I've been following the performances of the photographic communities. Two months separate these two pieces of data. I'll do another one in December and by the middle of 2025 I'll have enough material for more objective conclusions.
However, this curiosity stands out: all of them (with the exception of one) have increased their number of subscribers, but most of them have decreased their active users, interactions and pending rewards. Curious 🙃
It's too early to draw conclusions, but it's worth noting that one of them absorbs more pending rewards than all the others. The second largest absorbs all the others.
That's why the flow of curators and content authors to these communities is natural. It's legitimate, we can't condemn attending where we are. Nor can we see those who act like this as enemies. The whales and they are doing what they want, money. That's their goal.
I respect that, but I'm not going there. If the ecosystem allows for other realities, then let's focus on creating something better. Only with transparency, justice, recognition, gratitude and decentralization can we attract new bees. Behind the bees will come whales.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
I don't really understand your comments about "the whales want money", it almost doesn't really matter what people vote on as close to no downvotes occur, so they could vote on pretty much anything and the returns in hive would stay the same, so not really sure what you think the whales are doing that enriches them in exchange for not supporting content creators.
When it comes to the communities, one of them is incubated in the OCD program and was recently handed over to a curator who is still active after the previous owner left Hive. You're correct when you say the data is still too small to draw conclusions, especially since the price of Hive has been going down these past few months which may affect the decline in active users in the other communities. You are also correct to assume that the photography community may be "absorbing" activity from other ones because of our active curator in our incubation being able to reward those posting there well. We are however just one curation project on Hive so it doesn't mean the others can't do well only based on if they're incubated in our program or not. I think there's 200 million Hive staked currently with us using 6 million of it + some autovotes on our trail, that's less than 5% effect on the rewardpool.
The reason we don't have other photo communities incubated is because we're trying to only incubate one niche community at a time to allow for others to join that aren't already incubated. The same reason we only have one Gaming community incubated.
Other factors that could result in the decrease in activity in the other communities aside from Hive price are things like the community creator not being active, it not having helpers/engagement/curators casting their votes to authors sharing content there. This is an issue with the way communities are, where the creator is the owner of that account and if they go away the community is left to people who can't control it unless they're also given some of the keys. We've had this happen a few times in the past but we didn't want to step in and create communities of our own to prevent centralization even if it meant a longer lifespan for those communities.
I'm not discounting whales, or their role in the network. He said he respected it and it is legitimate. What I think is that we shouldn't depend on them. Hence the need for more people, more flow, on the network. In my opinion.
I'm not saying you shouldn't discount all the whales, like there surely may be some that aren't helping the distribution of Hive to deserving authors but instead spend most of their voting power on a few favorites through autovotes which I'm personally not a fan of. But hive accounts come in all sizes, there may be some orca's who only look out for a few accounts when they could be helping smaller users grow as well. You also gotta remember that at prices of Hive like this the whales are the ones that are at a bigger loss than most, yet they stay here.
Thank you for this investigation. It's interesting to see all these in one table.
about the "pending rewards" - it's not some additional feature of the communities but the sum of all
ongoing rewards made by the last week publishers to the community and how they were rewarded by the whales, supporting the community hosts. like qurator peakd for the m0n0mad for example.
Don't be wrong, there is no special "pending rewards" coming from HIVE only from the whales connected to the community hosts (the chain, protection whatever) so they votes for their interests as well. You can check the trading posts of every community and to see the "supporting" whale. "appreciator" "resonator" "curatorhulk" "blocktrades" and others
Seems like curie and ocd are less involved and more "fair" but can't say what is moving them.