PeakD: Chrome Extension to Display Payouts Properly

In my 2 years of using PeakD as my primary frontend, it was only a couple days ago that I learned the potential payout rewards displayed at the corner of every author post and comment turned out to be indicated in US Dollars and not, as the HIVE icon next to your potential payout would mislead you, in HIVE!

Imagine my surprise!

And ever since I've come across that fact, I couldn't see rewards the same way anymore.

For example, a post that displays a potential payout, like so:

would logically mean that you are getting that amount split up between you and the curator, then furthermore split up between HBD and Hive, with the final balance that's supposed to arrive in your wallet being 11.8 HP and 3.89 HBD, right?

Well, no. That isn't right, because the take-home reward after the initial 7 days will end up being wildly different than that, being 36 HP and 11.9 HBD. Almost triple the expected amount when calculated under the assumption that the amount displayed is HIVE and not the dollar equivalent.

@tobetada brought this to my attention a few days ago through this article, expressing their confusion as to the discrepancy between the potential payout in the initial 7 days of a post's life, and the actual payout that arrives in their wallet. Multiple people have given multiple explanations as to how this is happening.

By now, its pretty clear the problem lies with the iconography, and the text inside the hover box that says "Hive Rewards." The way LeoFinance had approached how to display rewards and in what currency is something to aim for. Unfortunately, PeakD doesn't provide much of an option.

So, I developed an extension

This extension simply aims to replace that HIVE icon with a dollar sign, and replace the phrase "Hive Rewards" with "Dollars." Nothing else is affected, and this only works on PeakD.com. The code is free to use for anyone, and you can download the extension on Github.

Developing this extension wasn't an easy feat for a total novice like me. All I'm gonna say is thank goodness for the numerous years-old Stack Overflow posts that explained things thoroughly to me, and ChatGPT for helping me squash some elusive roadblocks.

To install the extension, simply download the zip file by clicking on the green button here:

Then click on Download ZIP. Once you've extracted the folder inside, drag and drop it on an open chrome://extensions tab. That's it!

Once the extension is enabled, it should look something like this:

Limitations & upcoming features

The only thing that irks me is the quality of the icon itself. It's not consistent with the others, and when you really zoom in you can count the pixels on your hands, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to properly implement the icon such that it scales according to the context its in. For example, the icon appears abnormally bigger than the others in the comments section, whilst on author posts it appears totally proportional.

Now, I'd really like to expand on this addon by breaking down the Dollar amount into both HBD and HIVE within the hover box. You won't have to calculate what the take-home amount of your post is going to be, the extension would be able to do it for you. The problem is that I'd have to figure out how to parse HIVE's price every time the extension is loaded. Hopefully I'll figure it out as I learn.

Conclusion

Obviously, a native implementation, just as LeoFinance does with its potential payout display with a toggle in the settings, would've fared much better in terms of cleanliness and seamlessness, but for now this extension will do in terms of displaying rewards as they really are: in dollars.

Thanks for reading!