Overrewarded posts; an idea for a fair distribution of Hive rewards
(Image from Pixabay)
I may be throwing the cat among the pigeons, but a recent post of @edicted got me thinking...
I'm talking about this post:
https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@edicted/downvotes-oh-noes
The most interesting part of this post is a screenshot of a comment from @azircon
He touches an interesting point about a blogpost that receives more that $100.
The post of @edicted was being downvoted because the rewards were getting too high.
And I totally agree about the height of the rewards. Not about this specific post, but posts in general. Does any post deserve an author reward of $100+ dollar?
And who decides if a post is getting too much rewards?
I've seen many more posts that received more than $100 author rewards.
But setting a max reward doesn't really solve the problem I think. Because there are also shitposts that shouldn't be getting any reward in my opinion.
But when these posts don't get noticed and manually downvoted, these authors will get these rewards. And when a post gets downvoted it often leads to lots of discussions.
Auto voting & trails
Who decides which posts get the most rewards? You would say that we do that as a community, but I guess that 99% of the votes is done automatically with auto voting or following voting trails.
Auto voting and voting trails are great. I'm using them myself too. I have a few accounts that create quality content and therefor automatically get my vote with everything they post.
This way I make the most out of my curation rewards since I don't have the time to manually read all their blogs every day of the week.
But the downside of checking all these posts manually is that the quality of the blogs may change. Not every post from these authors is a quality post.
Apart from that I'm also receiving some auto votes from a couple of people. For me this results in a default reward of $2/$3 regardless of what I blog. Which is nice, but in my eyes isn't fair.
Oldbies & whales
As I mentioned before; my account receives a $2/$3 author reward regardless of what I post. But I've seen many other accounts that automatically receive a tenfold of that for everything they post.
And these people probably have invested a lot of time (and maybe money) to grow their accounts, but does that make it fair that they automatically get rewarded for everything they post?
If you have the luck to receive auto votes from a Hive whale, you'll get a nice share of the reward pool.
I also see accounts where the only activity is automatic upvotes to other users.
(Side note; there will surely be a lot of whales and other users that do check the blogs they are auto voting on and remove people from the list when they don't create quality blogs anymore).
So the current structure rewards people with the most 'connections'.
The more connections you have (from the past) the more rewards you will get regardless of what you post.
This made me think about solutions how we could we make a more fair distribution of the Hive reward pool.
Possible solutions
"How can we make a more fair distribution of the Hive reward pool?"
I've been thinking about this question for a while and I came up with a couple of things.
A small disclaimer; I don't have the slightest idea whether these ideas are technically possible.
Limit the author rewards
An idea is to set a max to the rewards a blog post can get. This way you limit the excessive posts that receive over hundreds of dollars of rewards. But then again; what is an excessive reward? Who will decide the value of that?
And shit post that are auto voted on will still receive rewards that might be too high.
Manual downvotes
We could, as @azircon mentioned do manual downvotes on posts. This does require commitment from the community and a change in mindset about downvotes.
I wouldn't downvote a posts of a whale myself since it could backfire if he or she sees it as an attack (which often is the case for most people I think).
Only allow manual voting
When we could get rid of the auto votes everyone is forced to do manual voting. This everyone really needs to check all the posts they are voting on.
This way the curators also may diversify their votes to other accounts and change the amount they vote on the posts based on the quality.
Of course you could still login and randomly cast your 10 100% votes if you like, but even then I think most shitposts will be filtered out.
And it would also eliminate auto-upvotes from 'ghost accounts' with large amounts of Hive that have been going on certain account for ages.
If technically possible, I think it would really give a much more fair distribution of rewards.
Curation vs delegation
Many people, including myself don't have the time to distribute manual votes and make the most out of our stake and therefor configure auto voting. As I mentioned before; I also do this myself.
Some people only use it to vote when their voting power is above a certain percentage. Other only curate automatically.
It's understandable from a point of view that you want to make the most out of your stake, but it isn't actually curating what we're doing.
I think it's better to delegate your power (or a part of it) to curators that manually curate posts. There are quite a lot of curator accounts that are controlled by groups of people that really try to find and reward quality posts like Qurator, Curangel or OCDB and also communities often have their own curation accounts.
Let's prevent auto voting
If it makes the distribution of Hive rewards more fair, why don't we do it?
First of all, I don't know if this even is technically possible. And if it is, we still need to agree that we want to go that way.
I hope we can have a discussion about this. What do you think?
FriendlyMoose
Photographing is my passion. Although I like photography in general, nature photography is one of my favourite subjects. I often go out with my camera for a hike to capture the beauty of nature.
I'm sharing my photos on Hive, Noise.Cash & APPICS.
I would love to read what you think of my photos in the comments.
Discord: friendlymoose#5717
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I think many if those auto votes would go or disappear if you started dropping you content quality.
Surely some of the users would regularly check up on the votes they cast, but what about the people that don't login to Hive anymore and just generate curation rewards.
They maybe don't even care on what content they vote as long as they get the rewards.
yeah, the whole topic is a difficult one tbh.
I know. But I thought it was a nice one to discuss...
There is no easy solution that everyone will be happy with....
I wonder what responce and how many wise comments this will receive.
not a funny post, so -- no beer or pizza on top of this.
thats a fresh idea, my friend, but you have to be sure they are sharp-shooters and do reward quality posts. For more than a year I was delegating 2000 of my HP (that still looks like a sufficient amount of power to me) to both you mentioned. And know what? Over time, I began to notice some curators are being biased; that instead worthy blogs, they give support to skin-deep posts not worth attention ... I was disappointed and silently revoked my delegation.
