Why can't it be both?
Technically it would be possible.
But practically currently it is not.
Why not?
You can find the answer in the behavior of the people.
Most people on the Hive blockchain currently focus on the rewards so much that they forget (do not even care) about the content, often both as a content creator, and as a content consumer too (the latter is currently a very very small percentage).
And many so called curators vote automatically to maximize their curation rewards, and they often do not even see the content they curate.
And most people focus on posting.
The ratio is somewhere around 90% (or even more) content creators, and 10% (or even less) content consumers.
Many posts are overlooked/ignored because of this. And thousands of people left this platform in the previous years because of this.
Currently most of the Hive users are literally ruining an otherwise technically revolutionary platform with their behavior.
Technically this platform is much better than other social network, but most people are not grown up to it (yet?).
To have both of the above mentioned things at the same time, most people have to change their approach to this platform, and have real, actual interest in the content.
Both as a content creator, and as a content consumer too. And much more content consumers are needed.
Voting automatically doesn't necessarily increase your rewards compared to manual voting. I agree it'd be amazing if we could give proven manual curators more rewards but for now it is what it is. Downvotes could help reduce rewards if votes have landed on content "blindly" but there's a big stigma regarding downvotes, still.
The rest of the comment is kind of made up numbers and reasoning but it's true that we lack consumers and a big reason to that could be that they're not rewarded for their time in the way creators are and since anyone can be a creator here they opt to focus on that rather than consuming and not everyone has time to do both.
We just need more users to generate more consumers, you can't compare hive to other platforms as the only others we compare to are in the millions if not billions of users. Let's compare it to Steem or Blurt instead and you'll be able to see that engagement is a lot better here already and I hope commentrewarder will have a bigger impact on that.
You can compare the Hive blockchain even to the smallest Facebook groups, for example Facebook groups with a few hundred users. And currently the latter is winning in terms of real, actual interaction.
Of course the Hive blockchain engagement is better than the Steem blockchain engagement or the Blurt blockchain engagement.
The Hive blockchain is created from the Steem blockchain by a hardfork, and most of the Steem blockchain users moved to the Hive blockchain after Justin Sun took over the Steem blockchain.
And the Blurt blockchain is just a bad copy of the Hive blockchain, literally with the same design, and with the same domain (.blog).
Why is that of course? I mean I know the reason but what makes you say that the legacy chain with much better SEO is obvious to have worse engagement than Hive?
I generally don't understand why you'd compare engagement levels on web2 platforms with Hive when you could compare it to literal copies of it instead.
Either way, your initial comment was about commentrewarder incentivizing fakeness or something so this is kind of spurring out of context. A quick look at your post history tells me you could use some engagement on your posts, maybe some comments just to take a little bit of rewards from your post would be better than 0? Dunno, guess that's where we're at. Most people here would make 0 income on web2 but I'm sure many of them would get more engagement than here just cause there's a lot more users there.
Why? They already have facebook accounts and they specifically joined that group based on their interests and they're not getting rewarded to create similar posts as that facebook group so commenting and liking is all they can do really.
Simply because people there (in the Facebook groups) actually care about the content, and their interactions are natural.
They show how a properly working social network works.
And this is why this should be the same in the so called Hive communities too to have a properly working social network.
So the Hive users should do the same.
They should actually care about the content, and have natural interactions. And not forced.
The rewards alone are not bad.
The Hive blockchain users make it bad (both to themselves and to the whole Hive blockchain) by focusing too much on it, and often literally ignoring (not caring about) the content, even as a so called content creator.
The code practically forces them to. People naturally have a prudential responsibility to manage their wealth, and curation rewards being coded in make managing their curation rewards a sacred duty. Failing to maximize their curation rewards can even be considered a sin by certain interpretations of scripture.
The problem is the curation rewards. People naturally engaging with content out of interest are very willing to upvote good content, as your examples of interactions on other platforms demonstrates. Curation rewards aren't necessary to incentivize people to upvote good content. What curation rewards are necessary to do on Hive is allow stake to be rewarded, for investment to receive ROI. Prior to HBD savings accounts, besides the ~3% staked Hive holders receive of inflation, curation rewards were the mechanism created for investors to gain a return on their investment in Hive.
You don't need to invest any money to gain author rewards, but curation rewards specifically depend on the amount of stake you hold.
Curation rewards are, in fact, the problem.
Then why not make it a flat ROI for all active curators, regardless of how they use their voting power, so long as they use it for something? Also remove the dust rule?
