It is extremely easy to run contests on HIVE. One need simply chose an unused tag or create a community.
Any post that uses the tag or community is a possible entry in the contest. The curators of the contest need simply look at the created page for the tag and upvote entries.
Running and judging a contest is super simple. As such, there has been hundreds of successful contests on the blockchain to date.
So the next question is: How does one judge the fairness of the contests.
This is easy too. One needs to determine the curators of the contest. They can then access the posts for tag and see how well the curator distributed the curation votes (AKA Vests) over the posts. If the curators simply upvoted their posts and failed to upvote the other posts that followed the rules, then the contest is clearly a sham.
I have not figured out how to directly query the blockchain yet; However, I think creating a program to check the fairness of the curation would be child's play.
Peakd.com and other sites have really nice tools for analyzing HIVE accounts. A program to curate the curators is the simple matter of making a similar tool to analyze a tag.
To fairly judge a contest, the person analyzing the contest would need to know the name of the curator account and objective rules of the contest.
I had been interested TheDiaryGame on SteemIt because SteemItBlog put the contest forward as a primary focus of the new platform.
The fact that the contest was funded by the delegations that Justin Sun took from community projects is another story.
On the eighth day of the contest, I looked at the created page for TheDiaryGame tag. I was astonished to see that the curators had missed a third of the posts and were piling curation upvotes on their own accounts.
One August 13 I downloaded the posts for the game using the infinite scroll feature of SteemIt.com. There were 5300 entries from 794 accounts. I then downloaded the curation history for the SteemIt curators.
I made a table that I put on my site that shows all of the accounts with five or more entries in the game. There were over 50 accounts that received no curations.
There was over a dozen accounts that had received 40 curations as of the 13th.
I should point out that there were several hundred complaints about the curation of the game on the SteemItBlog account. If not for the complaints, the curation would have been even more imbalanced.
SteemItBlog says that the unbalanced curation was due to the large response to the contest.
First off, 5300 is not a large number of posts in the Internet age. This is an average number of 400 users a day. Most restaurants serve more than 400 meals a day. Some server several thousand.
What Would It Take to Run an Honest
Justin Sun's SteemIt is a company that took $5 million dollars from its users. I would not expect honesty from TRON, Justin Sun or anyone of his cohorts.
The blatant dishonesty of TheDiaryGame has me wondering: Is it possible to create an honest game?
I concluded my criticism of TheDiaryGame by suggesting that it would be easy to create an honest tag based game.
I think it would be fun to create a tag based contest on HIVE. I think a well designed game on HIVE could get more than 400 posts a day.
I also think it would be easy to create a contest that is demonstrably more honest than the contests hosted by Justin Sun and his merry band of thieves.
I do not have the funds for the rewards pool. Perhaps the rewards pool could be funded by the HIVE DAO and perhaps a few delegations.
The size of the reward does not need to be large. It needs to be over $0.02 to assure the players get the award.
The contest would involve both the creation of a program that tracks the contest and a program that analyzes the distribution of curations from the designated curation account. One could then use the structure to host and analyze other contests.
I have a fun idea in mind, which I will put in my next post if there is any interest in creating an honest tag based game.
I would also love to get feedback on the table I created on my site.
There are over 50 accounts that did not receive curations (some of these may be spammers). The telling thing is that there is over a dozen accounts that received over 40 curations.
Isn't this an audacious level of corruption?
The picture is by photosvit from Big Stock Photo: It is a guy who is overwhelmed by empty binders.
