I've been on Hive for 6 and a half years.
I'm one of the OGs, as they like to be called, which is not be confused with ninja members or genesis users, those came way before me. Those early, really early users like @pharesim, @acidyo and others experienced an incredibly different ecosystem than what we have right now, they actually saw it come to life and grow from a half assed blogging editor to the 100 dApps that Hive has now.
One of the foundations of this ecosystem, or at least the blogging side of this ecosystem was, has been, is, and odds are, it will be, is that Quality Content should get rewarded.
It's a simple premise, but an effective one.
And thus, curation guilds lead by @donkeypong, @kevinwong, @papa-pepper, @instructor2121 and a ton more were born. Most of these curation guilds empowered by their own massive stakes, some backers with even more massive stakes, or simply boosted by a @steemit inc (aka Stinc, or stink for the homies) delegation.
These curation guilds relied on Trails. Delegations were a thing back then, but Curation rewards were too precious to give away, so big users would just follow the vote of these guilds to give them more influence in the reward pool allocation.
It worked, Steem was thriving at first.
But adoption never came. We never went mainstream.
Building a social ecosystem under an erroneous premise?
Now, the title of this post is partly true, and partly just clickbait so that maybe it generates some conversations and dialogue, hopefully.
Have we encouraged content creation on Hive based on erroneous premises?
One of the main Paradigms - perhaps the only one - of curation practices on Hive is that Quality Content should be rewarded, and content of low quality should get low rewards.
If we simplify this, we get this:
Quality = Rewards.
Some Quality content does get rewarded, but not all of it. I'm not here to discuss what gets curated, I want to discuss why it gets curated.
The Quality paradigm is great, don't misunderstand me.
But it doesn't work alone, it never has and it never will.
The main driver for the ninjas and genesis curation guilds to reward quality content was, and to my understanding it still is, that *Quality content will drive adoption and retention because potential users who come to Hive will see amazingly written, superbly formatted, and outstandingly visually supported content, and they will want to stay.
This, in Theory, works wonders. This premise is completely true, these curation guilds were correct at assessing under what foundations they should encourage content creation on Hive.
But what they (we) failed to realize, is that the Curation of Quality content is only half of the equation.
We need traffic
As I mentioned above, and I want to be repetitive, this premise was indeed true, correct and with the best intentions in mind, intentions and ideals that come from being part of something revolutionary that could change how social media works(ed).
It just was not enough. It is still not enough.
One side of the coin is rewarding Quality Content so that potential users see the value in creating and consuming content on Hive.
The other side of the same coin is Actually bringing those potential users, otherwise what's the whole point of rewarding Quality content?
Reward pool distribution, Reward pool abuse, plagiarism policing, the new guy in town called AI content creation and limitations... all of these are important, as long as we are indeed growing, bringing people to the platform, and sharing the table with new hivers. Otherwise, we are failing to see the burning forest because we are too worried about a tree with plague.
Sure, if not dealt with, the tree with plague will infect all the forest eventually, but if we don't deal with the shrinking forest, who cares about the plague because there will be no forest, right?
Expanding the Curation Paradigms
Curating Quality content is valuable, but what if these curation guilds like @ocd, @curangel, @appreciator, @leo.voter, and more, focused in also curating content that drives traffic to Hive?
It's not enough to compose great publications, we also need to share them outside and reach out to content consumers and creators. #posh incentivizes this to a degree, and it was working wonders before X changed their API's rules.
But even then, even if a user shares a post on Instagram, is it really driving traffic to the ecosystem? Is it helping us grow?
Who cares if I, on a daily basis, write a 3,000 word post with self made images, talking about the new shift in institutional investment patterns if only people who are already on Hive will read it?
I mean, I would hope that it gets some votes and all of that of course, but let's compare this post with a One picture post with two paragraphs that the creator shares on Twitter and it goes viral, bringing 10 new Hive users.
Odds are, no curation guild in the history of Hive will actively touch the second post (ok, maybe a couple of them would, but for the wrong reasons). The first one will probably get curated by one, or maybe even two guilds, especially if I am a newbie.
But the second one is helping Hive one hundred times more than the first one, because it is actually pushing adoption and growth towards Hive.
And yet, there hasn't been a single curation guild - and I am guilty of this as I was an important part of OCD for around 3 years - has focused in curating content that drives traffic, no matter the quality of the content.
Quality is subjective, and if a shitty post by my standards shouldn't get curated and yet it brought 3 new users, well then perhaps I should think about expanding my standards.
The best part is that google analytics allows curation guilds to review and track what posts or authors are bringing traffic to the platform, and we could reward them for that.
We wouldn't need to get rid of that first paradigm, the one that encourages us to reward quality content.
But perhaps, it shouldn't be the only curation paradigm we take into account when allocating the reward pool.
Or maybe I am delusional and writing pure horseshit.
But either way, why don't you give me your opinion in the comment section? I would appreciate the dialogue.
Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha
Eric, to be honest I think "quality content" is a bit of a unicorn and even though I was among the OGs who clamored for quality content I have gradually come to the perspective that it's less about quality than about whether something adds value to the community. And "value" is very subjective, depending on who you are, and who you ask.
Part of why I say this actually predates Hive by a good three decades, and goes back to my University days and creative writing courses — one in particular — where the instructor pointed out that when you go to a bookstore, less than ONE PERCENT of what's on the shelves is what you might consider "literature quality" writing, while 99% is pretty much illiterate pop-pulp.
Look at the top names on YouTube, IG, twitter/X, Tiktok and other places and quality is hardly the term that comes to mind. Value also is a more niche-based idea than quality. Photos of cute kittens have value to cat lovers. But unless you happen to be a professional pet photographer quality is dubious.
VALUE, however, is important and matters. I'm not trying to split hairs with semantics here, though. However, let's look around at many of our dApps, quite of few of which are now built around short form/quick content that will never have quality... as you well know, being part of the front marketing wave of LeoFinance's "Threads"* initiative.
