posh talk

in #poshlast year

I wrote a statement a couple weeks ago regarding the new changes to Twitter's API. We reached out in their application form for their third tier API structure they'll be selling just to check what's up and turns out they really do expect people to pay $42k/month to increase the API requests to more than the very limited tier 2 at $100/month. Not only is that a highly ridiculous amount which I'm having a hard time seeing anyone pay for it, thus this change eliminating 99% of hobbyists and devs who've integrated their apps or websites to Twitter, but on top of it all do they expect you to be a registered company to request for tier 3.

Basically POSH requires about 3-5x more API requests than the 2nd tier which comes at $100/month which would be manageable. The project and Hive itself is constantly growing though, so we don't see the number of usage and registered users going down. The issue is that the next tier instantly becomes $42k/month, there's no 2.5 Tier for some unknown reason to pay something "reasonable" like $1-2k/month, I personally would've found that respectable and probably used it. Or a tier where you pay based on usage would be acceptable as well.

We also can't limit it in some clever ways like asking people to tweet less or banning people from the program, we'd still have to fetch tweets with the hive tag and links whether they're registered/banned or not. As far as I understand it we can't be selective of who's posh-eligible tweets we scan.

Okay so this means if Twitter goes through with this, at the beginning of next month you'll see the @poshtoken comments stop sharing twitter embeds like they currently do. We'll have to pause it and see if there'll be any solutions in the horizon to get it back to working the way it is now, but worst case scenario if we can't get it back up it'll mean a few things:

The whole automation and ease of sharing your POSH tweets onto the shared posts will be gone. The way payouts work currently where when the author or someone else (for instance the team curating POSH shares at the moment) upvotes them will also cease to exist. Similarly the way we distribute POSH to sharers right now will also stop working. The thing that really annoys me is that some of our future ideas that required this to work will also not come to fruition now due to this, for instance the idea to allow registered users on the website without even a Hive account earn BTC/ETH in the form of POSH and Hive being exchanged and sent to their registered wallet. We were very excited for that idea and have been working on creating profile pages on the website primarily for it, but not all's lost.

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If the API won't be usable anymore we'll have to make due in more manual ways, we'd have to start encouraging sharers to share the embedded tweets themselves again in comments rather than relying on @poshtoken to do it for you. The curation team behind POSH may have to start using Twitter itself to sift through POSH shares listed through the #hive tag and go to the posts to look for the comments the sharers have placed to upvote. This is currently the plan of how we'll switch things up if every other attempt with the API fails. We'll check how that flows and improve from there.

As for the website, we do have more ideas, some that weren't as reliable on the API to continue working that we'd like to evolve the project into and we'll be continuing working on that after some edits to the website and informing people how you can use POSH now (or can't).

As mentioned in my previous post, we plan on making sure we can buy up POSH tokens for those who've invested/earned and would like to exit due to these unfortunate and uncontrolled changes. I'm also personally going to be selling a little of my bags I've bought over the years, not necessarily due to this but it's probably healthier for the project in general that some people don't have too much of the token. On top of it all when I started this project to support the sharing of Hive links on #web2, I told myself I'm not going to be paying myself for the amount of work that went into it. While I have gladly paid people for services, dev work, maintenance, etc for POSH, I've stayed true to not pay myself but instead "put money where my mouth is" and invest into the token with my own Hive. While the goal wasn't really to profit off of it but rather help maintain the price so others got some value out of their sharing, I'm glad it's done well and that I can at least recoup the Hive I've put into it.

I was also going to discuss POSH and the way it's funded as it seems some stakeholders aren't fans of it, but with the upcoming changes I've currently stopped funding it the way we did and will be relying on the already collected funds to keep the project going, evolving and at the same time buy up tokens for the secondary inflation period that's coming up soon.

This means POSH issuance will start decreasing over time as we have to mind the cap on the total supply of 1M tokens. You'll still be able to earn it through delegations and sharing, but the latter may pause at the beginning of the month and we'll have to figure out a different way to allocate tokens to sharers due to the API changes. Either way, both of those issuances will start to drop over time and when it gets to 50% of what it is now, we plan on adding tokens we've bought back instead so the "new token inflation" continues to drop from 50% to 0% while the "bought back tokens" are being fed so delegators and earners still receive rewards. This'll mean POSH will go deflationary by then and issuance will start to depend on how much the project manages to buy back in periods, although we'll try and keep it constant.

