You've made a good post. However, just like I commented on captaindingus' post, I disagree on many of the points.
Issue 1: some people never power up their Hive earnings, send their earnings to exchanges, and don’t own Spellbooks. To me, none of these are problems, except the last one, in regards to getting Splinterlands assets.
Here's how Hive works: person A makes a post, person B upvotes that post, payout day comes and (assuming no other upvotes or downvotes) person A gets half of that upvote value, person B gets the other half. That means the curation account is getting their share no matter what the poster does with their earnings. Since the curation account is Splinterlands, the best possible outcome is that the poster uses those earnings to buy Splinterlands assets. However, it's their earnings, they are free to do as they please with them. Assuming there's no abuse of any kind, they made a post about Splinterlands, followed the rules and they deserve an upvote for whatever size the curation team believes it should get. The post quality is what should determine the upvote, not what people do with their earnings or what's the size of their wallets and how much disposable income they have.
The only part that I agree is that accounts without a Spellbook shouldn't get Splinterlands assets. In fact, I only found out very recently that the art contest pays out packs, which the other contests don't.
Issue 2: This one I agree that it is an issue, simply because the Splinterlands account is getting less rewards. The downvote from the Hive whale is a big insult to the poster. I've gotten a DV that was higher than the upvote I got so it ended up costing me more. All because of a personal issue I have nothing to do with. It's also because the Hive system is flawed but that's another issue I don't want to get into. As for having a bigger curation team: I've tried contacting people about getting on the team and never got a response.
Thank you. I think we have slightly different opinion on the first issue. HIVE is a proof of stake blockchain and with time your stake should grow at least in baby steps. I am not saying that the size of your wallet should determine the size of your rewards, but Splinterlands should encourage at least some accumulation of HIVE rewards.
Otherwise we see here the same extractive behavior as we saw in Splinterlands with bots. The only difference here is that you have human bots which could scale up if HIVE goes higher. Imagine if we only have people who just come in mass and extract everything that would put a constant selling pressure on HIVE. I am not saying you have to stake all the rewards, but right now many participants stake nothing and sell everything they receive. This way they will never be able to contribute back to the blockchain in terms of votes if their HIVE stake is 0 even after years of juicy rewards.
On the second issue I was a recipient of the downvote on several occasions and yes it sucked! But I can understand why he was downvoting Zaku, because Zaku has such a huge upvote he was getting a lot of extra HIVE at the expense of Splinterlands. I don't think it was all personal. I must say I miss Zaku upvotes and wish Splinterlands would fix this issue with late curation and we can have Zaku upvotes back and Splinterlands gets their fair share of curation rewards. @topcomment
I can't have the same opinion. There are already incentives to having high HP. The higher it is, the bigger your upvotes, which means bigger rewards for your curation. Nice upvotes also come with a notification which helps attract attention to yourself. If your post is good it deserves to get rewards because that's already a contribution to the ecosystem.
I don't think it's comparable to the extraction of bots. Bots don't experience joy and don't have time constraints so they can play as much as possible. As long as there's a tiny fraction of profits, they will keep at it.
It was certainly personal towards Zaku and it's terrible. There's no justification for it. To hurt Zaku they decided to hurt the poster and every other upvoter, including Splinterlands. And why do they even care, it's the same payout. Zaku takes more, Splinterlands takes less. The DV just means everyone in that post takes less.
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