But when it comes to attracting new users, the content people find... SPECIFICALLY what a first time visitor who has never been logged in sees... IS super important; a bit like the storefront windows of a shop. And I will say that has improved a lot in the 6 1/2 years I've been part of this gig!
Value comes in many forms. Sometimes (this from my own personal content consumption patterns) the value comes in having favorite authors who produce "reasonably good and interesting content" with consistency and regularity... I know I can find my favorite authors, and I return to read them... and even worry about them, if they miss a couple of weeks. That regularity is another aspect of value.
You've really nailed it here, imho, with your value vs. quality argument.
The issue then becomes: what is valuable to me might be complete garbage to you. That is why we need some level-headed downvote reform. It is far too easy for a whale to massively DV the 'garbage' that I find valuable, which negatively impacts both me and the content creator.
See my comments here for some suggestions on how to potentially reform the system.
There are no popular social media sites with so many hidden rules, so many wannabe moderators telling you what, when and how often you can post, and name calling and intimidating it's users.
Let's also remember that people who don't talk a lot are also part of the community, and have watched the rules, evolve, change, be denied, be enforced selectively, etc.
In order for any kind of mass adoption you need fun, or even a gimmick, the reward pool, and paid posts was perfect for gaining adoption, but many large accounts decided inflation was too high, not enough users, etc, so instead of letting it al balance out and correct the whales decided that the reward pool wasn't meant to promote, but rather is eroding their stake and liquidating their value.
I've been here since 8/2016 - I watched thousands come and go, too many rules, downvoted to death, said something mean to a whale, bored.. etc.
I guess with a busy job, and the 7 year itch, I kind of think well if we haven't grown by now.. will we? Especially when the whales hate the blogging side of the platform.
There is no such thing in social media as quality, it's about engagement and networking, so the idea that each post should be judged according to a subjective benchmark, is not a winning strategy.
Good point, I agree. The big player role model platforms have never specified what a post should look like, so they have neither a Prussian understanding of work (effort, sweat and diligence) nor an artistic high-quality one (good design etc.) communicated. YouTube & Co never did, they didn't tell video content producers that their ten minutes were lousy because filmed with shaky camera or create the billionth cat video.
Every successful media platform that has grown up has in no way dictated or limited the "how" or "what" of content, but merely set the space. This only started when the channels became state-supporting media. Hive is, of course, parsecs away from that.
While you're free to publish whatever you want on YouTube and other platforms, their algorithms filter out low quality.
There are no rules what to publish here either. We don't have algorithms that decide what others get to see, it's all done by humans here. But I don't see that much of a difference as you're trying to imply.
I spoke of those channels in their beginner times.
And you think they didn't curate/have algorithms then? Do you think they filled the homepage and the feeds with completely random content? You don't get users by showing them loads of spam.
Of course. You have to start somewhere. In order to attract you create the lowest barriers. Like a wild west atmosphere. In the beginning, everything is welcomed. If you restrict it/complicate it too much people won't come.
I did not talk about spam. I talk about "junk" or "shit posts", random stuff. People like cats, tits, cutsies, you name it.
Well, you're wrong. YouTube started with manual curation by their team.
https://lsvp.com/for-social-software-user-culture-is-as-important-as-product-features/
[...]
!PGM
BUY AND STAKE THE PGM TO SEND A LOT OF TOKENS!
The tokens that the command sends are: 0.1 PGM-0.1 LVL-0.1 THGAMING-0.05 DEC-15 SBT-1 STARBITS-[0.00000001 BTC (SWAP.BTC) only if you have 2500 PGM in stake or more ]
5000 PGM IN STAKE = 2x rewards!
Discord
Support the curation account @ pgm-curator with a delegation 10 HP - 50 HP - 100 HP - 500 HP - 1000 HP
Get potential votes from @ pgm-curator by paying in PGM, here is a guide
I'm a bot, if you want a hand ask @ zottone444
Those who keep doing chit-chat on discord are the one who benefitted more on Hive.
Agree
That's where me and many others like me loses their identity. We remain stranded and remain mere a spectator some leave and some keep fighting for their existence.
I don't mean to contradict or undermine your point, but you must not have spent much time on Reddit
The early days of reddit were not like that, they kicked in once they had a platform.
And also, you are right, I don't spend time on Reddit
Who knows reddit outside the U.S?
I've been to reddit and I've hated everything about it.
Well put, I couldn't have said it better myself, except; If the stake were more evenly distributed, the whales won't stay whales and they can't have that. Growth isn't really what's on their minds.
Most sites encourage engagement, we have one of our few active large stakeholders telling people to stop posting or to post less often on posts making maybe $1. I just roll my eyes.
!PGM
BUY AND STAKE THE PGM TO SEND A LOT OF TOKENS!
The tokens that the command sends are: 0.1 PGM-0.1 LVL-0.1 THGAMING-0.05 DEC-15 SBT-1 STARBITS-[0.00000001 BTC (SWAP.BTC) only if you have 2500 PGM in stake or more ]
5000 PGM IN STAKE = 2x rewards!
Discord
Support the curation account @ pgm-curator with a delegation 10 HP - 50 HP - 100 HP - 500 HP - 1000 HP
Get potential votes from @ pgm-curator by paying in PGM, here is a guide
I'm a bot, if you want a hand ask @ zottone444
I've mentioned quite a few times, some indirectly, that HIVE is too obsessed with wordcount. There really isn't any need for 1 photo to need to be followed by a 100 word paragraph. Instagram got big just from people sharing random photos. That's what the masses like.
Missing the forest for the trees is indeed a very apt description of what some self professed guardians of the chain are guilty of, with the reason often being "protecting the reward pool". I'd rather grow the pie massively than try to keep more of the pie. Everyone gains far more eventually.
See also this thread https://ecency.com/ocd/@anomadsoul/the-horrendous-failure-of-curating-quality-content#@trostparadox/re-acidyo-rytxtp
Agreed.
