The whitepaper is dead; let it die.
The thing that the Swarm likes to call curation is not really curation, or at least it is artificial in nature. This is something I've touched on before in previous posts but it's possible I haven't really talked about it much since 2018 in the long-long-ago.
Curation is centralized in nature.
So we built this thing called Condenser and called it decentralized, but that's not 100% accurate. We basically juked the system by creating a frontend that enforced backend curation. Because this was the only frontend available a lot of people assumed that having a high payout on a post and curation were equivalent. They are not.
The frontend decides what gets shown and what does not get shown. The frontend is always owned and operated by a single agent, and thus centralized in nature. Doesn't really matter that it connects to Hive on the backend; it can technically show the user whatever it wants to. This creates a lot of confusion for those who don't understand how it works.
the action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition.
What does curation even mean?
It means your content gets promoted through an intermediary. The definition of curation is inherently centralized, as the entire point is that the content in question is being filtered through a middleman. In this case that intermediary is a centralized website connected to a decentralized backend. Does that make it centralized or decentralized?
The answer is 'yes'.
It ends up being both. The process of casting upvotes and downvotes is largely decentralized. When the frontend upholds those numbers and funnels them into an algorithm that creates a trending tab, that trending tab is kinda sorta decentralized in a way even though it was channeled through a centralized middleman.
However, as I have stated before, just because something is decentralized doesn't mean it's actually a good solution. We tend to forget this in crypto land because we often wear rose colored glasses when it comes to this tech. We are, after all, enthusiasts and purveyors of this tech stack. It would be foolish to assume that there isn't some sort of bias there because there is in fact quite a bit of bias and tribalism across the board.
Reblogging == Curation
The problem is that there is no financial incentive to reblog someone else's work. We click that button if we think the content is worth sharing with our follower list, but we don't actually get anything out of it, even though that is the literal definition of curation.
Personally I'm very conservative with which posts I choose to repost. I don't want to clutter up my feed or anyone else's. Don't want to be spamming others as that's rude. It's also the reason why I follow very few accounts. The type of content I want to be seeing on my feed is pretty limited. I have opened this up a little bit lately and followed accounts that I should have been following years ago, but that's another story.
Point being that sometimes when I've hit that reblog button: that post gets way more upvotes than the account in question would normally get. So I'm like, "Wow that actually worked these bigger accounts saw that post because I curated it directly." But does lacking a financial incentive cheapen the function? Or should we be curating like this altruistically?
What if we monetized the reblog function?
How would that even work? Well someone would have to spin up a new frontend or implement the feature on an already existing frontend. Then when a post gets clicked due to a reblog that user has to be tracked. If they upvote that post it counts as being successfully curated and the expectation is that the content creator being paid would share with the curator.
This could either be accomplished with Hive or a tribe token. Using Hive means the system is opt in and curated users would have to willingly give up some of their rewards by participating in the program. A tribe token or smart contract solution could automate the entire thing (or posting from a frontend that sends money to a centralized agent to act as escrow).
Is this actually a good idea?
Hm, yeah I don't know: that's a stretch. Getting noticed on Hive can be pretty difficult especially during the bull market. There's a lot of noise and good content can easily get missed. A financial incentive for real curation through follower lists could be beneficial, but I honestly can't say if it would or would not be worth the effort.
Here comes the spam!
The main thing to consider with something like this is: how much spam is it going to create? Is everyone just going to start running around reblogging everything they see in the hopes that they could exploit a system like this for rewards? This question leads us down an obvious path where we can't force content creators to accept the deal by default as it would be endlessly exploited for personal gain.
However, on the flip side of this argument it could be really good to give content creators the ability to divert some or even all of their rewards just to get more exposure to the platform. Thinking back to when I was a new user in 2017 I definitely would have utilized a feature like this. Do I want to earn pennies for a post that I spent 5 hours writing? Or do I want to earn $0 on the post and make sure the entire platform sees it? Back then it would have been an easy decision to get some quick exposure because I knew some of my posts were really good but hardly anyone was actually seeing them. If I had the option to give 100% of my rewards to curators (rebloggers) I would have done it in a heartbeat. Good investment is good.
Decentralization can be a huge disadvantage.
So imagine one of Hive's frontends implemented something like this and it turned out to be a pretty good feature, but it didn't work very well because the other frontends weren't in consensus with the idea. So one frontend is trying to track all the clicks from the reblogs and whatnot, but it can't track clicks on other frontends because those are controlled by different entities on separate servers.
See when someone like Twitter or Facebook makes a decision like this they can enforce it effortlessly across the entire platform, while something like Hive may be a little tricky or even impossible to implement across the board. Just something to consider generally. Again: decentralized doesn't mean "superior". It's actually quite a niche and narrow use-case in many circumstances.
Conclusion
- The algorithm is curation
- Reblogging is curation.
- Curation is curation.
