save HBD for higher rates of interest, which reduces their staked Hive and their impact on governance. I reckon that improves the quality of governance by increasing the weight of non-pecuniary interests on votes for witnesses. Most of the most valuable things in society are far more valuable than mere money, and Hive being a pure plutocracy hugely devalues those far more valuable features of society by making money the only way to vote, distorting society by grossly overvaluing the weight of stake on governance.
Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his momma for a dollar. Folks like Don King rule plutocracies, and most people value their mothers vastly more than mere money. It is most people that make societies valuable, not Don Kings.
Trending is our marketing department. If we want Hive tokens to increase in value, because Hive society is growing, we should tend that garden assiduously. At least we don't have kids pimping their mothers OF's pages on Hive trending, like there are on X. I'm sure we can do better than we are, however, and the less self-voting there is the better we will do.
Thanks!
Yes I think curation has a long way to go, but I am glad to hear others do take it seriously. I am just glad bid bots are no longer a thing, so hopefully one day trending can be more organic. I think we are making progress though.
We are making progress, but losing >1m users since 2017 is a hard way to do it.
I wish that were true, but at least one is still openly in operation on Hive today. Not mentioning it because I'm not advertising for it, but a while back I tangled with it for a bit because they blacklisted someone I follow that spoke up.
Never was a million individuals active and engaged on the social network side of things.
That doesn't have anything to do with what I said, which is that since 2017 >1m users have been driven from the platform.
"Driven."
Maybe there's a chance I just don't remember that part.
Excessive taxation always destroys viable enterprise.
With all due respect, if there's a group of 1 million people, one individual cannot speak for all of them. It's fair there are things here you don't agree with. But your view isn't necessarily their reality. This is something I too try to keep in mind. When it comes to people deciding to go their own way, there are countless reasons. That's a fact of life.
That practice of voting early in order to snipe curation rewards is no longer a thing.
Yes, but there are other reasons to upvote posts to farm curation rewards. Being quick on the draw isn't the only stratagem.
First 24 hours after publishing, all votes yield the same outcome. No need to be quick. Some of those autovotes still roll in quick simply because those individuals haven't made adjustments for several years in some cases.
Some vote early and on everything. They do that mainly to gain a follow from naive members thinking those people are actually supporting them.
People will be rewarded no matter what they vote for or why. Good reason or bad = same result.
Which scenarios are looking at? The basic blind voting that's been creating a disaster for the past eight years?
There are a variety of ways to game network effects, pandering, and etc. I prefer not to detail here because those that know, already know, and those that don't include some that would if they did, in order to farm curation rewards. I generally agree that curation has been a disaster for the past eight years, and point to financialization of curation as a large reason for that trainwreck. @edicted suggested savings accounts as a means of enabling investors to attain to ROI without deranging curation some years ago, perhaps before Hive even began, and when HBD savings with interest of 20% advented I was greatly encouraged things would improve.
I don't have the chops to investigate how much the HBD savings accounts changed the situation, but I assume it has done something beneficial for curation by enabling an alternative way to benefit the platform from stake without requiring investors to game curation to attain ROI. Ideally folks would upvote content per their biases and promote their principles and subjective preferences for creators and posts that would appear in trending, rather than seeking to maximize ROI with curation rewards, which would make trending a better reflection of Hive society to folks searching for content from outside the platform.
Our content is our marketing, after all. This is one of the reasons that Splinterlands has been such a relative success for Hive. However, while gaming is a massive draw, social networking has become the largest global market financial sector IRL in ~10 years, if you consider PC hardware and phones part of it (which I do). Hive has potential to surf that tsunami of financial growth, if we could only fine tune the code a bit to enable investors to attain to good returns without deranging curation, and end the free for all of taxation by any and all of any content or creator on a whim, by restricting DV's to spam, scams, and plagiarism.
Eventually someone will get it right. Steem was the first on that scene back in 2016, but the weakness of pure plutocracy caused it to fail and impelled the creation of Hive back in 2020, and now there are numerous competitors in the market. I want it to be Hive that gets it right first.