@edicted long ago suggested that savings accounts with nominal interest could provide better ROI for investors without perverting curation with financialization, and I have strongly supported that idea, and still do. While HBD savings accounts with 20% interest (now reduced to 15%) advented, curation rewards remained potential and this allowed the financialization to continue to pervert curation.
There simply isn't any need for curation rewards. Myriad social media platforms enable folks to upvote content for subjective reasons, which is the definition of curation, and without receiving financial incentives for doing so. There is no lack of curation on any such platform. People have other values besides money that cause them to curate content, and in fact these values are far more valuable than mere money. Mike Tyson said that Don King (his manager) would sell his mother for a dollar, and curation rewards are perfect for the Don Kings of the world, but unnecessary for anyone that loves their mother more than a dollar - or any other societal value, like truth, justice, or apple pie.
Curation rewards are not only unnecessary, they are utterly contradictory to functional social media platforms, and Steem and Hive have well demonstrated why this is so.
Edit: also, the dust rule is simply economic reality. Transactions on the network have costs, and when they are below the cost of transmitting them, storing them, and etc., doing so drains the network of necessary resources. The dust rule isn't a conspiracy to cheat the poor, but is necessary to prevent spam and infinitesimally tiny transactions that have the same costs as ~$1M transactions from bleeding the network of resources.
That's exactly how it works already as long as you vote within 24 hours.
I agree this is a dumb compromise and a bastardized version of how it should be.
At the same time it's also a reminder of our history of economic policy.
I think the dust rule is mainly in effect if a post/comment is 50/50 hbd/hp, I'm talking to @peakd to see if comments could automatically be set to use 100% power up to give curators and authors a chance to earn even .001 hp if that means the dust threshold can be bypassed in that case. Still checking on the latter.
Only a handful of people make content on web2 for income compared to rest of the users there. To get to a place where u can earn from your content is hard, takes a lot of time, resources, commitment, etc. This also forces people to stand out and put in a lot of effort into the content which drives demand for that content.
Here we don't have any "amazing" content creators so demand is quite low, we're all just regular folks with close to no influence outside of Hive or income from any web2 platforms. There's not many people who would pay to consume the content being produced here, no advertisers, etc.
That's a big reason why it is hard to compare the two platforms with each other. Here anyone can earn something for posting and that's what they'd gravitate towards because that's what's being rewarded, whether it is worth the rewards or not is out of our control as inflation has to go somewhere. So why not direct some of that inflation towards engagement as well? Just because it may cause some people to only comment for the rewards? Why not empower smaller users to be able to reward their engagements with some value if their voting power isn't high enough to get them rewarded? Just because it may reward a few people who are only commenting for the rewards?
Hope you understand that complaining about a project like this generating fake engagement is a bit like complaining hive itself is creating low demand content. It can't be helped at this point in time because we barely have active users and the rewards are skewed towards those posting or curating. We can't figure out how with the current way things operate how it would evolve and scale with 100k or 1m daily users because we haven't gotten there yet.
Yes, we did. Flaggots chased them off the platform, including the 'influencers' like David Pakman that came here before Steem was Steamrolled. You were here then. You should remember. They were so outraged at being taxed by everyone for any reason - or no reason at all - as any business would be in the same circumstance, that everyone with any reach anywhere else on the internet left here with a bad taste in their mouth and spread the word like butter on bread.
PS. That graph in the end of 2021 mainly represents @splinterlands players who we've now found out most weren't even aware they had a hive account or what hive was.
They cross-posted here for years with no attempt or intention to promote their existence even with the advantages it gave and still gives their following. Pakman was the only one who did a couple videos with Steemit regarding the platform but they weren't even shared on web2.
We need influencers who understand why promoting this place is good for them and their following longterm, not influencers who just cross-post their content for extra "free" rewards and never attempt to bring anyone here, I'd rather support non influencers putting in more effort here in that case.
All that said there's still a lot of real and genuine engagement going on here, more than on the copies of our chain and being able to reward that better and easier is a good thing. If you notice people commenting only based on the rewards you can just ignore them. Like I some times notice some leaving quite general AI-generated-sounding comments on my posts, if you don't reward them over time they'll give up, but if you reward the good ones you may get more good comments. It's up to each author themselves and then the curators can notice that and decide to maybe vote the genuine looking posts and comment section more to make up for the rewards forfeited towards engagement.
I could hardly agree more. However, this isn't what you do. You tax authors into penury. That is blatant censorship, and has resulted in an exodus from Hive of >1m actual people that came here and undertook the learning curve to post and gain that economic return for their content Hive advertised.
You kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from doing that.