I would really like to look into how we can make things fairer for the small vote counts. If I am correct, vote counts under $5.00 are penalized in that the amount rewarded is less than the theoretical value of the upvote given, and that the opposite occurs on vote counts above that threshold.
- That obviously encourages "piling on" the larger vote counts, and also clearly opens the door for the famous curation trails.
- It discourages voting for less recognized content (it could be great content in the curator's eyes, but not widely seen).
- Most importantly, it discourages the upvoting of comments since by nature their vote count is almost always less than $5.00.
In my view, upvoting comments is at least half of what a social media should do.
I notice a clear lack of upvoting on comments, and I think it is attributable to the fact that you get less reward than you would if you just looked for something crossing the $5.00 mark, regardless of whether it's good or not. (As people know, I vote comments anyway, because I think they are extremely important - engagement is one of the keys to success and it needs to be rewarded - all the well knowing that I'm actually hurting my ROI.)
Comments would also be more difficult to create curation trails for, I would think, if not impossible, thus dealing effectively with part of the issue.
If we were to go one step further and reverse the reward growth as the count grows on the larger vote counts, that would also further thwart the curation trails, again, I would think.
The long and the short of this would be not the elimination of curations trails, but a reduction in their profitability - meaning that they would still be an option for those who don't have the time. However, those who do have the time would have much more incentive to manually curate.
I think offering an opt-out staking option would completely defeat what HIVE is meant to be. Everybody would opt-out (except for a handful of diehards) and we'd be just one more staking cryptocurrency among hundreds.
For more than one reason, the most important being to foster community, but in this case to combat autovoting, I think the best way to address the issue is a dual approach that makes the small vote counts fairer while throttling down the rewards of the larger vote counts at the same time.
To be honest nobody is giving meaningful upvotes for comments anymore and in turn few people comment in comparison to the " good old days" which is very sad for the evolution of a social platform
I do but to be honest, I hate social media. #HIVE is more than any other pile of crap #mssm Mainstream Social Media to me and always will be. I like not being censored, hacked, spammed, targeted by bots, flooded with advertisements or having my content disappear/ be deleted. Most users of mainstream social media don't seem to care about any of those things...
I find it hard to "engage" digitally with users here as much as I once did on STEEM for many reasons, but those reasons don't relate to upvotes, HIVE income or curating rewards. My lack of engagement is my problem and something I'm still trying to change my online routines around.... But to see an immutable blockchain platform try to gear itself towards capturing market share away from Squitter, FuckBook, PooTube, DikDok is such a limiting way of looking at it all.
I know for a lot of #hive users, this is really important stuff. Growth in their 'investment' can be the priority reason for them bothering to post or upvote anything here and they want to see more and more users migrate here (or at least integrate #hive into their daily social media addictions). I just don't see it the same way.
The value is in the content on here, the drawcard is the technical superiority of the hive blockchain tech itself and the tenacity to commit to engagement here is what I see the major struggle as.