For what it is worth, and just my simple observations. It seems this is a place of mostly content creators that also consume. Some maybe don't consume so much. Seems most is mostly auto voting and such. What we need is the pure content consumer. Now would the typical content consumer be interested in anything I write? Doubt it, but I am here for reasons other than just rewards and not selling or marketing anything, so...
Anyway, your idea has merit I beleive. But these frontends need to start making it much easier to share posts on other social media outlets and via other venues as well. For instance, on PeakD you have to scroll all the way to the bottom, click on three dots next to a reblog symbol to find the "share link" option. If you look at most content on Web2, social icons are front and center to share the content.
We do have some content consumers, but they don't comment - which is my arbitrary metric for measuring active content consumers - and I'm guilty of this as well. I read around 100 posts on hive on a daily basis, and I comment in less than 2. I suck, I should comment more but that's a story for another fireplace hehe.
I agree, not everyone has to create amazing content that brings the masses, if we are being honest we don't even have the talent pool to put 100 stupid good posts on trending every day, but we do have a few. Those posts should trend through the guilds' curation.
But then, all the other voting power could be used to encourage users to attract traffic to hive.
So we'd effectively have a community effort where some people create good content and get good rewards, and then the not-so-good content creators who wouldn't earn rewards from votes, would earn rewards through attracting and onboarding users.
And this community effort would work ten times better than what we have right now, don't you think?
Yeah it could probably work. I am all about whatever will help get consumer eyeballs on posts.
I would agree that it is not always the 'best' posts that make the most. The trending page tends to feature the same few people all the time. Some can guarantee to make $50+ on every post for whatever reasons. They may be 'OGs' with lots of connections or be doing work that is seen as good for Hive such as development or marketing. I benefit somewhat from this as I have got to know a lot of people and am on some curation trails.
If you look at the views (on peakd) and/or comments on some of the top posts you may surmise that not many are actually seeing them. It seems rare for a post to get over 1000 views. I heard about some old ones that did recently, but I assume that is because they got linked from some popular forum/reddit/whatever. It did not result in more comments, so those seeing them did not have Hive accounts.
The big curation accounts have massive influence and that may not be a good thing. One reason I want to see a lot more users is that it would spread the votes more. My voting is mostly manual. I delegate to some smaller curation account and have limited automatic voting. I want to target where my votes go.
We have some talented artists and musicians on Hive, but some just get the odd dollar for their efforts. If we want to get more interest in those areas then it may help if they got more support. They are likely to spread the word. The fact is that few will read a 2000 word blog post that may be 'worthy' as it's about the economics of Hive, but people may play a fun song to their friends.
Opinions vary on what has value. Elsewhere online a meme can get millions of views, but they you can argue over who created it. I do not think it's good for Hive if a short post that is popular and earns a few dollars from general support then gets downvoted for being 'low value'. We need to beware of abuse, but Hive needs to be a friendly place where people do not feel scared to post. I have heard plenty say it is hostile even if it may not appear so to some of us.
See also this thread https://ecency.com/ocd/@anomadsoul/the-horrendous-failure-of-curating-quality-content#@trostparadox/re-acidyo-rytxtp
It's not as simple as some people think and the current system mostly works. Those who have an issue with it tend to make a lot of noise. The fact that we can give less DVs than upvotes each day limits the damage.
You can actually give 10 more Dv's a day than upvotes, so this is an incorrect statement.
You can give ten full upvotes per day and recover your voting power over 24 hours. You can only give about two downvotes in the same time. I think that is what this means. There is an account that downvotes me all the time, but their DV mana is down at 1%, so there is no real damage.
The vote weights work identically either way, but you get 10 free dv's before it starts to use your default RCs, so this is incorrect.
DVs use up mana 4x quicker than upvotes according to that FAQ. Please let us know where you get your information.
I didn't know that about the DV mana pool, but I perceive the definition in the FAQ for DVs to only apply to the separate DV mana pool, so I was off on 10 extra DVs as it's +2.5 DVs over UVs. Once your reserve Dv mana is used up, Dvs and UVs on your shared Voting mana pool are equal, so you still potentially get more DVs than UVs.
There's a ton of what I would call "hobby" bloggers here on hive that write about travels and such and get voted out of the woodwork. Issue with these is they simply wont rank and drive traffic nor are these people sharing their blog post on hive with other social networks to drive that traffic and engagement it just sits all on hive.
Many of these hobby bloggers also take their rewards and sell them out of hive which I mean is ok but it's just a constant drain on the hive price when that happens. There are many MANY more factors that should be considered with curation and curation trails but are either far too hard to track, too time consuming or any number of the above things.
Will we get there? I'm not so sure... However I will say I believe we have gotten better. But there's always room to learn, grow and improve and that's something we all should be open to.
I don’t think it has anything to do with quality content. People looking for quality content have thousands of options. And creators of great content are probably off getting book deals or something vs blogging on a blockchain no one has heard of. Above anything Hive is meant to be social media that pays users money. For people to stay they need at least one of two things:
If you have the friends the money doesn’t matter, because interaction is the reward.
If you have revenue, you will stick around to get your lambos.
If you have both, then you are a happy camper.
Yeah, this is why I don't want us to focus on quality, which is often linked to effort, but rather value, from the reader's point of view.
Isn't @arcange or @demotruk tracking the impact of posts in terms of external views?
I don't think we have anything more than the peakd.com views page. That is limited to peakd.com, but that also happens to be our most trafficked site.
If you explore that for a bit, you'll notice that the numbers of views to get to the top are extremely low.
No traffic is landing in our ecosystem. IMO we should consider this the top priority to fix. LEOFinance is considering the approach of sharing ad revenue. I think we should try the avenue of using DHF funds to reward high traffic posts (ideally across all platforms, though that means hive.blog, ecency.com, liketu.com etc. all need to start showing view counters).
Really we should be doing both, because our views are so extremely low that we should consider it an existential matter.
