By Ian Alexander - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25455499
Most of us must have heard about one well-known Steem OG and Hive users who, until very recently, used to post a lot to LeoFinance using his main account and what turned out to be his alt.
People found out that he was selling HIVE and LEO and buying STEEM. That got them pissed off because supporting Steem with high earnings from Hive is not cool after Sun's taking a lot of prominent Hive users' funds.
Fair enough. Stake has spoken. Hive has a common called the reward pool. In fact, it's got several of them. Stakeholders decide together where the rewards should go.
But I've also heard some people say it is always wrong to post more than, say, 2-4 times a day, and that it is particularly wrong to do that with alt accounts that are not clearly recognizable as your alts.
I don't see anything wrong about that so long as you're not using your voting power on voting your own posts to any greater extent than most people here. When that is the case, you're just a prolific content creator. That by itself is not milking the reward pool without regard for the common good, which is using your votes to enhance the social network.
The idea that there is such a thing as posting too frequently seems to rest on some odd assumptions. Namely, that Hive or whatever tribe in question is like a soup kitchen and that posts are like bowls that we bring to the kitchen for the staff to pour soup into. I agree that it would be rude to bring more than one bowl to a soup kitchen line.
However, I don't think anyone should think of content creators as recipients of charity. There should be free and fair competition between posts for curator's attention. Honest posts that are made not just to put out worthless receptacles for self-votes or votes from one's circle jerk that one has worked to create are the result of creative effort and deserve to be on chain. It is up to curators to decide whether or not they want to spend time curating them or to how much of the reward pool they are willing to direct at their creators'
wallets.
To be honest, the idea that we are under some kind of a moral obligation to self-limit the amount of content we publish on chain is weird. Hive does not have a very large number of users or a very large amount of content created per week. The chain isn't running anywhere near capacity. On the contrary, there is a great shortage of content capable of catching the attention of the consuming public. Creating some more won't hurt anyone.
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From what I have seen, the problem is not what it once was some time ago. No need to mention the abusers of the past. Anyone that has been here as long as I have been knows who they were/are.
Abuse is very easily identifiable. I just don't bother with it. I do my best to ensure that my posting is not abusive, at least not in a financial sense which would be detrimental to the HIVE tokenomics or the tokenomics of any of the communities.
One thing I have stopped doing is chasing internal tags. I gear most of my tags towards the content of my post.
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I am not sure it is wrong, but I also think that for the highly rewarded, it is better to limit posting a lot, especially if going to selfvote all of them. If rewarded highly, it should be then about adding in some quality instead, make a brand etc, not just do it solely for the reward.
I used to post a lot, but as my earnings climbed, I scaled back. Not because I want to scale back, but because it is the right thing to do for the community. Yes, people can limit their votes and they don't have to vote - but I suspect that my 5th post of the day would likely still be better than 90% of the platform and deserve rewards as a post. But, what about my behavior?
As I said, posting something to over-reward it with self-votes it is not cool.
I don't think the problem would necessarily be your fifth post earning more than 90% of the posts on the platform if it brought commensurate value to the platform. For example, I like it that Taskmaster posts as much as he does because he's easily one of the best authors on this entire platform. He's someone whose posts are good enough to embed in comments and posts on various fora all over the internet. We have a serious shortage of material that is that good here.
As for using alts to post, I don't think a lot of people who only use a single account for posting everywhere realize how large a part of their rewards are the result of their networking. It's rather foolish to think that making three alts and tripling one's posting volume would result in a tripling of author one's rewards even if the hike in volume did not result in any poorer average post quality.
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I didn't mean the earning, I meant the quality of it. I could sit all day and write and have sometimes thought about running a 24 hour challenge for it :)
The alts aren't that much of an issue, until that person also has significant stake and uses it to upvote the alts multiple times a day, while hiding that they are alts.
I agree if the content were too poor for the rewards. Otherwise, it would be a problem to the extent the community did not use their downvotes to trim the rewards.
I'd say that even with significant stake, creating alts just to be able to self-vote more than is deemed appropriate is a losing strategy in terms of rewards. Users with very large stakes tend to be followed and upvoted by others anyway. Posting with many accounts forfeits that advantage.
Nothing wrong in my book as long as you are adding value with what I would call decent posts. If you have varied interests and are involved in different tribes this could happen quite easily.
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My point exactly!
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It all about selfvote
This is the abuse
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Yeah, I'd say that using too large a share of one's voting power on voting your own posts can not be considered constructive behavior because it neglects to use votes to build the social network. Other stakeholders tend not to be too happy about that.
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Maybe the issue is about piling into the soup kitchen with a bowl the size of a 44 gallon drum twice a day for years, and then selling all that soup to the rival soup kitchen down the road, and then dressing up as a woman and doing it all again, all the while pretending to be a pillar of the community!
I post a lot, but it varies between 0-4 times a day, depending on whether I think I have something of value to say. Many times those posts don’t receive a lot of votes each. That’s the community voting on my content and indicating it’s value at that point in time.
I agree that simply posting a lot is not abuse, it’s what you post and how you vote, and I understand that’s it’s subjective.
Decentralization is great until you do it, and then it’s hard. But worth it.
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Well put.
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