The community front for free rewards

It's sad that I have to make a post about this but considering how many communities were affected that eventually left/were removed from our incubation I thought it was good time to write down my thoughts on it. Another thing that happened recently caused me to look back at these issues and remember why they happened.

We started the community incubation a long time ago, quite early after communities were introduced by @roadscape and the goal of it was to mainly support people working towards different niches of communities so that it would be easier for both new consumers to find their place on Hive and at the same time improve quality of content and engagement/consumption of said content. There are many who to this day still ask what the point is of communities so I'm going to give a brief explanation and vision of how I see them growing in the future and how we have been attempting to aid said growth. Bear in mind I may miss out on some details here and there as I'm freewriting this.

Before communities we mainly had tags and tribes, tribes were kind of the gateway to communities as they allowed to remove posts from front-ends that didn't fit there but as far as I know it wasn't something that was easily done. With tags as you can imagine anyone and everyone could use them and often times without much care, you'd see the #hive tag overused everywhere or the #life tag which is something that grinded my gears often as it was such a useless tag in my opinion. With communities came the "centralization" power that Hive lacked, giving owners of communities and their moderators the ability to mute posts from the community. This made Hive a lot more like Reddit except that it still had the immutability of posts and allowed people to check what was muted by going through the author or the chain since they couldn't find the post in the community feed.

So why is the ability to mute posts good? With spam, controversy and other abuse attempts on the wild west of the internet we get to relive in #web3 the ability to keep your community clean and according to the rules you've originally set for it is important. With downvote mana now existing it also made it easier to deal with unwelcomed posts by muting them and mentioning that it doesn't fit there rather than downvoting since we all know the drama it often may cause, not to say muting doesn't, but it's different. Muting posts that don't fit there, depending on the size of the community required work of the community leader and anyone involved that was invited to it, of course while muting and keeping the community clean it made sense that those "moderators" would also be curators as they're already looking over posts so they can also curate at the same time. Without getting too much into why communities are good, even though I initially said I'd give a brief description of it I think I won't be able to make it too short so I'll just dive into our incubation program and the issues that came forth on it and why it required us to remove some communities.

With what I just mentioned in mind, we wanted the community incubation to do a few things:

1. Invite community leaders who had started a community and had some activity on them already, proving there was demand for it and potential for growth with our support.
2. Give the community leaders as much power over curation as possible.
3. Reward everyone involved similarly how we have rewarded our curators who spend a lot of time curating.

Now before I go any further there are things that need to be said about curation as it's not just lazy/mindless curation, although I wouldn't be surprised if there are lazy nominations every now and then, we have and keep on working hard on making that less of a possibility in our project. Since our focus is on curating as many unique authors as possible with restrictions of how often we can nominate the same authors, checking for abuse such as plagiarism, moderating communities for posts that don't fit, etc, you can start to imagine that curators are not just getting rewarded for curating but doing a lot of other things at the same time to keep both the communities clean but also make sure distribution of Hive inflation was wide and fair.

Some issues that could plague our incubation in the long run:

1. Community leaders are the sole owners of the community accounts thus also the community, in an effort not to centralize our community incubation (i.e. us being the ones creating communities ourselves) we felt it was worth the risks that A. leaders become bad actors or B. leaders go AWOL which means all the effort, time and reward distribution may somewhat go to waste.
2. Something we didn't expect at the time but showed itself later on to exist was that community leaders would want "free rewards" for doing nothing but owning the community and having others do the work.

For point 1. we figured it'd be alright, I've seen these things happen many times on Reddit where a subreddit gets banned/deleted and people would just move over to a new one. This of course takes time as not everyone is always there to be alerted when things happen or even notice what may have happened or that a community they used to enjoy does not exist anymore. Luckily developers building communities chose to use a serial number for it rather than names meaning they couldn't be squatted, this could have become a big issue eventually and something that happens often on Reddit. Think the community "sports" with direct link to it being peakd.com/c/sports would only show a dead community with a post saying "name for sale, send account xxx 1000 hive to receive keys", etc. At the same time there are many similar communities so the jump from one to another wouldn't be too difficult for communities that are quite popular genres.

For point 2. I admit it caught me a bit by surprise as I didn't expect to see such greed, if you will, cause not sure what else one would call it, but let me try and explain it in details.