- Upvotes/likes are only a part of the equation when fed via the algo.
The frontend determines what gets seen and what doesn't. It's whatever that entity decides, and nobody else's. Today the ultimate curators come in the form of megatech corporations like Google, Facebook, and TikTok. Perhaps we should be taking a lesson from them and incorporating what works for Web3 while throwing away what doesn't. Easier said than done, but probably worth it in the end.
We could gamify it. A Hive Engine/Tribaldex token, which you're only awarded if more than 50% of the post's total vote weight, came from your reblog.
You could even have heavy hitters reblog spitefully. "I don't want you to get those tokens, so I'm going to reblog this quality post to my followers too."
Yeah but you are assuming it works in a super basic way and the content creator has no control.
If someone is selling a piece of art they take it to a curator on purpose.
And ask pretty please if they'll show the art to the rich people.
Doesn't matter how big the curation cut is: it's worth it.
What you're saying with this comment is that the curator is going to swoop in out of nowhere curate the art and then take a cut without permission. Clearly that's not how it should work.
I was thinking an alt entirely for the curators. Which they'd compete for.
Ah right yeah there are a lot of ways to play it when the smart contract could be anything.
I think a curator token would have to be subsidized or funded by ads to actually be sustainable though.
Pretty tough sell honestly no matter how it gets sliced.
To me it makes more sense as something Hive content creators opt into with the main token.
I see both sides of the argument. I think if the creator opts in, it would work out. But Like @antisocialist said in his comment, it got hairy with the cross posting feature.
Peakd tried that with crossposting, but some non-mathing snowflakes said, 'He's making money off my work!' and pointed fingers at your's truly, when the facts were that 90% of the money went to the author and only 10% to the crossposter.
Crossposting brought the work to eyeballs that otherwise might have missed it.
100% of the votes the crosspost received were as a result of the crossposting.
But feelers are 'very important' and more interactions were less important, so they changed how crossposts work.
Now crossposts get flagged as spam as often as not.
Ah yes damn it's all flooding back I never actually used that feature but I remember it.
Tis a bit different because the creator hasn't opted into it but yeah I see your point.
Asking out of total ignorance: What if you spot a very good post with valuable information, vote it 100% early and reblog it so it will have more exposure, technically reblogging in this case will bring you 2nd tier benefits? I get that you mean that there should be direct incentives. Just curious to know if I understand the system well.
Voting early no longer has any affect on posts.
This has been the case for years now.
As long as an account votes within the first 24 hours they get a 50% kickback no matter what.
Reblogging the post would be a completely separate thing based on the other 50% of the reward.
They wouldn't be connected at all, no.
Understood, thanks! I think I remembered that from the first year I was around, but then I was out for several years, so it makes sense that stuff changed, haha. Ty
Your post somewhat brought to mind those "aggregator" sites that were popular 10-12 years ago where individuals would "curate" web content onto related collections of content, perhaps centered around their hobbies, a sport, cooking or whatever mattered to them.
In a sense, it was an extension of the circa 2000's notion of "blog rings" that connected related/similar blogs within a frame and took people from blog to blog with a single click.
In a sense, I was happy when PeakD added their CCC - Curated collections — feature as a way to present/reblog groups of content. Except... they serve as testament to how few people actually read/look at content because they very seldom actually help the featured creators.
And it also serves as an illustration of your point that decentralization can be a disadvantage. "Curated Collections" only look good if you're using PeakD... elsewhere, it's an ugly muddle of links. So individual reblogging actually is more effective...
Perhaps...
=^..^=
I've actually been talking to quite a few people lately who tend to not follow someone or mute them if they are doing a lot of reblogging. I never really considered that a thing before. I always felt like my reblog game was very weak compared to my upvote and comment game. Now I realize I may have not been slacking as much as I thought. It's pretty rare that I reblog other posts. I even stopped reblogging the stuff from my secondary @bozz.sports account lately.
Yeah I want people to know that when they see me reblog something I find it to be very much worth taking a look at.
LOL! I was saying this years ago and people like you told me to go fuck myself. 🤣🤣🤣
I was accused of being negative and not 'contributing to the community'. Hilarious, so I left you guys to it and now look. Everything I said about this place is coming true. It has been a disaster from day one, the first fuck up being naming it after another blockchain company. So anyone searching Hive in those early days, would have come up with the other Hive. 🤦🏿♂️
You really can't script this kind of incompetence. All the witnesses cared (and do care) about is lining their pockets.
Hive will never be big because it is poorly run by a bunch of clueless programmers who do not have the first idea about marketing or design.
Lol.
Ah well I'm glad you got some catharsis out of this extremely emotionally tilted comment.
But also Hive as a data availability layer isn't run by anyone, is it?
It's a permissionless system that anybody can use with a couple resource credits.
Do you play a video game and think:
No, because nobody thinks like that; that would be ridiculous.
