RE: Ask a photographer #AAP

I don't really understand your comments about "the whales want money", it almost doesn't really matter what people vote on as close to no downvotes occur, so they could vote on pretty much anything and the returns in hive would stay the same, so not really sure what you think the whales are doing that enriches them in exchange for not supporting content creators.

When it comes to the communities, one of them is incubated in the OCD program and was recently handed over to a curator who is still active after the previous owner left Hive. You're correct when you say the data is still too small to draw conclusions, especially since the price of Hive has been going down these past few months which may affect the decline in active users in the other communities. You are also correct to assume that the photography community may be "absorbing" activity from other ones because of our active curator in our incubation being able to reward those posting there well. We are however just one curation project on Hive so it doesn't mean the others can't do well only based on if they're incubated in our program or not. I think there's 200 million Hive staked currently with us using 6 million of it + some autovotes on our trail, that's less than 5% effect on the rewardpool.

The reason we don't have other photo communities incubated is because we're trying to only incubate one niche community at a time to allow for others to join that aren't already incubated. The same reason we only have one Gaming community incubated.

Other factors that could result in the decrease in activity in the other communities aside from Hive price are things like the community creator not being active, it not having helpers/engagement/curators casting their votes to authors sharing content there. This is an issue with the way communities are, where the creator is the owner of that account and if they go away the community is left to people who can't control it unless they're also given some of the keys. We've had this happen a few times in the past but we didn't want to step in and create communities of our own to prevent centralization even if it meant a longer lifespan for those communities.