Our incubation offered:

1. Curation from our accounts on posts the leaders/community curators have vetted and left in our discord for nomination of curation. It was done this way so that every community curator and the ocd curators would always be able to see what was being nominated. This removed the form of abuse where certain authors were getting nominated too often due to favoritism or something and at the same time it allowed more eyes to check that the post was indeed original and not plagiarised or spun, though the latter is of course not that easy to detect no matter how many people have access to see it before it gets voted.
2. Delegations to the community accounts and highlighting which they were in our weekly community incubation progress reports so that other stakeholders or people following @ocd would be able to know where to direct their delegations in an effort to help support said community. For this point it's needed to be mentioned that we knew the rewards from delegations went and belonged to the community leaders. We had no say in what happens with them or pressured the leaders to share them with others involved in the community. This was one of their "rewards" for having created the community and continously helping it grow. We would of course remove our delegations if we saw it declining in activity from the leaders but that was not something that happened often and not really an issue, probably cause the delegations weren't that big, I think at the top we delegated over 90k HP to 25+ different communities from the @ocd or @ocd-witness accounts.
3. Post rewards in the form of curation reports highlighting some of the best posts the community had curated that day/week. The consistency of the posts depended of course on the activity of the community, some smaller ones were instructed to post less often to attempt to fill at least 5 nominations in a post while others got to 8-10+ nominations daily due to the size of their community and quality of posts within it.

It's about the last part that caused some issues and what the title of this post is about.

The curation reports have had some sort of controversy for a long time on this chain, some stakeholders feel that people shouldn't get "extra rewards" for curation and that their stake should be enough for them to receive the (then 25%, now 50%) curation cut that every stakeholder receives. We've mostly operated in a way where we'd give curators about 10% post rewards compared to how much the posts we curated would receive but over time that has changed, I'll talk about this change in a bit. The main point is that 1. not only does not everyone have stake or a lot of stake to make it worth to go out of their way to look for new accounts, quality posts that have been overlooked, making sure no abuse is ongoing, etc, etc, but I think it's also pretty obvious that when there are feeless autovoters and trails available, many in the position with a lot of stake will just do that rather than put in time and effort to make sure Hive is as friendly to new accounts and distributes stake wide to make this place one of the best ways to quickly monetize your effort and content and 2. not everyone is an author but can be a curator, meaning while some projects prefer to reward the curators with a vote on their posts, this is something that often either gets abused in one way or another or leads to "dead posts" as there's many examples of where an account is being very well rewarded but never bothers to engage, build genuine connections or even reply to comments they do receive which makes Hive and curation in general look quite bad to the outside or those not knowing why certain accounts are being rewarded that heavily. Point being, where there is effort and work being done, it doesn't matter where the curator is from similar to how we treat content creators on Hive, we don't vote someone lower just because he lives in a country where the GDP is a lot lower than someone else thus voting the latter higher. Hive is supposed to bridge that gap of borderless connection and reward effort and quality equally no matter from where in the world that person comes from or how much money and stake he has invested. Although it is human nature to want to stop rewarding/reward someone less who is constantly selling their stake off and similarly reward someone who is buying stake and holding it more it doesn't mean it should stop completely. I admit I do give people I know have stayed with Hive for longer and actively put in a lot of work on and off the chain for the ecosystem a bit more than "just authors". Content is not king in my eyes and it would need to be some insane content to change my mind but more about that in another post. Similarly curators should receive some extra rewards for their work not dependant on their stake if they are putting in work and effort. Anyway, that's my thought on that and why @ocd has operated in the way it does now, we do also delegate to people who go the extra mile of doing great work with delegations as well but we wanted to see how these post rewards would work towards communities since there's also moderation required which is another layer to the workload of curators before communities existed.

Okay so that's all and well, so what was the issue?
I think the easiest way for me to describe the issue would be to give you an example of how I could do things within @ocd but don't.

Let's assume for a minute that one of our initiatives, say the "other niche communities" one, where community curators of all incubated communities in our project can nominate posts from communities not in our incubation freely would not give out post rewards to everyone involved in the day to day. Before I paint you a picture of that I should also mention that since we don't do automated curation reports, we give a % to the "compiler", i.e. the person who's task it is that day to take all successfully curated nominated posts and connect them to who nominated them, place an image from their post and a short description of the post into the report and then divide the post rewards evenly to the curators and part of it to himself for said workload.