No, we can't track anything in terms of views from the blockchain data. The only ones that can do that are those running a front-end like Peakd, Ecency, Leofinance, ... and they will only be able to track their share of the views.
Quality content - what makes good content can be in the eye of the beholder. Some folks really dig a long, well-thought-out piece with lots of words, while others are happy with a couple of selfies and a few words.
In the past, we've put a lot of effort into driving more people to our site. But when the market dips and rewards aren't as shiny, many of those folks just don't stick around.
I admit I'm one of them in the past and now I'm back again making contents again but this time without any expectation.
Holy shit man, so good to hear from you! If memory doesn't fail me, we met in Lisbon (or was it Krakow?) with Bitrocker and you were part of coingecko? Or damn, am I getting confused here...
The come for the rewards, stay for the community motto was good at one point, but I think that we should (and I think we are) move away from that. People should come for the dapps, stay for the community, and appreciate the cherry on top that rewards represent.
Yes, it's nice to get rewards, but those shouldn't be the main driver of our users, because that's why we've had a 95% (or maybe more? I'm pulling this numbers off my ass) of users leave Hive eventually, because the rewards are not what they expected.
I am glad you are back fren, and I do hope that I remember how we met correctly.
Yup, we met in Krakow with @bitrocker2020, @joannewong, and @elizacheng (the TeamMalaysia gang) haha, it was during SF3. Wish I was part of CoinGecko, but nah, not quite yet, just daydreaming. 😂
I'm with you on this one, mate:
You're spot on! HIVE could really do with a little clean up. They need to spruce up the way they present their dApps, and sweep the non-working ones or the dead projects under the rug. I was a bit baffled trying to find my way around when I first came back, took me a while!
But it's so great to be back, reconnecting with all the old pals and making new ones. It's all good fun!
And, odds are that if that one-picture two-paragraph post did get a few big upvotes, it would also draw one or two big downvotes (to “protect” the rewards pool from that “over rewarded” post). In fact, I would not be surprised if the post ended up downvoted to zero, by one or two whale accounts.
The ability for a single whale account to unilaterally nuke other accounts (with impunity) is a significant problem desperately needing some reform, imho.
That's actully a scary factor and kind of brings up a big negative of hive and curation trails/whales. It effectivly allows a single person or a collective group of a few people that have massive stake to mute or destroy someone on here. That's not such a decentralized thing and I know it's caused some issues in the past. How we solve that I'm unsure unless there was some type of weighted system maybe on whales where after 100k hive it starts to have a degraded vote of 90% of the power and continue to go down from there. I haven't got a clue but that was the first thing that came to mind.
See this thread https://ecency.com/ocd/@anomadsoul/the-horrendous-failure-of-curating-quality-content#@trostparadox/re-acidyo-rytxtp
Limiting whale accounts like that will just cause whales to spread their stake over multiple accounts, completely defeating the limitation.
See my other comments to this post for a couple of my latest suggestions.
Agree that the current downvoting group structure centralizes power to silence people in the hands of a few people.
Why is this brought up so often when it so rarely happens, though? Especially that it gets zero'd out.
It happens enough that not only are current users intimidated, but keeps users away from the platform because of this feature. I've used many other blockchain platforms and because of Hive's reputation they'll never sign up. More people know about Hive than is thought and they'll never come, because unequally weighted downvotes are equated with censorship.
Rationalize all you want, it's how it's viewed and that's what matters. The masses aren't going to blog, so if you want them to come, standards must be lowered and whales must settle for smaller votes as 'crap' content earns and those users build stake.
It's that or stagnation and the proof is that Hive's userbase is now smaller than ever...
You might want to read the thread under @trustparadox's reply to acidyo.
I did
Because it’s a systemic problem. The system itself has a problem.
Whether or not the abuse is rare is not the issue. The fact that the system allows such abuse with impunity is the problem.
The fact that it is brought up so often should, in and of itself, be a strong indicator to those who have the power to initiate change that some serious consideration is warranted.
Some fairly straightforward countermeasures would go a long way toward minimizing the threat.
One simple improvement would be making DV power a witness parameter, similar to HBD APY.
Another would be to allow free “Counter DVs” that are less powerful than DVs, but free, and can thus be used by “the community” to proactively counter DV abuse.
Yeah I just feel it's brought up way more than it actually occurs, and some times in posts that were barely even relevant. It's quite a complex situation to fix, I'm not denying that it can be a big problem down the line. I mean imagine if someone like Elon has been buying up stake over the years and decides to fuck over everyone here after powering up just so the system doesn't become a competitor.
Either way, I'd love to discuss possible solutions, do some simulations through them to see weaknesses and how they could potentially be abused as well, etc, just a bit tired of hearing the same complaints over and over without many not even attempting to come up with a solution or discussing them (not you, I know you've proposed some ideas in the past similar to now, but it's just not been something that has clicked for me or felt right yet).
Would it be possible to set up guest accounts on Hive without official registration? One feature of easy access is commenting.
I often feel the need to simply react to certain content on platforms by commenting without having to register straight away. Not everyone wants to have their own account and produce content. The registration requirement is present on all major platforms and it's annoying when you really only want to comment, nothing more.
I think this possibility is underestimated.
Especially if you can comment without registering, it seems to me that in the long run it will bring new users who first get used to the platform without becoming immediate actors themselves. Since almost all forums/sites have a registration requirement nowadays, that would probably be a unique selling point again.
I suppose it would also encourage the easy sharing of content, because if non-hivers can react to content by commenting because, for example, a post was shared on fb, yt or others and they saw it and want to react to it. It could then be shared even more for this reason of easy access.
A second aspect that is probably less considered is that of unbiased commenting, when users who do not receive votes can also speak freely as guest commentators, since they receive neither rewards nor downvotes anyway.
I would find it interesting if only because it enriches publications with guests who don't look at rewards or whether they could make themselves popular or unpopular.
