Greetings Fine Felines and Hoomans of Hivelandia!
As you may know, lately I have been on a bit of a quest to fine tune my approach to participating more actively in the community to help build my account... and one of the most important things — for me — is to try to increase engagement and participation.
This IS, after all, "social" media... right?
Encouraging Comments and Engagement
Which gets me to commenting on other people's content. Which, in turn, brought up a memory from the "early days" here... namely that it could be quite a good strategy to actively engage with other people's content, because many users would give nice upvotes to meaningful and appropriate comments.
Which, of course, does encourage engagement. People like a reward for their efforts. The "gamification of social media" and all that good stuff...
Somewhere along the way, that practice seemed to get severely curtailed... in part because of a rule that any post/comment with a payout balance of 0.02 or below would be considered "dust," and would revert to the rewards pool.
Dust in the wind...
I won't get into the why of this rule... a bit of poking around will explain it.
Why did that make a difference? Well, because the vast majority of content creators — particularly when the price of Hive was low — did not hold significant enough HivePower to upvote a comment above the "dust threshold."
Serious kick in the rear for engagement! WHY would I bother to upvote even a good comment if I already know my little vote of encouragement wouldn't actually count?
Even now — after 5 years here — my 100% upvote is still just slightly below 0.06... so there's not a whole lot of bandwidth there to encourage engagement. Hence current drive to increase the voting power of this account... which I can only afford to do through publishing and participation.
For a while, I subscribed to the @dustsweeper service, which was a way of "salvaging" the rewards from smaller upvotes, predominantly on comments. The idea was that you paid Dustsweeper an equivalent amount to make sure your outstanding rewards below 0.02 were rounded up to at least 0.025, so you would not lose fractional rewards.
It was a *reasonable — albeit imperfect — solution to the issue of having small votes be worthwhile.
Which brings me around to the title of this post, and to my ongoing quest to better understand the mechanics of how things work here. You might think that "I should know," after 5 years here! Well, not everyone is technically inclined, in this community!
Do we Still Have a "Dust Threshold" on Hive?
Or was it one of the things that went away with HF26? I honestly don't remember... and it seemed like most of the talk was about Resource Credits.
Just to be on the safe side, I have been upvoting worthy comments to 0.03, just to be safe. But, of course, it's limited how much I can afford to do that!
Ah, so much to learn and remember... even after all this time!
As always, thanks for visiting! If anybody know about the current status of the "dust threshold," please do leave me a comment!
=^..^=
Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communties!
If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?
These are some of the more active Cat Communities — why not join them ALL? Remember, you can also "cross-post" your cat posts to them!
HiveCats by @curatorcat is a central "gathering place" for cat content on Hive; promoting the use of the #hivecats tag for feline content!
Cat Snaps by @manorvillemike is a place to post pictures of your cats when you don't have a whole lot to say beyond just sharing your cute photos!
Caturday Community by @saboin is a community where we get to celebrate posts relating to Saturday — aka "Caturday" — our own special day!
Cat Photos by @andrarchy is a "mixed use" cat content community; posts can be just photos or longer, as long as the subject is CATS! It has a lot of subscribers but is not very active.
Cats by @captainklaus (and Sissi!) is another "general" cat content community; it's there, but not very active.
Last, but certainly not least, a special shoutout to the Hive Pets Community which has become quite active and typically has quite a bit of cat content!
There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!
226/545 2023.03.28
Based on my reading, the dust threshold went away with HF26. Here's a quote from The Evolution of Hive: Hardfork 26 by @hiveio. It's stated better somewhere else, but I can't find that post!
With the introduction of Hard Fork 26, dust votes were eliminated; however, the minimum payout threshold of $0.02 remains in effect. This minimum payout threshold is the only significant value for Dustsweeper.
Ah, good to know!
Thanks for that @cliffagreen, I was somewhat under the impression that was the case, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.
=^..^=
AFAIK, there is still a dust threshold, but I'm not always up-to-date on the tweaks of the hardforks. I still subscribe to dustsweeper, and upvote comments. ;) On this account, my account is small, but on main (@phoenixwren) I think even my 25% vote is above the dust threshold, so it mostly covers incoming dust more than outgoing there (but probably both on this account).
Thanks! What made me ask in the first place was noticing that even though I have a dustsweeper subscription, I hardly ever see any usage, so I wondered if it had just become obsolete.
=^..^=
I do see notifications on occasion, so it's still working!
That’s a good question. I remember the dust sweeper service but had forgotten all about it. And despite hearing about the changes that made these small votes worthless dust, I never really understood the mechanics behind the action or the impact it had.
Now I need to go look at the comment votes I’ve made and see what their value is. Thanks for the reminder.
I believe the original rationale was that the witnesses wanted to prevent "unnecessary bloat" of the blockchain by having millions of insignificantly small transactions. But that's sort of moot, really, because there are already millions of tiny votes that DO count, when they are added to a post/comment that's already above $0.02. And those still represent a transaction. Just consider when a curation trail hits one of your posts and you suddenly have 100 upvotes... the vast majority of those are close to zero.
=^..^=
Very true. With little understanding of how the back end works, I find it hard to comment on the decision making process. Whatever the rationale for the decision was, and whether converting the tiny votes to rewards bloats the Blockchain or not, I don’t think the decision had much of an effect in the functioning of things around here or mass adoption either. Not that I can tell, anyway.
I have been assuming that yes there is still a 3 cent minimum for payouts. I was very happy when I got to the point that I could afford to upvote my comments.
I've only recently reached the point where I can "afford" to upvote most comments. Being able to do so feels like a pretty important part of encouraging engagement.
=^..^=