So in any given day the post rewards of that iniative would go to 5-6 curators and 20% or so to the compiler. Everyone in the incubation understands that it takes some workd and effort to compile it and that the rest are evenly divided to those who nominated posts and the posts were accepted for our votes to land on them. This is how we reward the work being done fairly and transparently. If a % was going to someone who hadn't nominated a post for curation that day the others would be able to notice this and speak up/ask why. This brings me to the main point of the issue.

Some community leaders would instead of giving their main account a % of the beneficiaries, instead withhold a percentage from other curators/moderators in their own team and let it go to the community account. Some of you may already see the issue here but let's dig it up a bit more. The community account belongs to them, they own the keys to it and the stake that it earns. Some of that stake was earned from delegations of @ocd or others wanting to support said community or even themselves delegating to it to "help it grow". Point is those delegations didn't matter, what mattered was the post rewards. We asked them many times that if you are going to reward yourself with a % from the curation reports, please direct them to your main account for transparency. You can then delegate to the community account or do whatever with the rewards as long as we know what % you are allocating to yourself from those curation reports so that we know there is no unfairness occurring. Unfairness such as, 1. leader taking too much rewards for themselves even though leader did no work that day, i.e. curating/nominating posts, moderating the community, whatever it was that was almost never an issue where we had to ask them why they are taking "so much" rewards for themselves, the issue was that they were obfuscating the transparency of the rewards while wanting us to reward the curation reports with upvotes. There was actually one community where some of the curators came to me warning me that the leader was taking most of the post rewards for themselves without doing anything and that ocd was voting for those curation reports.

So believe it or not, our only ask was that they would be more transparent with the reward distribution of something that was already kind of controversial and not something every stakeholder agreed on (earning post rewards for curation/moderation/etc) which should've been accepted as a bonus for doing good work and keeping communities clean and the curators content to keep on doing a good job distribution stake fair and wide rather than attempting to look for ways to self-vote or vote on alts, etc, which was a big issue before we went back to the linear curve. And if for some reason you really didn't want to be more transparent with the post rewards by sending beneficiaries to yourself rather than keeping it "with the community account" then just stop nominating your reports in our program for our votes. We really couldn't have been more clear on this somewhat complicated to explain issue.

Instead, we were met with "you're trying to control how we run our community" and a few of them left the incubation together. It felt pretty obvious to me that not only did they not care about the community they themselves were running that much but that their interest were mostly in attempting to maximize both delegations/curation and post rewards for themselves, who was mainly the leader. Comparing them to @ocd would be as if ocd would just magically only give out 40-60% of the post rewards from our compilation posts to curators/moderators/etc and keep 40% to the account just because.

I followed some of these people and their reports for a while afterwards, spoke out why some of their curators and heck, even authors that wrote long quality posts highlighting certain authors or initiatives they had been doing that week were only getting a smaller fraction of the post rewards posting from their community accounts who of course didn't belong to the author but to the leader. Some of the reasoning the authors gave me was probably more sad than the reason these leaders left our incubation to begin with: "we wouldn't get as much rewards posting on our own accounts". It was quite a disgusting ghostwriter/middleman scheme so maybe you can understand my frustration when not only did they leave our incubation that benefited the authors posting great posts in their communities which lost out due to their selfish decisions but to also see it get even worse (higher cut they started taking for themselves) for the people who were actually putting in the work but weren't as successful or lucky to receive such high rewards. Unsurprisingly many who left the ocd incubation in the same go were welcomed by @tribesteemup either cause the communities had some things in common in their niches or because the owner of that account was okay with their practices and some of those same people are now contacting me again to consider them for the ocd incubation. Why? The reason is probably this. Don't think I need to say more about that but I'm glad jamesc reconsidered his delegation and hopefully whoever is in charge of that stake now doesn't misuse it or get taken advantage of in the same way.

I haven't decided yet if I will welcome them back but considering nothing changed before the undelegation happened I kind of doubt they're going to be willing to change or let go of whatever APR they've gotten used to going to their own accounts by using communities as an excuse to increase their earnings. I guess in the end it relies on trust as they could be coming up with other ways to get more rewards for themselves even if they were transparent about something as small as curation report beneficiaries going to those putting in work and not receiving "free" hive rewards that ultimately end up on exchanges cause how can you value something you get for free or if a few downvotes make you turn against the whole platform that has rewarded you better than thousands of multiverse attempts would have on web 2.

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