Either way, I want to thank everyone who's been a part of this project, grown with it both on Hive and Twitter, and tried their best to get traffic onto our ecosystem and at the same time talk Hive on web2 with other Hivers being around to amplify and support your actions. We're still quite a small project in the general crypto space but I'm happy to know POSH has played a small role in getting people out there and active and at the same time brought some value to our content from outside and inside visitors.

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While these changes are quite a bummer, there's still a lot that POSH can do and become due to its way of token distribution and fair airdrop. We're looking forward to the near future and I'll be a bit busy in the coming weeks to try and shift some of our sharing focus onto other places with some contests and incentives to get things kickstarted. Will post about it soon!

Thanks for reading!

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I’m not a Twitter user myself but the manual way we used to do it was fine. I think people can get into that, we can’t all have things as simple as possible IMO.

This is a move that I’m surprised hasn’t come sooner, as all those API calls Twitter handles in a single day are astronomical. I was listening that this was because largely of Substack. They were using it and making lots of money off it and now Elon is going to also buy substack apparently lol. Not sure about the buying part but to me it makes sense when they are shifting the platform away from data mining users for profit to then charging people to use the platform and other things.

I think we can get past this all!

Yeah honestly I don't mind the costs that are coming up to prevent things like that, and especially all the scams and botnets that currently exist there due to how easy it is to create accounts and have bots run them all over the place.

The shitty thing is that we could've easily covered a reasonable cost, something that I'm sure most botnets or profiteers would've gotten blocked by, but this amount is just too absurd at the current stages where Hive and POSH itself isn't that big. Even if we were a billion $ marketcap it would've probably hurt to pay $500k/year for something as simple as API requests.

While POSH is built to bring value to Hive through visiting links, we've maintained it well where we ban abusers/maximizers/bot users on Twitter and aimed for genuine engagement and growth similar to how we run things on Hive. POSH has in many ways encouraged people here to sign up and use Twitter more often so it's not like POSH was just "extracting" value from Twitter but activity was being created and going back over there as well. I can speak for myself that I wouldn't have been active on there at all if it wasn't for POSH for instance.

Either way, will be interesting to see how these changes will affect Twitter and how we'll adapt. POSH still remains as a very cool project with a unique usecase and fair distribution so the sky's the limit of what we can accomplish with that if we keep working on it and spreading over other usecases.

POSH has in many ways encouraged people here to sign up and use Twitter more often so it's not like POSH was just "extracting" value from Twitter

Definitely, I recently revived my Twitter account for Hive and Posh...

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This must have been a hard post to write !

I've always been torn between understanding the need to reach out to Web2 users and bring them over to the Hive Side, and hating the idea that we have to pay Web2 corporate monsters to do so (or even that we have to have anything to do with Web2 !)

As an interim measure is there anything that could be done with Leo Threads ? I appreciate it becomes more a case of "preaching to the converted", but we wouldn't be haemorrhaging Hive wealth to Twitter so the saving might help cover the rewards. The goal of increasing the adoption rate of Threads (especially if it can be done in a way that raises it's profile outside Hive) seems just as beneficial as putting Hive content onto Twitter to try to entice users over here.

We created a new token that works similarly to POSH for threads/dbuzz/etc. I'm not sure what exactly could be done to drive traffic towards threads other than the people now already on twitter "promoting" hive and threads, many who may be there mostly due to posh.

Hopefully reddit won't end up the same way and we can scale our activity there.

Twitter is becoming something strange. If on one side, Elon was supposed to bring Twitter back to freedom of speech, on the other hand he is making many changes to Twitter that are not really bearable from companies and projects.

I think that either people using POSH on Twitter will post them in specific sections where you can track them easily, or otherwise, you can ask for a weekly recap from each single user. In that way, you will have eventually less users but much more engaged and productive (also less work for PoshToken team to be done). In this case, you can also set that all the rewards for such posts are going to POSH Token, that will distribute the 90% of it to the best users and some random users (to reward also smaller accounts that may have lower chances to make big incomes with their posts).