(No, my own curation isnt better, but at least I'll be to blame if some bullshit gets supported via my HP). And... in general, there is an opinion that the above listed 'contras' of the platform stem from the "whales" and their (money-biased, instead of content-evaluation) upvotes.
I also use automation. We live in an age when the mechanization of labor is inevitable :) and because of this, do-it-yourself and manual work becomes and is only appreciated more!
When I see that my HP has reached 100%, I look at the friend feed, and curate good friends posts, if I can't spend the available power on worthy posts - I look at posts and spend HP on posts in my favorite communities, or (more rarely) I choose posts for support from curators' reports. All this is already done by hand. But anyway, you are right about the "old horizontal links" - they are defining, and in general, I would formulate that my upvotes are predominantly received not by posts (which I usually do not have time to evaluate and read), but by old friends, whose I have already evaluated the content as a whole, with the amendment - that this is done manually, and I minimize my efforts and time spent ...
Good point you make there. You do have to keep track of the votes they cast as well. People controlling the account may change over time.
I'm not against automation. When you can automate things to make things easier, why not. But in my opinion Hive is about rewarding quality posts. This is objective and can't be judged by automation (at least not yet).
I afraid, a lot of folks do not share this opinion; we can assume that silent majority consider Hive to be basically "a remedy to make money out of thin air". 😳
objective? hmmm.... never will be. it stays highly subjective and even (lets face the truth) random. ok, I explicited my point of view on this. 🙄
That is where it turned into. I think it supposed to be a social platform.
I ment subjective by the way...I often confuse these 🤣
ah!!!!! ok then - we are in the same boat 😉 👍👍
edicted had a great article a while ago, btw, about Dan Larimer and his projects (I think I reblogged it). Have a read, its nice and educating reading... gives some vision on the project's mechanics and whats wrong with it... a bit. to some extension. cheers -- and a !BEER 🙏
Thanks for the tip! I'll look it up.
But if it's wrong and more people agree on that, why don't we try to change it.
Who do we need to convince change things?
Cause "money win", my guess? 😳
View or trade
BEER.Hey @friendlymoose, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @qwerrie for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.Not that you deserve any explanation, but you should at least try to learn how projects work. You keep complaining about some curators not voting your posts (conveniently forgetting that the very same curators have been curating and helping you after you have joined Steem).
In fact, if you knew how @Qurator works, you would know that our bot was set not to accept any posts that had more than $5 earned (not to mention that there are also limits of votes each user can get each week). It was to give votes to less rewarded posts and not the ones that already had larger votes on - like yours happened to be getting later on. But of course, the votes you were and are getting now are still not enough for you, so you have to go and complain right and left.
The same rule but with a different value is applied in @Curangel.
Your entitled and leeching behavior (plus complaining about curators, curation projects and tagging whales for attention) finally did earn you a VIP pass to a no-voting list in Qurator. Congrats!
As for your delegation - you were getting liquid Hive payouts, just like any other delegator.
CC: @friendlymoose
leeching behavior / whining about curators / tagging whales -- I found it a bit stretchy label for me, but ok, facts are out there.
What about a weighted voting system where votes have less value the higher the reward for the post. E.g. a 100% vote gets you a 1$ reward or maybe just 0.01$ based on how much rewards are already flowing to the author. I hope you still follow me 😅
I like the idea. It seems like an alternative for setting a max reward.
It’s like having income based tax brackets :)
The biggest downside of votingtrails is that most people don't even see your content and more interaction would be nice.
The bennefit of the trails however is that if you create apreciated content you are able to grow pretty fast.
I do remember the time that no matter how good content you created if you got $2,- payout you got lucky.
The post you refer to is just another mud fight between whales , make sure you don't get caught in it seen it happen before not a pretty sight.
I think if nobody's content is being automatically voted on it will stimulate users to keep producing quality content.
sic!
I think if you went that route there would likely be a lot of bigger accounts that just quit and move along to something else because the return on curation rewards wouldn't be there for them anymore. If they actually cared they would be commenting and voting instead of just voting.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I think you have a point there. But would that be a bad thing?
The overall rewards on posts will go down then and only the users that care about quality content will stay.
And do we want people that are here just for the rewards and don't care about the quality of the content?
It's still a blockchain and people don't necessarily invest in blockchains because they care about using the product. I own Apple stock but I don't own any Apple devices. Should I not get dividends? Maybe that isn't a great example, but just look at most of the huge accounts. Lot's of stake and zero posts. They bought in as an investment. They don't actually care about blogging. Would them leaving be a bad thing? I dunno, maybe. Vacuums like to be filled.
They can still invest, but then via curators.
Just like mutual funds with stocks. You have people that use your investment to generate money for you.
True, not all curators are unbiased though. Just look at trending. I don't typically see votes like that though unless the price of Hive is up around $3.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
"There are also shitposts that shouldn't be getting any reward in my opinion."
so right said. I see too many of these.
their snapshots are terrible but there are many images and it's supported and maintained by the this place.
I know not everyone is a good photographer, but some people indeed dont put a lot of effort in their photos and or posts.
Thanks for the Ecency boost by the way!
!PIZZA
the bigger problem is that they do receive very high rewards and attention from curators, so they even don't get this fact that their snaps are real shit so the learning process which is very natural in a normal situation is not taking place so, so they just continue with their badly composed skewed images.
i don't want to put here some samples, sure you can find some very fast.
Yay! 🤗
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