LoveGun - why I still Love and Champion HSBI

If you are unfamiliar with the new functionality, click on that link to read more. I will get back to LoveGun much later in this post, but first I want to go through the "why".

Why I (still) LOVE and Champion HSBI

In terms of "crypto projects", I have seen a lot of them come and go. There is always a distinction between vision and execution, there is always a gap between "what we want to do" and "how we decided to do it". The difference here is sometimes conceptual, sometimes practical and often makes a difference only for the most hardcore "understanders" of what is really going on. Today I will focus on "what it is" or if you prefer - "what it do".

The concept of UBI but voluntary, an opt-in - "give to get" program, is necessarily a long term play. "Voluntary" UBI with ToS strings attached is a creative academic concept that "basic income" has taken on, and its been experimentally and synergistically used by me in the Synergy Builders program - which parallels with "my journey" on HIVE.

What it do

@steembasicincome aka HSBI, is an experiment in voluntary UBI, with a "Terms of Service". It is a decentralized support and savings club, where the decentralization comes in the codification of how the program operates - because at a top level we have a benevolent dictator as manager, his name is @josephsavage.

I have met @josephsavage, and I consider him a friend. I "trust" him as a manager of my funds. And because of that trust, which has continued to grow over time watching him manage the project, I have continued to have him manage more and more of my "funds" in this type of "club" - a community/voluntary club where we curate users instead of pieces of content (more on that later).

Some people see we send HIVE to the program, see that I am "getting votes" from the program, and assume this is "vote buying". Its not, and I would like to touch on that next.

50% is my curation rewards

If I power up HIVE POWER and vote my friends, maybe even "manually curate" them, they get 50% and I get 50% as curation rewards. If I nominate my friends into the HSBI community curation club, we each get a unit, my "curation unit" and their "author reward unit". This is 50/50, its always been this way and its exactly the same as we do on chain.

And I most definitely am manually curating the users I nominate into the program! And over time this has been interesting to watch, I want to give you two examples:

1. @brofund with @raymondspeaks

Now this long standing community has some units, I looked at the account history and it seems ~2000 units were nominated by me and a few hundred more from @taskmanager and a couple dozen from @chronocrypto. I curated this account a few years back - and its still posting today! I cannot take these units back.

Now its no secret that there has been somewhat of a "falling out" with me and the bros - I am currently banned in their discord - but that doesn't mean I cannot see the value they bring to HIVE, the effort and care and positive intention to do what they think is best for HIVE. He and they "are still here", which is commendable, laudable, wonderful. If I "incentivized" any part of that with these HSBI club units nomination, what a wonderful thing that is right?

2. @archon-mining to @archontribes

This is an example of why I actually appreciate the core centralization of the "benevolent dictator" model, and that is the case of a "community fork". When I worked to support @taskmanager as he was setting up the ambitious A.R.C.H.O.N tribe, I nominated the @archon-mining account for units. When the tribe "fell apart", and we didn't regain control of @archon-mining, I reached out to @josephsavage about it.

He classified this (correctly) as a "community fork", and helped us transfer the units to the @archontribe account managed manually by @seckorama. This was a huge motivation for everyone involved, especially at a time when there was a lot of doubt about how it would all turn out.

Abuse?

Since the curation of the whole thing earns for "the community of users", the entire club of a community of HSBI are motivated to identify abuse and apply the ToS. We have even build a custom YFE feed to see and monitor every piece of content that receives HSBI curation - you can see and monitor it as well here

HSBI works with HiveWatchers and even has its own channel in the discord for HiveWatchers to work with HSBI. When we can we also try to recapacitate users when possible, occasionally giving the community space to take on the role as "good cop". HSBI and members thereof are clearly disincentivized to allow abuse of the program or allow the program to reward abuse.

LoveGun!!

I have recently increased yet again my position in HSBI, specifically after helping to implement the LoveGun automation - here is where I will explain how it works and how I will use it.

For many years I have not been able to "recieve" all my curation rewards, the pending balance has been growing. I have taken advantage of the manager's good will and willingness over the years to "convert" the pending balance (unpaid curation rewards) into more units, for myself and others. I have used this as an additional layer of nomination, and shared my curation rewards to ever expand the "voluntary UBI experiment" by curating users that would bring long term value to themselves by blogging and thus bring value to HIVE.

I believe that the units create a "stickiness" to utilizing HIVE that can help get users over certain humps or "hard times" along the way, in their "Journey of Hivian". And now with LoveGun I am able to show on chain how I am using these "curation rewards". @quintaesencia is our NGO, and it rarely posts, preferring to use its pending balance to support users from the spanish language community on HIVE.

I have been testing this lightly during the previous month since we released the functionality:

@quintaesencia has got a very big pile of pending balance to share around and motivate users in Latin America - which just happens to be something I think about a lot as I have been on an Onboarding Journey across Latin America - From Guadalajara to Guatemala and next to Medellín.

"Its all related", and this is how Synergy works. Yes I could have just powered up this HP to me along the way, but having an active manager of these HPs, a wider community than even I could curate, community abuse monitoring, ability to give away even my curation rewards, and the discipline of being "locked in", make me actually enjoy participating in this voluntary program.

Any questions or comments? I will read them below!

Freedom and Friendship