I am not really familiar with Twitter API, but, can't you purchase different subscriptions with the same account? Or like "gifting" a subscription to the PoshToken Twitter account from another account?

Great points, @lordbutterfly also mentioned the idea to do a "one day of a week" POSH push so we'd remain under the $100/m tier limits but could still utilize the current automated comment sharing.

We'll figure something out, this is nothing but a scratch. :P

Not much of a developer myself but I would guess applications that use signup with twitter and login with twitter are all API requests right? I feel like that's going to kill signup processes for some places.

All of these web2 applications are catering now to big ticket items and while it's going to make them big profits at first it's going to drive people away and be replaced by other applications. This seems to be a constant trend in business and I've seen it happen 3 times in my lifetime already.

Web2 is getting suckier by the day which is great for new web3 applications to start making strides!

Signups we're most likely going to be able to still cover as it won't push us over the 2nd tier limit. Hopefully they won't requests that tier to also be a registered company only.

they really do expect people to pay $42k/month to increase the API requests to more than the very limited tier 2 at $100/month.

I don't see this lasting very long. I doubt if even the multibillion dollar corporations will pay it, so it'll get reviewed and lowered. I'm not worried, things will work out :)

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I think it's really worth the wait. I certainly don't believe in the adequacy of Twitter anymore, maybe there will be an interim rate for that soon.

I present on the menu of my favorite bar 2 kinds of beer, for a dollar and for 100 dollars. And nothing in between... Like, either you drink what you have, or goodbye).

Frankly, I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't expect Twitter to make this kind of nonsense, or did I expect it after Elon, yes, I guess so. Anyway I believe in the future of #Posh and will continue to promote #Hive on web2.

Sounds like a decent plan to salvage this situation.
I really don't understand why they don't have a payment plan based on usage. If they can keep track of your usage then they should be able to bill you for it. Its what all other big companies do...

I think ways will be figured, I did cancel my delegations though because im looking to pump my hive a bit 😂 but I am going to give it a go again soon.

Goodluck with everything in that area bud!

I definitely get the impression Elon wants Twitter to burn to the ground...

It's already valuing less than half of what he paid for.

I think that was by Elon's calculation... but I'm guessing with all the burned advertisers, unpaid bills and upcoming lawsuits its actual value is way way down.

That is such a shame and hopefully it will change as POSH has been very good for Hive!

You can't just buy multiple tier 2 packages then spread the load across them all?

Thing is they may detect that since payment has to occur on each through cards thus considered a sybil attack or to prevent their tiers and they may ban our IP's altogether and maybe even shadowban #hive even more, so there's that risk.

Yeah. If there's that much on the line, it's not worth it. But with such drastic leap in prices, you know people will try. So of course they know people would try. That's not something easily overlooked on their end for sure.

This could also be a sign of some drastic changes down the road they have planned, so the crazy price could be set up to be a deterrent, so when the potential changes do go into effect, fewer are impacted or dependent, leading to less blowback and bad publicity. A strategy.

Time will tell. One can only guess.


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Ohhh no my dearest Posh, this is not fair🥲

I propose to use multiple accounts in Tier 2 and balance themselves based on the needed consumption. It is crazy what they are asking to pay for Tier 3 and I am sure that people will be creative to continue their integrations and keep their Twitter linked businesses alive.

Good explanation @acidyo!!!

There's something I've been asking myself for a few weeks now, twitter and youtube are changing the way they work, to follow the pace of facebook (where boosting is usually hired for greater views.)

However, the question that remains for me is, if youtube/twitter start to "charge" to generate engagement, could it be that this is not the moment that hive can stand out, given the differential of being a propitious moment for a large number of contents and people outside the bubble, because in my opinion if twitter/youtube starts "charging" to disclose something, a lot of people will stop using the tools to get likes.