@starkerz and @theycallmedan (@threespeak, @spknetwork) are working on tying ceramic accounts to Hive. The idea is that you can easily start posting and commenting simply by linking your email address or some other identification method to a ceramic/Hive account. The account can receive upvotes and any earnings from your comments would be exclusively associated with you. At some point in the future you can claim those rewards by following through with the full onboarding process.
Also, @anomadsoul and the Leo folks are doing something similar, see their recent DHF proposal where they explain their plan for One-Click Onboarding (and add your support to the proposal, if you think what they're planning to do seems worthwhile).
Thank you very much for this info. One-click onboarding sounds good.
I did this on Steemit and called them Guest accounts. I published posts that described Steemit and contained the posting key. I invited people to use Guest1 as the username and paste the posting key into the password box. It was very simple and worked. This let them comment on posts and get feedback. I think it helped them form a bond to the platform.
Very interesting. Have you already considered this for Hive? How did you monitor whether the guest commenters actually used guest1 etc. as their username and was it safe for you to give out the posting key? That is, the use of usernames that already exist as their own account did not lead to confusion? Not that there aren't some jokers out there.
That idea of a system where downvotes are measured through a similar way we provide witness approvals would go a long way. Instead of HivePower determining the influence of a downvote, the community would have to vote for you to have your downvotes have certain power.
Granted someone could just vote for their alt and give it nuking power, so this measure would need some tweaking, but I like it. Either the community gives you the power to downvote hard, or your downvotes is worth pennies.
I think this idea has merit. I think it may require quite a bit of changes to Hive code. But it is just as valuable to the future as other software changes, so hopefully it gathers support.
Exactly.
Please look at my blog. You will see several posts with over 200 upvotes and zero rewards.
and what have you done to get hivewatchers downvoting you?
To be more precise Hive watchers stopped voting my posts to zero over a year ago. It was only after someone commented on my five year anniversary post that they were not impressed with my self upvotes that an account called adm started voting my posts to zero again.
Reused my own content: words and pictures and most recently upvoted my posts with my stake.
Reposting or just re-using here and there?
I would repost.
I stopped this practice more then 2 years ago, because I decided I was being lazy, and I had an endless supply of ideas coming out of my head.
Although I certainly wrote some posts that I felt were good enough to repeat.
Hivewatcher's bot Spaminator eventually stopped downvoting my posts to zero after a few months I think.
But after that they still gave me a downvote on every post, but it was really small. it was a constant reminder not to fall back into the habit of reposting.
Unfortunately I am still technically Blacklisted, so every so often someone who doesn't work for Hivewatchers, but looks up their blacklists will vote my posts to zero .
Unfortunately in April I had my fifth year anniversary and wrote two posts on two consecutuve days. The second post focused on the 80 or 90 thousand upvotes I had given out and how that reflected a focus on engagement. I credited my ability to receive upvotes to my willingness to give out a large number of votes, focusing on the importance of engagement and interaction with others as vital to bulding a network of followers.
Someone read the post and posted a picture in the comments of a chart of votes I had given my self. They were very angry, and soon after that both posts were voted to zero. A suprisingly angry response, and the downvotes came from a new account I hadn't seen before , which was precisely downvoting my posts exactly to zero. An amazing amount of effort to punish me I guess for boasting and voting my own posts.
It's fascinating how I had the badluck to stumble into the radar of someone who gets really angry about self upvoting and has friends willing to downvote people to zero for it.
It is unpleasant and disaapointing to see good posts earn nothing, but I know many people feel there is no alternative then this one tool . It seems that everyone in the blacklist is a nail, and they all get the same hammer, until the downvoter decides to stop. Such is the random nature of things on a large platform.
I understand we all have stake, and do what we wish with it, including some do this. It's a strange type of freedom, which ironically also involves pressuring someone to stop doing what they would like to do, or suffer the wrath of someone with more stake. No system is perfect, but this part is disappointing.
Please look at my blog. You will find several posts with over 200 upvotes, but purposely zeroed out rewards.
Yes, but if there were other metrics to measure what deserves rewards apart from Quality and engagement in the post, then I think the reward pool distribution measures - those that we support or we don't - would perhaps change and adapt to the new common agreement.
Who cares if it's a dog picture and three lines of text, if the dog is the most famous canine on Reddit and it brings 47 redditors to check the post out on hive?
I absolutely agree with this. However, even if such metrics existed, under the current protocols, one whale account can still wreak havoc, with impunity. The “with impunity” part is the problem. There are no robust defenses against such abuse.
That's why you use the Leo frontend with no downvotes. Your Hive rewards might take a hit, but you still earn Leo, which you can spend just as well.
True for now, but khals posts suggest downvotes are coming.
That'll be unfortunate, because that would be the only reason the masses would come back. It's the downvotes that caused so many to leave and even more to never come.
I agree.
Good point. This is social media and posts which stimulate people to be social and join your platform are I think an important part of growth.
Quality may not be enough #fun. Think threads makes things more fun. @pepetoken came here for the #memes. Where quality may of a different kin(d) or perspective. Yes to moar traffic. But also yes to the niche, the groups nad different ideas and communities are deventralized to just themselves to various degrees that are simply not of mainstream. Yet do well on their own with the right backing and support of some that have found their way with Hive, some from pre-Hive (steem) days.
i haven't been here that long but i just read what whatsup said :P and i think I will agree with what he said. it's difficult to get new people here i dont think writing a post will make people come here and even if they do how long will they be here. ive tried getting friends to join and they gave up prretty quick so i think its more than just a curation problem . we need to look at the roots
I agree. I invited one of my friends to join hive. He only stayed here for about a month. Few times I tried to convince him to start writing posts but he did not listen. He only relied on curation.
O.O how did you know i commented here lol u see me everywhere. Exactly it's difficult to start on hive unless u join contests first and build up from there as there won't be much support. it seems like it incentives u to join more circles and then u will do well i guess so in a way make more friends?
