Some thoughts behind this new service on hive called Hive-bounty

Noticed this new service on hive recently called @hive-bounty and after reading their announcement post I wanted to post my views about it and maybe some new additions they may consider down the line.

At first sight it reminds me a bit of the BCH bounty thing on twitter. That was something Ipersonally wasn't much of a fan of due to how it affected POSH rewards which lead to us having to implement a way to ban certain tweets from earning POSH to keep things fair. It also resulted in a lot of bots on Twitter being the first to automatically claim most of the bounty which I'm not sure how it can be combated exactly. It's also one of the only things I'm a little bit concerned about with POSH as people seem to either manually spam certain activities that'll get them more POSH or start using bots. While it has been manageable thus far we'll have to see how we combat it in the future (if there is a future for our poshtoken bot (read my twitter statement in a previous post)).

Either way, this bounty program on Hive has a lot more potential than the one above, and I can see from some settings mentioned in the announcement post that it's already a lot better in comparison. Not just due to the way we can combat and handle spam/fake activity here but also some settings that make this easier for the author or bounty organizer. Let's look at what setting I'm talking about:

I'm referring to the one called Creator Weightings, as explained in their post:

Although looking at its recent payment I am unsure if that part is working correctly, I believe the creator of the bounty on my April fool's post was @schlees (Thanks for trying it there, btw), and the person who got paid the most of the bounty was @misshugo for her comment:

Apart from the double spend which I'm assuming is for certain a mistake as the bounty was only 10 Hive and it paid out a lot more, I'm also a bit confused as to why her comment received so much compared to the rest:

Her comment didn't have a vote from the creator of the bounty and in general has as much pending rewards as most of the comments in the post. So while I'm guessing this is just early testing which is the reason to most math mistakes, let's go back to talking about the service and my thoughts surrounding it.

The reason I noticed this to begin with was a transaction from it to @poshtoken, so one idea of mine would be to let creators of bounties ignore certain well known bots. For instance the service could have a list of known bots which we have and make use in #posh and #gosh as well so the creator can checkmark to skip sending bounties to them.

Another option I'd like to see at some point would be that instead of just the creator weight there could also be author weight or a mix of both. So the equations behind how the bounty is distributed could be 33% community (everyone else's votes on the comments), 33% creator of the bounty and 33% author of the post.

Another thing that could be cool to add would be to set certain parameters of reputation behind accounts, this could give some extra value behind that reputation number and avoid bots going for bounties solely if the service becomes popular. This part now brings me to another suggestion:

Anonymous/hidden bounties

Since Hive has the possibility to encrypt memo's, simply by having the memo key in your keychain/accessible and placing a # before you write out the memo, this could enable people to place bounties without people knowing where it was placed. This feature could reward those who aren't just commenting for the sake of commenting but are quite engaging in general. This feature would of course mean that the comment wouldn't be placed in the shared post:

Either way, something to think about. It's definitely something I would prefer to use to reward more genuine engagement in posts.

Alright, some ending thoughts on the project.

In general I like it, it can increase overall engagement, whether some of it may be forced or not. It already gives you proper tools to mitigate rewarding things you don't want, even mentions that if the creator places a 1% downvote the comment won't receive a bounty whichi is nice to have, and with the (possible future) option of letting the author direct the bounty it would give him that control as well.

The service takes a fee which can be set by the creator but is at minimum 1% which is fine and acceptable. The main question here is how could one fund this kind of activity more broadly rather than just having a creator donate to a bounty. Now some of you may know that I'm not a stranger to use voting power for purposes that positively affect the whole community/ecosystem, think like stakeholders who upvote hbd.funder comments knowing it helps stabilize HBD and also provides some profit back to the DHF. Similarly if this project continues to improve and people see a lot of positivity coming from its existence, I wouldn't mind if daily automated posts announcing things like amount of bounties created, which posts they were used on, who got how much rewards, etc, could be upvoted. There, though, I'd wanna see the funding go towards generating more bounties that could be placed on posts through certain parameters or voting, maybe even the anonymous bounty idea behind them to generally improve and reward more engagement. As long as it's not one person/entity/project itself receiving post rewards for automated posts and they'd clearly mention what they're using the rewards for I don't see anything wrong from some extra funding coming from the reward pool for it, especially once the project is fine-tuned and working perfectly. Though I wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on that.

Anyway, just some quick thoughts and potential ideas for this project I noticed randomly. Thanks for reading, go test it out and let me know what you think!