I almost stepped on this wonderful little creature. It was very upset with my carelessness. I suspect that it is a gopher snake.
I took the picture in zoom mode with my NIKON D90. You can see the poor little guy was in a striking pose. Looking the picture I regret that I did not switch the camera to video mode as a video would show the agitation.
Anyway, I thought the picture would go well with a post about people who hold multiple accounts.
Are the people with multiple accounts good netizens or are they just sneaky snakes in the grass.
HIVE accounts are interesting in that the accounts have a financial component. Each account is really just a ledger of transactions on a blockchain.
I started HIVE with a personal account. I decided to create a business account so that I could keep a separate business and personal account. I even created a coin (the OMA) so that I can transfer funds between the accounts.
Having a separate business account means that I can list the HIVE account as an asset of the business. If ever I sell the business, I could transfer the HIVE account to the new owner with the business.
The business in question has multiple components. I've been considering the creation of a second business account; so that I could have separate accounts for the different business components.
Quite frankly, I think that anyone who is working on an online business should have a separate business and personal accounts.
Multiple Accounts and Community Development
There are many other legitimate reasons to create multiple accounts.
Some functions on HIVE actually require the creation of accounts. For example, HIVE communities are group owned accounts. When I ran the command to create the Review the World Community, HIVE created a user account for the community with the address @hive-173119 .
I've noticed that developers on HIVE tend to create accounts for each of their projects. For example: @fraenk created @dustbunny to help new users sweep deal with the problem of HIVE dust. The DustBunny bot needs to have its own separate account.
It is wise to have different accounts for different programs. As I recall, developers are required to create a new account if they want to use Hivesigner's oauth.
People who create tokens, interfaces and contests for HIVE tend to create new accounts for each of their creations.
Curation is a very important aspect of life on HIVE. I've noticed that some people create accounts specifically for curation purposes. As the number of alt-coins on HIVE explodes, I would expect to see a proliferation of accounts for curation projects.
I have only a few hundred dollars in alt-coins at the moment. This few hundred dollars is spread over a large number of different alt coins. I am following different projects like ProofOfBrain, #Archon, CreativeCoin, LEO, etc. Because my votes are spread over a large number of different projects, I do not realize the full curation value of my coins.
If I were to invest thousands of dollars in a curation project, I would consider creating a specific account for the curation project. That way I would realize the full bang of my alt-coin investments.
As the number of alt-coins proliferate, I suspect that we will start seeing accounts created for specific curation tasks.
Questionable Motives for Creating Accounts
I think that most people who create new accounts have legitimate motives for their actions. There are bad motives for creating multiple accounts. There are people who created multiple accounts for spam or fraud. There are people who create accounts to squat on a name or to engage in harassment.
I've encountered a few people who started their account off poorly. For example, it is not uncommon for newbies to use copyrighted images off the internet for their posts. Some people start with plagiarized content. #Hivewatchers is known to downvote such accounts into submission.
I suspect that some of the users simply abandoned their first account and started a second account.
Multiple Accounts on Other Platforms
Account proliferation is not unique to HIVE.
I have multiple accounts on other social media platforms as well. I have a personal account and a business account on both Facebook and Twitter. I chose this structure because I wanted to keep the tweets separate. It also allows me to sell the business at a later date.
Blogger is a publishing platform. When I was using blogger, I would create a separate account for each subject I explored. Tumblr is a photo sharing platform. I live in the Mountain West. I created Tumblrs that show shared photos from Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. I have a different site for each state. This way the galleries could have radically different URLS and focus on different subjects.
It is not uncommon for people to have multiple accounts. Smart social media sites provide tools to assist in the creation of multiple accounts.
Conclusion
There are many legimate reasons for having multiple accounts HIVE. Community projects need to have separate accounts.
Developers need to have separate accounts for each of their projects.
People who blog on radically different topics should have different accounts that focus on the different topics.
People with businesses should have both a business account and personal account.
People who want to engage in dedicated curation projects are wise to create separate accounts for the curation projects.
People who have legitimate reasons to create accounts are not engaged in subterfuge. In most cases they are doing the opposite. By creating separate accounts for different activities, they clarify what they are doing.
Having multiple accounts is not necessarily a bad thing. It should be possible to determine if the holder of multiple accounts is up to good or no good by simply looking at the different accounts. If the accounts appear to have different purposes, then the account holder is most likely driven by positive motivations.
Do you think that HIVE benefits by people creating multiple accounts, or do you view folks like me, who use multiple accounts, as snakes in the grass?
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As long as people know why you have multiple accounts, there is nothing wrong with having them. What you said about having business-related accounts makes perfect sense and is totally valid.
When I was here for just a few weeks and my earnings were close to nothing I created a 2nd account to start over and avoid mistakes I made with the original account. It turns out I didn't have to use that 2nd account much or at all, so I keep it for emergency purposes or if I have content appropriate for it. The name for that account is unrelated to the name I use here, and I created the account directly (no referral link).
Recently I created a 3rd account so that I can make posts on D.Buzz. I discovered that many people don't want to see D.Buzz posts on their feeds from people they follow, so I set up my account for that reason as I use that account to promote content I publish with my original account. For that account, I used my referral link.
It's too late for me to upvote this post, so please have a slice of !PIZZA instead.
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@yintercept! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @magnacarta.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza (1/10)
Thanks for the !PIZZA .
It turns out that having multiple accounts are great for curation.
I've been complaining about tag spam . For example, it seems to me that many people are abusing the creativecoin tag. So, I decided to liquidate the CCC in my primary account and bought 10K CCC in my business account.
This way my main account no longer rewards people who abuse CCC. I can also award people with 2.2 CCC upvote with my business account.
I would recommend people do this for the tribes that they want to support.
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@magnacarta! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @yintercept.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza (1/10)
This sounds like the seed for a new post! I look forward to reading it if you write it.
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People use multiple accounts even on platforms without monetized rewards. Here, dealing with a rewards system a lot of people are going to operate with the perspective of hive being an investment.
Yes. As you said, there are projects that require dedicated accounts. I have two accounts for projects that are currently on hiatus.
There are, of course, also bad actors like the hundred or so Crystal Liu spam and griefing puppets.
This is common. The first step in starting a project is to create accounts for the project. I would expect to find thousands of accounts that were created in this exploration process.
I worked with a non-profit group that considered creating a web site. They discussed their plans in a public meeting. A mal-actor heard about the project and registered the preferred domain name for the project before the board finalized its decision to start the project.
The lesson I learned is that one often needs to register the accounts for a project before discussing the project. That means registering accounts that are likely to be abandoned.
People who are legitimately engaged in HIVE are apt to end up with undeveloped accounts.
As for spam. I've noticed that bad actors tend to create dozens (if not hundreds) of accounts.
I think that the actual number of spammers is quite low. But the small number of spammers make so much noise that we feel that we feel overwhelmed.
It is easy to conclude that, since spammers have multiple accounts; then people with multiple accounts must be spammers.
But that reasoning is fallacious.
While writing the post, I was actually thinking that HIVE might need a mechanism for classifying accounts. Some of the classes are very clear. Community accounts begin with the word HIVE. Accounts created for oauth have certain limitations. Accounts created to curate alt coins will have very little HIVE but large stacks of alt coins.
BTW: my "business account" is not fully developed yet. Launching the site will involve work.
I'm happy to know that I'm not the only person that recognises this fact: multiple accounts can be used for good reasons! I have a couple so I can compartmentalise my content into it's different themes