Ha yeah this was MANY years ago at this point.
I know this because it was before AMM liquidity pools existed.
Meaning around 2019 my plan was to get rid of raw 15% yield to HP stakers and allocate that to the savings account. Once AMM rolled around it became obvious that we could allocate inflation to LPs to create exponential liquidity between HIVE/HBD on the internal market... but politics (and maybe technical limitations/risks) prevents this from happening. It still remains a good idea. Not having AMM is embarrassing... but at least HE has it even if people don't use it correctly.
Good ideas like that are why I follow better minds, and once I grasp a sound principle I stick to it like a tick on a dog.
From this response, I take it you simply don't like curation rewards. I think if more stakeholders wanted to be responsible and wanted to see progress, there wouldn't be such a mess.
They're more about mining tokens though and building their stake. Many seem fully against attracting consumers, which is the paying audience this content needs. They prefer to pretend to be consumers, leading content creators on, in order to build their stake and status within the tiny community designed to never grow.
With consumers engaging organically, consumer rewards would be a boost to this economy. Instead we stick to common practices stemming from 2016 and basically contribute to this project becoming obsolete. Consumer rewards place us ahead of the curve. People don't want to be curators. They just want to pay for the things they like and being rewarded is a perk that helps attract them. That's the only way you can move a large established market from one place to another.
The current state of content alone won't do it. Need self starters reaching outside for support like you see anywhere else.
I saw the numbers. There's only a couple thousand potential paying consumers here. That can't support an entire social network that pays contributors. A tiny market, so people need to reach outside and create their own in order to succeed here on their own and ignore all the local shenanigans.
Without any appeal, paying consumers will simply stick to "web2" offerings and give them their money. That's life. No way around it.
Trying to convert people into investors when they are consumers is sure to fail. And crypto already has plenty of options for investors so making more saturates the market which is one reason Hive isn't appealing to crypto investors. There's simply enough options out there.
Whereas consumers outnumber crypto investors and are not aware of this option to grow their money by supporting content rather than throwing their money away. In other words, we're missing the boat. Consumers are spending wild amounts of money on content and that market is expected to grow, all while they don't trust crypto in general and think most "investments" are scams. In order to bring the masses, one needs to offer something they're already familiar with, don't have, and want.
Way to ignore what I said about them. You can make any assumptions you want, but you ignore the statements I have made that form a rational basis for eliminating them to do so.
I almost unreservedly agree with this statement, only replacing the word 'many' with 'the oligarchy on Hive that control governance', and also detail reasons - that the hostile takeover of Steem demonstrates - why the stakeholders that control governance of Hive must suppress growth to maintain their control of governance.
Best estimates are that >1m have been driven from the platform by unrestricted taxation since 2017. That's the reason there's only a few thousand consumers here, and it was done on purpose because a growing platform offers an attractive target for hostile takeovers.
That's just like, your opinion, man. I pretty strongly disagree, and can voluminously cite reasons consumers of social media are strongly incentivized to support the platforms they use, even without the financial incentive Hive potentially avails bloggers.
Hive enables them to spend the rewards pool, rather than their own personal funds, on supporting content. The market is growing. In ~10 years social media has become the single largest sector of global financial markets. Consumers are right to not trust crypto, and to suspect investments are often scams, as I'm sure you'll agree.
This is exactly what Hive offers them. They generally know that the Big Tech companies make scads of money off their content, their posts about pot roast and selfies with grandma, and Hive offers them a chunk of that money, which they do want. It's taken a lot of effort and blather to prevent them from coming here to blog, which is what HW and spaminator are paid ~$350/day to do.
For this part:
You blame "governance" but realistically, everyone new and old participates in common practices which provably lead to stagnation. Voluntarily.
I say "designed to never grow" because after this many years, it's difficult for me to accept how a group of people would enjoy making the same mistakes constantly that don't lead to growth, so it must be intentional. They design the outcome. Change is also an option.
Also, we don't share the same views, but I'd prefer not to go back and forth. We won't accomplish much doing that.