I have some sympathy for what you are trying to do in removing autovote abuse; however for individuals who produce quality content for a living the auotvote trails for trusted content are one of the key things that keep quality content producers here working on posting quality works in a similar way to Patreon. Changing the weekly default to a multiple of your daily limit would have been more fair, respected peoples choices, and allowed people to individually reduce the weekly limit for followers they thought were abusing the system. The reality is however that if someone is abusing your auto vote trust you are likely to just remove them completely. Or if they are intentionally abusing it with shitposting linked to a 2nd account then they will simply update their settings.
This change will in the long run just damage small content produces who were benefiting from a distributed but semi disengaged auotvote fanbase while allowing the large scale abusers who have larger stake with multiple cross voting accounts and monitor things closely to simply log in and update their systems. Very sad to see. I appreciate you provide this service and it is within your rights to change at any notice. However the service does form a big part of the hive ecosystem; and some discussions with the community about how to address this would have been appreciated in advance.
If you had put a hard limit on the votes per week (limit to 1 or 2 per day or even 7 per week so one cant just vote 10 times a day for a scam account) then this change might have come across as helping fight abuse. As it stands it does nothing to help abuse and just hurts people who have worked to develop a trail or people who have passively invested their hive.
I just wrote a long comment then I somehow lost it.
TLDR of my not broadcasted comment:
2 votes/week is not bad for quality content creators. Content creators need more real people than auto-votes.
Also, It's not a hard limit. Users can login and change it.
That is exactly my issue; its not a hard limit. So tell me how will it stop abuse ? It just makes everyone have to log in and change it and penalizes passive investors and small content producers who may not keep up with the changes? To the major abusers its a meaningless change as they have enough vested interest to log in and change it. You would find most content creators would support a hard limit of 1 autovote post a day. This change does nothing to stop people using your service to autovote shitpots on puppet accounts 10 times a day.
Then who are auto votes for then if not for content creators ? Tell me that? Why offer the service if you don't believe they should be used? Just offer a curation trail only service ? Then you effectively crown a few kingmakers like curie and centralize all the votes via a few major curation trials. The Patreon model of rewarding creative producers per output unseen is one of the biggest in the industry; auto votes allow you to support an artist. If you don't like what they are producing you can remove your support. Content creators is exactly who autovotes exist for, either directly or via curation trails (well unless you have the opinion that they are there to facilitate networks of interrelated shitpots voting each other). Not everyone has time to manually vote and want to support people. Hence Hive.vote exists. All you have done is change the settings against the opinion of the user base wile allowing them them change it back. All this does is penalize people who don't see the change has been made (which is a lot).
The elephant in the room here is that you can't manually curate and receive a decent curation reward with the way the exponential decay on curation rewards work (unless your online all day looking for posts which is not possible). Hence people autovote to get their votes in at the right time .
Change is to reduce auto-voting and encourage manual curation. Abuse is subjective. Personally I think there is no such thing as abuse when chain allows users to perform such actions.
I understand your concerns. The main reason for the change was inactive users. Users must revisit their settings once in a while.
We will send notifications from now on to the inactive users.
Why do people in the blockchain have to have an "active" stake? If someone buys shares in a company do they have to be an "active" investor? Don't we want mass uptake of investors to buy Hive and power it up for passive income purposes using autovotes and curation trails ? Or are we saying as a blockchain we only want "active" investors and passive investment will be discouraged? Will anyone trust hive.vote not to change their preferences again after this? Most people who want to 'invest' just want to set some settings and come back in 12-18 months; not have to monitor continually changing requirements or log in each day to manually vote. Investment funds will just flow to coins like Tezos which simple staking rewards if we keep changing the goal posts.
Agree. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that you provide the service to the community and ultimately an independent app can make whatever changes it likes. I think overtime we will see more sophisticated development in this space to help with maximizing curation rewards for passive investors. If HIVE is to succeed and cover the selling pressure from the development fund and post inflation pool we need to make it attractive to passive investors. @therealwolf I know you were in support of introducing some passive staking rewards system at a blockchain level. Any plans to bring your smartsteem.com autovote trails over to hive?
There is not much point to that if the user is inactive, is there? They won't see it anyway.
As for the default weekly limit, if someone set a daily limit, they expect that in 7 days they will have voted at least 7 times. It would have made sense to set the weekly limit to 7 so that the many people who have no idea about the change will not get hurt. There are lots of people who have set their votes to those they trust will not post garbage and now don't log in for whatever reason. You just censored their votes with your arbitrary change. So much for the belief in freedom of choice. I urge you to change the default to at least 7 per week or preferably to reflect multiples of whatever their daily limit was set to. Anything less is censorship by you. For those who are active users, they can now go and change their settings as they see fit using the new extra feature.
My belief is that if you are going to provide a free service, then do that without harming anyone. We thank you for your generosity. If you are seeking to control the votes of others, then that is not really a free service, but a form of trade by taking control over others. Be honest and say that up front... I will take control of your votes if you use my service!
I also believe that the reason you made the change was honorable, but misguided. I hope that after reading this and some of the other comments, you will realize your mistake and correct it in the name of true decentralization and freedom of choice.