The game is a completely separate entity from the operating system it's running on.
All of Hive's frontends operate under the same ideology.
The people who run the backend and the frontends are not the same individuals in most cases.
In any case if you want anyone to take a comment like this seriously you're gonna have to point to another blockchain that's actually doing things right. There isn't one. Nobody is doing what we are doing so there are no comparisons, yet. Giving the backend a shitty name is irrelevant because it's the forward facing apps that are supposed to do all the heavy lifting. I personally would have called it Hydra but Hive is fine I guess.
Something similar is actually implemented in Ecency - you can buy exposure with their Points, so it is sort of paying the frontend for "reblogging". Sure, it is not the same as being reblogged by someone whose target audience is more likely to actually consume your content due to aligned interests, but in the same time the actual reach is far bigger (sort of a difference between viral marketing vs general ads).
There is, although not very strong. By exposing reblogged content to users who didn't see it before, there is a chance they will upvote it. Assuming you've also upvoted the article you've reblogged, if those new upvoters vote outside of optimal voting window, part of the curation reward they "generated" will go to people who voted in first window.
This is one of the idea hive need to adopt if we want to get to promise land. There is a need to earn reward for reblog, when people spend hug time producing good content and get little, no view or support, he or she will want to leave.
What if we monetized the reblog function?-
If this ever happens to be a possibility, earning through reblogging on here might be of great advantage to users especially individuals known for creating amazing contents effortlessly. I mean for a whale on Hive to reblog a post there must be something unique about it !
This is why I am always happy when a whale reblogs my post. Anyway, if you check posts that I reblog, they are meaningful ones and the ones that everyone can benefit from
A post that is being reblogged must make sense
Honestly speaking i was thinking that big upvotes is political in nature maybe I'm not too wrong as there is kinda centralized nature of this.
And reblogging truly is curation and it gives big accounts age over others as many people reblogged they fet wider audience and popularity, one who reblogs should be rewarded handsomely.
To me every one who engages in one activity or the other should get something
From this post i have my understanding corrected on what truly curation is.
I’m also selective on my reblogs for most of the reason you outlined. I do think it’s good to show respect and build relationships by revolving someone content.
I see a lot of effort expended to decentralize the web. Nitter, Newpipe, etc., are constantly arising, and being swatted down like flies by centralized tech empires. This is the toothpaste coming out of the tube. While we think Big Tech and the NWO are indomitable, in fact Rome fell to decentralized Goths, not because they were barbarians, but because they were more decentralized and nimble, economically. Rome didn't dare allow political power on it's borders, which made policing borders impossible. Every time they let too much power get too far from the center, the resulting rebellion decreased the economic viability of the empire. Rome fell not because there were barbarians, but because it was centralized.
Good. I'm fine with frontends or second layers doing stuff that pushes the envelope. I'd like to see more of it. I think curation rewards are a fatal mistake for Hive, but no one cares what I think, and the fact we'd curate content without financial rewards doesn't matter, because the point of curation rewards is plunder. That's one of the things that makes Hive a government. Governments hate competition. I was very pleased when savings accounts with nominal ROI were introduced, but dismayed that curation rewards weren't eliminated to enable curation to be freed from pecuniary interest and arise as a natural expression of the community, and shunting whales from chasing ROI through parasitizing popularity contests to more prudent mechanisms, tested by time. Giving a choice between ROI or governance would create a vastly different focus of governors, and greatly reduce the risk of a new Sun shining on Hive.
Financialization got in the way there, I think. Why give that power away when you can just double your fun? Centralizing power is always the goal of government, once established. Eliminating curation rewards would have a very signal effect on Hive governance, IMHO. I'd like to see a different mechanism than raw stake determine what is appropriate for society, for once in my life. There are such vastly more valuable metrics being sold for a pittance today. The fact we occasionally reblog others' posts without remuneration, amongst myriad other examples, proves this. The fact BlackRock exists shows a pure plutocracy cannot avoid centralization. We need to be less like Rome and more like the Goths if we want to long survive.
Thanks!
We've both been around long enough to see what happened with 50/50 curation.
Used to be 75/25.
I said we should just go to 100%/0 back in those days.
But 50/50 does in fact incentivize exponentially more users to play by the rules and stop trying to game the system with self-upvotes. Free downvotes are a part of that as well. There hasn't been more downvote abuse on Hive even though downvotes are free to cast. There might even be less it's hard to tell. All I know for sure is that downvote drama back in the old days makes the stuff we see today look pretty tame.
I agree with you that it will lead to spamming as some people will not mind the content, either it is offensive or a plagiarised content won't matter. Self gain for reblog will be the ultimate goal.
Thanks for sharing
I donxt kmow when I have rebloged last time a Posting from another User, but I habe now rebloged this post.
Don't know if it would work or not. I think I wouldn't reblog only because of a smal incentive
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