See this thread too
https://ecency.com/ocd/@anomadsoul/the-horrendous-failure-of-curating-quality-content#@trostparadox/re-acidyo-rytxtp
you bring up a good point hope u can push out your solution or someone can provide a solution to this clear issue or things just stay as is because nobody wants to change
One problem is, that everybody has a different idea of what quality means. Quality for user A is a sleeping pill for user B.
And the other problem is - rewards are by far not only depending on quality. As a long time user you will know what I'm talking about. All the time - also the time when it still was Steemit - we are struggling with nepotism or outright fraud and con artists.
I guess the biggest problem for Hive is what makes it unique (well almost unique) - the reward system. Without the financial aspect all that wouldn't even happen at all. And most people wouldn't be here, I guess, quality content or not.
Bringing traffic to Hive would be a new great variable for curation!
I am trying to setup a small curation trails that would also take that into consideration. I am not alone in doing that and I hope I will be able to present you some first practical ideas about how we would like to put it onto the ground to make it work and support "border contents" & "traffic contents"
Haha. Reminds me when I used to think what do people who write about makeup and the sports commentary do. A lot of people on that niche get voted in 20USD or so worth of vote in some communities. I suppose sometimes we have to expand the shell where we are exposed to. I mostly am in STEM, Programming related shell but I do explore outside and kind of make me wonder on other niche and the quality but I let those expert in that niche deal with that.
Exactly, I have my own opinions on videos of people thinking, but I am not an expert on that niche and I have no idea what brings value and what takes value. Hey if a karaoke girl can make hive trend in youtube who cares if the song is shit or if she's selling all her rewards. The net value she brings is positive.
I am a rookie JS programmer, so nice to hear of another fellow dev man!
Eu posso agregar um pouco nesta conversa, mas se eu fizer isso você não vai me entender (suponho).
E se eu mudar de língua através de um tradutor, é provável que algo da comunicação se perca. Vou tentar.
As duas coisas são necessárias.
Uma delas atrai novos usuários, mostra que aqui pode ser um lugar legal, divertido, sério, confuso e muitas outras coisas. A outra ajuda a segurar o usuário aqui no longo período de incubação que é o pós-ingresso na Hive e, ou seja, se manter na Hive.
E talvez, somente estas duas não sejam suficientes, e serão necessárias novas formas de interação que irão complementar a dinâmica de relações entre o usuário interno, externo, as curadorias e as recompensas. Se em um jogo de futebol são 11 jogadores em campo, estamos apenas com 2 jogando a partida. Por quê estamos "perdendo" (se é que estamos)?
Acredito que a resposta final é que novas formas de interação são necessárias e serão criadas em algum momento, fazendo com que consigamos furar a bolha, dar visibilidade à rede, atrair novos usuários, manter os novos usuários, e assim fazer o que suponho seja a vontade de todos, que é o crescimento sustentável da rede Hive.
my best regards
Many communities say they want fresh content that's not already written about online. This is the problem, because people search the internet for answers to their questions, whether it be how to do something or about a travel destination. We need to supply answers to those questions and get that content high up in the search results of search engines.
We need to compete with platforms that supply those answers, like YouTube if we want to become valid. Posting a photo album of your vacation with little useful information for your readers is not doing that. I don't know you, so your family trip is not of interest to me. Tell me something to help me make a decision to visit the same destination or not.
That's what will bring people here. On top of that it's free advertising that's way more effective than any ad you pay to run on the big web2 platforms.
Very well presented post and I hope that the intended target audience are taking note, and that includes your comment section too. I’ve recently highlighted 2 authors who have been deemed to be unworthy of rewards, one of which has now left Hive. I imaging these authors potentially bring more traffic to hive than I ever could. I enjoy writing and make plenty of effort when creating content but it’s never bothered me to see someone get rewarded for a few lines of text and a picture. Plenty of enjoyment can be found with posts like those, and aren’t we supposed to be creating an enjoyable platform? It’s time the old guard submitted to the idea that not all quick posts are shit posts and not everyone who creates this shorthand content is necessarily farming rewards. More often than not I’d say these creators are replicating what they do on other more successful platforms and bringing that to Hive. It’s a shame to see these accounts earn rewards, begin to establish themselves, and then get noticed by an disapproving whale.
As others have pointed out, there is no central repository for front end analytics, which means that there is no way to accurately determine the number of views a post achieves network wide that come from outside of Hive. Sites could voluntarily forward their statistics, but confirming their accuracy would not be straightforward. Additionally, do we really want to trust Google with having a hand in the distribution of the Hive rewards pool? (Google Analytics is the industry standard currently).
There are open source analytics systems that could be used, but they could also be abused.
I think monitoring the onboarding and activity of new users is a more reliable approach to tracking marketing success of different users and apps - but that's also not straightforward and the more rewards can be gained by it, the more effort will go into gaming it.
As others have also kind of pointed out - since quality is entirely subjective, we end up with the content being rewarded that the community likes. Since it is all stake weighted, those with more stake shape the narrative and visibility of posts on the network overall. Despite claims like 'no-one looks at the homepage' (totally untrue), the reality is that rewarding posts well does make them more visible in many ways.. and this is a genius idea.
There are several common problems I can see that result in missed growth/SEO/marketing optimisation opportunities for posts and lists on Hive:
What one person may personally like is not necessarily what the rest of the world likes. So truly quality curation that drives traffic will take into account current trends and the posts that drive traffic. Doing this requires having an eagle eye on SEO trends and social media stats from Web 2 sites. I am not aware of any curators that have even spoken about this on chain.
