I get downvoted with say $80+ posts, and I don't really mind, although I always do my best.
I think we should start minding this to be honest. While the intent is to distribute the reward pool a bit more and it makes sense, it also tends to ignore the general performance of whoever received the upvotes. Some people may put in a ton of effort into a post and they get next to nothing, then on one lucky day get $70 only to have that post downvoted. But then there'll be other people that post daily and get constant whale support around $30 that end up being ignored. It's a bit of a broken system.
KE also is fundamentally broken, but because it assumes people are paying attention to begin with. There are curators of big initiatives that hold less Hive than I do with a KE that's double (there's one that has a KE of almost 32 and making $250+ per month excluding the beneficiaries and tips they receive, and almost daily sends Hive to an exchange). Yet the people that end up being targeted for being extractors tend to have significantly lower KE ratios than the people that get daily appreciator upvotes.
Take a quick glance at this other person (not part of any curation efforts) who seems to do incredibly well on here despite almost never curating others and remains in a constant power down. KE almost at 20 (current HP held is 1.7k), but the upvotes continue to flow in.
The whole KE thing also doesn't really take into consideration that people shouldn't be expected to hold the vast majority of their earnings. In the long term an aggressive stance on KE would only limit the certain types of content that ends up here. Like people on YouTube may use their earnings to fund better equipment: improved lighting, better cameras/lenses etc. In that instance, someone with a poor KE but improving their video quality setup for making videos at home is more justified than someone with a poor KE that is posting phone pictures of fancy cafes every day.
KE ratio is just a number, pretty much like reputation as we have it. It's upon everabody to take it into consideration or not when curating.
Withdrawing rewards actually create that "whale dependency" - you can see people publishing either $1, or $15 posts, and nothing in between - the latter because of a whale upvote, since the community they publish in, or their audience does not have enough stake to push them higher - and that's not really decentralized or healthy to me. We need more "middle class" dolphins and orcas to curate content the way they will.
I have no clue who's behind Appreciator, I only got upvoted by them a few times.
The whale dependency has been a problem for years at this point, but I do think it has grown increasingly worse as of late. Many communities, big and small, would simply collapse without it. In smaller communities the argument of less interest being present due to niche subjects is valid, but the bigger communities relying on them does show a problem.
OCD has a generally decent idea towards who gets upvoted and how often: two times a week is the max and there was (at least when I was contributing) a look into whether people were considered over-rewarded and held their HP or not. The dependence is still very much there though within the communities under their incubation.
Appreciator is definitely a problem because they're clearly throwing daily votes at a group of people that barely hold more than 800 HP but are making 1k Hive a month from those votes. There's definitely no regard for the posting and curation habits of the person getting those votes.
No idea what the solution is here. Tighten things up too much and people leave, don't tighten things up enough and the dependency continues/worsens.
It would help to show this middle class more posts that have low rewards.
There's certainly a problem that many communities are quite niche and a lot of posts end up going unseen in both engagement and rewards. OCD has a channel for finding such posts but it's still not enough, again we still have that reliance on whales there.
I see this more that Hive is still massively in its infancy, people have their preferences and the things we'd consider niche here just don't get the same attention as something finance/photography/travel related would. For example I am pretty much the only person on Hive posting about comics frequently. There are a few others that do it a bit less often, but it's like five of us in total spread across different communities. They get next to no engagement due to how niche it is here, and would make next to nothing both because of that and because Hive Book Club (where I post) is also an incredibly small community.
Part of my own goal with growing my HP is that I want to start being one of those people that does find and curate such people. I see a problem and want to do my part to fix it. Whether the subjects directly interest me or not.
Dolphins and Orcas should already know where to look for them ;)
It's not the fact that they don't know where to look, but you really have to look for them. Where I can find all highly rewarded posts in the hot or trending feeds.
Well, I look for them in communities I care about, since I am hardly going to curate someone praising Nescafé in the Coffee community :)
That's a way. But I think it would help if there would be a stream with long blogs, of the subjects you like, thay have just a few upvotes after a few hours.
Just make it easier to find posts that deserve more upvotes.