Thanks for listening to share holders and delegators. I was worried. Why? Cause once ecency boost was introduced and sold in playstore for local currency. Then till today I counted 13 burn L2 token and get a upvote in L1, if they gave in L2 I don't care but it is inorganic way of getting votes. It all started from one point and soon spread. Now in posh case hbdstablizer got funded through comments and it is till today but they also pay back to reward pool while stabilizing hive. So it was a income generating asset for us and still running and auditable algorithm. While auditing of posh funds and it's use is shaking confidence of investors. Not because we don't trust ocd or posh or you. Mostly because I personally fear it will start something similar to ecency boost with new heads appearing everyday. So I don't want projects to use authors reward pool. If they want to be funded then use hive funds or get a sponsor. I believe this will leave more on the table for authors and it was designed for this purpose. Imagine many new projects choicing this path. It will be just out of control to audit anyone. It's too hard to draw a line what is allowed and what project is not. I hope posh team understands this.

Screenshot_2023-04-11-21-30-34-716_app.esteem.mobile.android.jpg

The way it was funded was okay I believe, it had a fair airdrop of only earners receiving tokens, no team allocation or premine so it wasn't favoring anyone in particular and the main point of it was to reward those bringing traffic to Hive and growing their influence on Twitter to promote hive. It's kind of like funding marketing and I don't think there was really a big issue that it was taking it from the rewardspool. While I don't mind doing a proposal for it in the future, if we somehow get past this roadblock, considering how a lot of stakeholders believe post rewards in general are quite big along with the userbase remaining small I don't believe it did any "damage" to the userbase. Many stakeholders, especially those delegating to us were okay with the way it was being funded and from the lack of downvotes after I've talked about it for many years now I figured others were as well. For now I decided to not continue that funding due to the recent API events but if things change I'll be bringing this up again and see what everyone thinks and if there are any good reasons not to fund it this way.

PS. part of the reason we had a lot heavier upvotes the past couple weeks compared to in the past was due to our new "POSH accounts only" liquidator called @nomnomnomnom that takes 0 fee and also sends out l2 tokens which reward.app couldn't/stopped doing. In combination with our recent POSH curation and @poshtoken receiving a lot of delegations it meant that we were dishing out a lot of rewards for sharing which made the liquidator account grow fast and in need of a lot of liquids since the powerdowns couldn't match.

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It does show that relying on a centralised web2 platform leaves us open to certain risks whenever management or their views/goals change. It always felt like a sword of Damocles was hanging over our head imo. 😅

That's a bummer 🙁 I hope you can figure out a different way to do it. Posh is a huge part of Hive.

I don't think having to manually share links is the end of the world. Any thought of adding eligibility for additional social networks? Pinterest and Tumblr come to mind and are places I frequently share links to hive. I know I'm in the minority but I always liked Tumblr better anyway.

Such a shitty high price by musk
Like who does he expects to pay 42k a month 😂

Well I guess you can call whatever price when you've got the blue bird In the cage...


So basically what you're saying may start happening next month to earn posh, is that after we've shared a post on Twitter, we would have to comment the twitter link back on the hive post ?

What a pity. I literally just got into playing with POSH and I love it.

It works super well and is very beneficial for users, with no investment on their part but their time and their connections (which is actually "the gold" online so... POSH - in my short experience with it - was an honest and fair exchange as far as users/partnership goes).

I actually just came to find you to say fucking great token and I'm in. Totally bummed now.

I don't know how the money stuff works. I do know that if you're successful or start to become successful that some folks are going to get rattled and cause a ruckus.

I'll read this again and try to understand the financial side but I don't get that stuff. Really. I do get the admin and the api stuff a bit. Liddle bit.

On my side... for the very generous rewards earned from this exchange, I would totally be more than happy to manually post on Twitter and then head to a totally different website to log the url of my tweet and the url of the post shared, for example. Honestly.

I think the value that people have been getting for such simple admin to tweet from POSH hasn't been a very exchange for you guys, considering the time and resources you've given this project thus far.

This was sad and disappointing to read.

You have my support. There's always a solution 👍

Also. F*ck Twitter anyway. Shocking. Let's figure out way around it...

Some ideas sent on Discord 👍

On we go. 👣

The new changes to Twitter's API will eliminate 99% of hobbyists and developers who integrated their apps or websites to Twitter. The @poshtoken project may have to switch to more manual ways if every other attempt with the API fails.