As you pointed out, posts that go viral on web 2 are often quite simplistic and/or they come from 'big channels' - meaning they are produced by content creators that have large followings and decent production budgets/skill. Neither of these categories are well respected on Hive. Simple posts are likely overlooked for being too 'lazy' or they are downvoted for being 'exploitative' if they get upvoted. The only channels I am aware of that post 'big channel' content on Hive are @tdvtv and @cast.garden - who either syndicate content on behalf of 'big channel' users or actually have those users using their site. These guys take the biggest downvotes currently - EVEN WHEN THEY SET THE POSTS TO BURN THE REWARDS! Just go and look at the history of Vigilante.TV and Cast Garden (or monitor the untrending report that tracks downvotes to see for yourself). So clearly, the bigger curators are missing big opportunities from a content optimisation perspective. It's true that there are counter arguments, such as that the content creators don't often engage the community here - but genuinely, having listened to the few of them that have commented on this (james corbett, max igan, pressfortruth etc.), they have all specifically said that they are put off from using Hive due to all the downvotes. Even after the situation is explained to them they still choose to stick to other networks as it is a matter of principle for them. Something to consider.
In short, there is no agreed upon marketing strategy and little appreciation of SEO or viral marketing among the curators from what I can tell. This is all reinforced by the lack of real world data to clarify what is really going on to the curators.
This seems to be an area where centralisation actually offers an answer, in that front ends which combine analysis of the real world data they collect from web 2, tied in to referring hive accounts, stand a chance of curating the right content to grow the network (and their own site). If they can also mitigate any downvotes they might attract in the process, then they are probably going to grow more than other Hive UIs.. maybe that's the best we can do for now.
You missed an asterisk here lol. Just sayin'.
That's always been a problem, subjectivity.
I think some shit posts are quality. I mean they bring me more joy than shady investment advice. Some days I log in and this place is a chore for sure. Others I love it.
Since I am not one to write quality content, I will summarize it in a question: who would attract more traffic to Hive, Kim Kardashian or Annie Ernaux (Nobel Prize for Literature)?
Some are completely wrong if they want to grow Hive but that doesn't matter because the rules are clear. Send who has more HP!
I mean to be honest, I feel like it's working overall so much better than 2-3 years ago. It's not perfect by any means, but subjectively speaking I feel it's not bad. Many new users get some smaller to decent sized votes and often those payouts actually end up making a difference to them as they might come from countries where a couple of cents a day is a big deal. Curators are mainly here because people don't want to vote themselves and/or want to make passive income on their stake and I reckon it's really not easy to read through all the stuff and pick "quality" content. so kudos to you! I have often felt that having the option of displaying posts by their number of votes instead of their payout rewards would really make it easier to spot actually engaging posts. Peakd has "most viewed posts", but getting a "most votes" filter would be better imo @peakd
We just hit an all time low in the number of users who joined and posted within 30 days in June.
We have gotten better at policing the raw exploitation of the reward pool (a comparison to steemit.com shows this plainly), but our traffic and rate of new joiners is flatlining.
I was referring to the practice of curation and upvotes in general. You will notice a correlation of users and price of Hive (it's for every chain like this). It will pick up when price goes up and v.v.; I am very certain that price > users and not users > price. But we still obviously have to keep building here if we want more adoption
This can be determined by statistical analysis. It's probably about time someone determined this for good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granger_causality
I mean it makes more sense as well: price increases > attention/rewards/engagement increases. But an influx of more users does not necessarily increase price imo. Only if they actually take the step to buy it off of the market which I guess rarely happens at large.
I think the traffic/user count on hive is comparable as transaction volume of other coins on popular dex/cex, or wallets/activity on other chain, or even CT activities.
I think that creating a content that attracts new users is even harder than making quality content. Sometimes I share my posts on facebook but at most they get a few likes. The same happens when I share my art photos from my art page. On twitter one or few of my videos had nearly a hundred views but no likes or retweets.
Traffic: Posting on traditional SM while including the link to say the "original" piece of content here on Hive does attract new users. 1. Having a generous follower base on traditional SM obviously helps. 2. Once a potential new user lands on Hive the struggle of signing up and understanding the platform (which is far from being intuitive) begins. Using Google Analytics and other measurement tools to reward accounts for their onboarding efforts (success) and for generating traffic is definitely a good idea.
Quality content: That's a highly debatable topic. Is a post with what you had for breakfast with five emojis underneath a quality post? And yet some of these generate two digit rewards here on Hive; a similar trend we see on Insta or Tik Tok. I think communities are a good option to tackle the concept of quality content. The initiative Leo started to reward authors who win contests within communities provides an interesting guideline and filter for future projects.
I think that Hive should consider its niche.
Hive isn't in competition with the big social media sites, like twitter. The rewards pool isn't large enough to be a consideration for celebrities, nor influencers. They can monetise their followings to a much greater extent on twitter / instagram / youtube etc. And mass adoption on such sites follows celebrities.
Hive instead tends to compete with long-form content on blogs / Medium etc. But even here committed bloggers have greater potential for earning by setting up their own site.
So, for me at least, the premise of "come to Hive to earn money for quality content" doesn't hold water. Mainstream content producers can earn much more elsewhere. Better long-form content will always be elsewhere.
What Hive does very well is build communities. It's more like reddit, or even discord, in that respect. For me, that should be the focus.
As such, I think that requiring "quality content" actually reduces the attractiveness of Hive. Most people out there are more likely to "comment" than "post" and requiring longer-form quality content raises the bar to a high level which people are unwilling to make. And since the majority of content rewards are reserved for posts, this turns away the majority of potential users.
If the niche is to be more like reddit and the goal is mass adoption, then the focus should be on growing communities and rewarding content that generates discussion and engagement. I would think it's worth an experiment where communities focus on short-form posts (with a specific tag) and curation guilds drive rewards to those communities that are growing and to those accounts that generate discussion within those communities.
There is so much intel and info in this comment I don't know where to start, so I'll start shilly to then, depending on your response, I will continue on.
Have you seen this?
https://leofinance.io/communities/hive-124452
Each community has its own threads section. The backend work was a pain in the ass, but the frontend now shows community discussions in the form of Threads.
Yes, I think this is the right direction. Although it still feels like a competitor for twitter rather than reddit / discord.
The latter tend to have communities as the driving force. Then the threads (community discussions) would be one tool that the community can use, along with their own token for rewards etc.
Thinking along the lines of discord, I think it could be easier to sign up communities who bring users with them than sign up users individually.
