I started writing web site reviews on the site Internet Rivers. The purpose of these unsolicited reviews is to generate web traffic for interesting independent sites that I encounter. For today's review I would like to gander at hivePosh.com. This project by @poshtoken rewards users for sharing their HIVE posts on Twitter with the POSH Token.
The acronymn POSH stands for "Proof of SHaring." I am not sure why they didn't use the shorter three letter acronymn POS. I guess they were worried about being confused with Point of Sales systems.
I think it is really important that HIVE users share their posts through different platforms to build up interesting the HIVE collection of sites.
Unfortunately, the hivePOSH project seems to have an exclusive focus on Twitter. I am not a fan of Twitter. As such, I have not followed the progress of the POSH Token.
To use the program, one needs to log into hivePosh.com with one's twitter account. Once in hivePOSH.com, users can associate their twitter account with their HIVE account.
To be truthful: I don't like this design.
Twitter aggressively tracks and sells user data. I do not like logging in with Twitter as I want to reduce Twitter's ability to follow my web usage. So, I would prefer to log in with my HIVE account and then enter my twitter account to create the association.
Sharing is good. Unfortunately, sharing links on Twitter does not have a positive SEO benefit. Twitter has a horrible problem with spam. For this reason Twitter runs all outbound links through the t.co web shortener.
For example, I just tweeted about my review with my twitter account account. Twitter automatically created a shortened URL t.co/i5E4KsXXHu. A user who clicks on t.co/i5E4KsXXHu will go to t.co. T.co will record information then redirect the traffic to my site.
Using Twitter to promote my site gives Twitter the ability to track, monitor and exploit my promotional efforts.
Twitter will sell this information to people who will use the data to undermine my efforts.
I should point out that t.co blocks Googlebot and other webcrawlers. This means that I do not get any SEO benefit for the tweet.
Sharing Links Is Good
I believe that sharing web sites is a good thing. Receiving rewards for sharing links is even better. I like the direction of the POSH token. I don't not like that the token appears to have an exclusive focus on Twitter.
Yuck.
Personally, I think that sharing links on personal homepages, independent directories or blogs is a better way to build traffic than twitter.
I started this post by mentioning that I wrote a review for hivePOSH on the independent site "Internet Rivers." I believe that this link will have more long term value than the t.co link on Twitter.
While my tweet will only be viewed a hundred or so times and is unlikely to generate any web traffic, the independent link is likely to be viewed a few thousand times. Since my link does not have the rel=nofollow directive, it will pass a small amount of Page Rank to HIVE.
If I were developing a program to encourage people to share links; I would design the site differently.
First I would have the users log in with their HIVE account.
I wouldn't focus on a single site like Twitter. I would encourage people to share their HIVE posts on every social media platform and independent site on the Net. This could be done with a simple program that lets users submit links, the POSH site could then scour the page for external links and hashtags.
So, while I like the general idea of POSH token, I am not that thrilled with its current implementation.
Sharing CreativeCoin Links
Last month I decided to revive my Twitter account to share my inktober posts on Creative Coin. I used the keyword #POSH on multiple posts and tweets but did not receive any POSH rewards for the effort. My guess is that POSH only works on a few of the HIVE interfaces.
It seems to me that if we want to promote the HIVE ecosystem, POSH should work on all of the HIVE interfaces. If the creators of POSH want to promote certain interfaces, they should name the preferred interfaces.
The idea of rewarding people for sharing their HIVE posts is great. IMHO, the implementation isn't up to snuff ... yet.
I will reuse a picture I took of staples on a tiny anvil. It takes lots of little links to build web traffic.
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the person sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.