I have spent some trolling around the some deeper posts across LEO and HIVE and am starting to question if auto votes, or the Fan Base option from Hive.Vote is causing more harm than good for the platform.
I understand the appeal of using the fan base option or other auto voting features. It lets you automatically vote on the creators you want to support even if you don't happen to see their posts. There are plenty of options, one post a day, one post a day, 2 posts a week, any custom combo you can think of. The appeal is easy VP management, supporting people even you are not around for a week or two.
Proof of "Auto Brain"
While it auto votes to posts may not be a problem if the posts is good, what happens when the post is not the same quality that is typically posted? What if they post a quick update - or just a short post that day about a quick thought or idea? Do we really think that if you read that post - people would feel that the post is worthy of a full upvote for 2-4-10 HIVE/LEO/etc?
I think these high value - low effort posts create a optics issue, especially as new users are on boarded. These posts are seen by new creators, and as they look at the content, and the correlating votes I think it creates bad feelings and a push towards producing more content at the expense of quality. Authors know they are picking up auto votes, why not post every day, its free money.
Auto votes break down when posts switch topics or formats. Could be a short form port, micro blog, etc that is not in the same traditional post and the auto votes don't have the logic to avoid these posts and only target the traditional high value content. That is what "we" are supposed to do. We are the brain that places value where it belongs not code.
Can we continue to claim we use proof of combination of POS, that support content creators that provide the most value, when a large portion of votes are actually placed by automation, and the posts may,or may not be quality.
Negative Impacts
This can create a lot of negative feelings of jealousy. While jealousy won't help new creators, than can certainly push them away from the platform. Seeing short posts get 20x the attention your post does, with no comments will make you question why you keep yelling into the wind.
I don't see this as often on LEO as I do HIVE or other tokens and while we are a focused community with high standards, all communities are influenced by the total HIVE eco system. People cross tokens, topics and communities, and may be used to things differently.
What to do -
Clearly auto votes are here to stay - its too easy to program, and too many people like them. I see how they can be nice, and if people only produce one quality post a day, but most don't follow that path.
Personally I will stay away from auto votes, I would rather to delegate to those that have proven to be good stewards than use auto votes that my reward content I don't think is high value, even if I think the creator is great.
The only way to fix the problem I see is making a personal choice to manually vote your state, or follow/delegate to a proven curation trail, it must be something chosen by the community - its a choice.
sincerely,
@cluelessinvestor - aka a random nobody on the internet spewing nonsense
This post NOT financial advise, it contains my personal opinion and experience and is intended for educational purposes. Perform your own research and analysis prior to making investment decisions.
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Auto voting may have the negative impacts. I completely agree but there are certain benefits of doing the same. Consider some one like me who is not regularly active on this platform but is still making some tokens. In such case there is no point in keeping it idle. Then i either sale it or power it up and delegate the power to some project. But again the whole amount can not be risked on single project, then auto voting helps me to get the income from curation as well.
True, but I typically bucket curation trails in a different bucket that the Fan Base options on Hive.Vote. Fanbase votes anything the users posts with in the frequency parameters, where curation trails, someone is typically picking what posts to vote based on their interpretation of quality. If I stepped away I would either delegate to something like Leo.vote, or follow a curation trail at 100% and let them manage my VP while I was away.
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I have written about the subject of auto-voting bots (and how to improve Hive by adjusting the incentives to auto-vote) here and here.
However, to the best of my understanding, the upcoming hardfork (HF25) will change the curation incentives such that auto-voting will likely be redirected in a way that will actually be more beneficial than harmful (imho).
I discussed my understanding of the HF25 implications here
You wrote some excellent articles there. I guess my rambling point was less about the timing of the vote, or the analysis of the article, but more about the systems I see that are more basic. User generates post, apply vote. The systems I saw were more simplistic and voted any post the user posted.
My issue was that often a lot of the content they create is excellent and worthy of an upvote, but many people make shorter posts, and this logic still applies a big vote to it. To me it was just bad optics to see so users getting several large upvotes on every post, some were great quality, others were much less so but all received the same size vote from the "curator".
Hopefully we move towards more manual curation after HF25
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Yes, that is the 'fanbase' feature in hive.vote (and other bots that I presume do the same thing). There is also a 'curation trails' feature in hive.vote. A curation trail simply follows some other account's voting pattern. As long as the curation trail accounts you subscribe to are manually curating, then your auto-voting does not distort the manual curation process (but actually amplifies it). This effect is also done indirectly via delegation pools, where you delegate your voting power to a curation account, then that account shares back with you a portion of the curation rewards earned by the account.
My main concern has been with auto-voting bots trying to snipe the non-linear rewards associated with presumably good posts. In the process of doing that, they ultimately muddy the manual curation waters (as can the 'fanbase' bots you mentioned).
Alas, with HF25 linearizing (mostly) the rewards curve and expanding the 'early vote' window from 5 minutes to 24 hours (or maybe 36 hours), that will remove the incentive for auto-voting bots to vote early (and will actually incentivize them to hold their votes until just before the 24hr (or 36hr) threshold ends.
It is complicated. The bot wars on the steem chain resulted in various solutions, but curation trails are also great ways for users to support content creators, and work together. Just like delegating your HP to whales or bots, the benefit is there for those who use it, but it can be abused.
I would like to believe that we value freedom of expression,
and if we find a post we don't want to vote for, we don't.
If users are powering up and staking their rewards, then they are still vesting in the platform and increasing its value. There are various bot tools that are quite handy. Like !PIZZA for example.
I think it comes down to personal responsibility. I try not to vote for users who are powering down and cashing out rewards, but even so it's their loss. Those who have done this and sold off all their rewards are just forfeiting their vesting shares. They may regret it, but I will not judge others for taking profits, we all are hopefully translating Hive into real world value one way or another
@cluelessinvestor! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @hivecoffee.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza
It is complicated, and I don't think I have any solutions to what I saw. I just noticed an author get the same vote, on one post a day from the same curator, regardless of content length or "quality". To me this just looked like someone using autovotes to other accounts to manage much of their VP.
I guess I have not looked too much into those who powerdown, while I have no intentions of that anytime soon, I guess if I ever got to a point where I was a whale, I might have to consider taking some cashflow out at some point to live a better life.
I will have to check out !PIZZA, I have no idea how that works or what it is. Thanks for the tip!
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@cluelessinvestor, sorry! You need more $PIZZA to use this command.
The minimum requirement is 20.0 PIZZA liquid, and 0.0 PIZZA staked.
More $PIZZA is available from Hive-Engine or Tribaldex
I don't know a whole lot about it but I do like to manually curate. But it's not the first time that I see a post about this so I believe it's a complex debate with many nuances.
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I too like to manually curate, and my account is small enough that if I miss some VP sitting at 100% I am not too concerned. I wish I had the perfect answer, or a more elegant solution but for now I will keep reading and voting.
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@cluelessinvestor I have seen some poor and spammy contents that are upvoted massively by a whale but you later realize that the whale did not sit down to upvote those contents,there was an auto-vote in place already so whether the content is bad or not,the auto-vote not will upvote it and that is one of the disadvantages of auto-voting...
I agree, there are some pro's that are hard to get past when you look at it. Honestly many of the automation can be setup on people that have not posted for along time either, and if they turn active again it could be a surprise for both creator and curator.
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