But the offering for the community needs to be strong. All the tools you need to run a web3 style community but simple user experience.
This probably means native tokens and NFTs, rather than relying on hive-engine.
It may even be cleaner as a fork of hive entirely, to separate from the long-form approach, although these things are very hard to get off the ground.
If we wont get an internal engagement and support on own content, then how it help to get traffic from outside?
The curation on #Hive has becomes so generic, be it #curangel #ocdb or others. Being a curator myself of a small community. I can easily figure out which post going to get upvotes from the top guilds and whales. On daily basis 90% of them stands true.
As far as quality content matters, taking an example of my own work. I am writing a series on a particular topic, after doing self investigation. Already published 3 part of it, but not once got any feedback except from our own curation team. Neither from the community where i published nor from any other member. Does that mean, my content is bad or not upto the standard.?
If i did something wrong in Part 1, or Part 2 or Part 3 it needs to be highlighted for further improvement. Who going to judge if not the community. Any outsider will come ahead to let our mistakes know?.
Over 6 years of stay, I noticed those who remain active on discord get good support. Engaging on #Hive have nothing to do. It asks for spending more time on Discord to get the users or guilds attention?
So shall we asks users to remain active on #Hive or #discord. Not everybody has so much time to stay 24*7 active.
I can dig it and that's a huge part of my hive growth initiative, we need to make our blogs for the world in mind not just hive and curation of onboarding posts are way better for the ecosystem
The worst part of Hive is that quality content posts don't get any rewards if you don't know people who have invested in Hive. People mostly vote for their friends or people from same communities.
It is Social Media, you have to interact.
Right, which validates his statement. It's about relationships, not content.
Yeah. I think value is perceived by everyone differently.. I post my music on here and usually say a little blurb, but not too much.. The words are in the Songs an if I tell you what its about, I ruin it for you. Its up to the listener to decide if they like it or not and maybe give it a thumbs up.. I have been asked before to say more about my posts, but if the person actually listened to the Song, they probably would have abstained from the criticism. Traffic, yes is still an issue.. There must be a way for Hive to get the word out.. I have been telling normies about Hive for Years now.. They've never heard of it. I joined before "the fork", so I've been around a while now. Hive is one of our best chances to have a parallel ecosystem to the tirany that is heading our way..
https://leofinance.io/threads/theb0red1/re-theb0red1-2uzqrdd4z
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people ( theb0red1 ) sharing the post on LeoThreads,LikeTu,dBuzz.
I think we can have a bracketing system for authors and the curation they are eligible for. Like a tier system. It could help in both quality and rerention.
Maybe a tag like #TheHiveIsRising or similar, to use simultaneously on all platforms in a concentrated campaign, Twitter, Insta, Facebook, all of them. With a Zealy contest even...
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I am new here, but I would want to know what exactly is your criteria for a quality as an OG of the platform please
In professional wrestling, two kinds of wrestlers are necessary for its survival: babyfaces and heels. Babyfaces are the good guys, the heroes. A really good babyface can sell out an arena. Heels, on the other hand, are the bad guys, the villains. A really good heel can generate so much buzz around an event that TV ratings or par-per-view numbers are off the charts.
So you can imagine when the top babyface and the top heel face off at the main event. Box office gold, high ratings, and insane PPV purchases even at outrageous prices.
The babyface needs the heel as much as the heel needs the babyface-- and the organization needs them both.
This is what came to mind as I read your post about paradigms for curation. What most people think about for curation-- rewarding quality content-- is the babyface. Rewarding for boosting traffic from the outside (even if its shitposts), is the heel. If we can find a way to maximize rewards for both, then we have something.
Just as both top babyfaces and top heels put fannies in the seats, we need to get more eyeballs on the content we generate. That doesn't happen if people don't show up. We could have J. K. Rowling and Stephen King posting content here, but it won't matter if only the 8 of us here check it out.
It's too late for me to upvote this post, so please accept this slice of !PIZZA, this bit of !LUV, and an !LOL / !LOLZ
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Curation should be based on value.
Quality is value, likewise attractiveness.
But even at curating the attractive ones, quality should be seriously considered to meet a certain standard.
Thanks for seeking my opinion.
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First, I like the idea of bringing up posts which direct traffics as worthy of rewards. I think it is indeed important for growth for people to click those links and comeback to Leofinance and Hive. Curation is tricky but important and efforts to improve it on Leofinance seem popular. I think especially amongst the newer members with small networks.
I think Leofinance has been talking about rewarding Leopower to Leopower stakers and potentially those whose posts generate traffic. I think this is a good idea.
Second, the comments section brought up other points impeding Hives growth, mainly downvotes. Hive has reputation for having a downvote culture and this on top of the steep learning curve is a factor, I think, in the lack of growth.
Personally I wish Dan Larimer was more active here to help guide Hive in a more of a reward what you like and ignore what you don’t like mentality, and reduce or redirect resources from downvotes to finding new accounts, curating them, providing positive feedback and gentle guidance.
Censorship via removing rewards or removing reputation and rendering peoples posts invisible are called everything except what they look like, which is censorship. If you get 200 plus votes, but a whale downvotes your rewards to zero you can’t make it to trending and your voice is effectively silenced.
On a more sensitive note; When Hive split off Steemit, I thought Steemit would become a ghost town. But it didn’t and relatively large communities stayed there.
I think it suggests that not everyone feared the authoritarian behavior of the new leadership as much as they feared the authoritarian behavior of the old leadership, not all, but some of the people who moved to Hive were not missed on Steemit.
I realize these are sensitive subjects, but it’s important to realize Hive isn’t a perfect place, it has issues restricting its growth. I am proposing one idea as part of a solution, but not as a magic bullet. Because Hive issues are multi factorial and because reputations are hard to change. But important first steps are one you have suggested :to stop talking to the choir about the choir, tell people outside the community. And stop chasing away new members, and stop chasing away old members if real growth is the goal.