Alright, as many of you know we've been growing the roster of communities we're supporting in the community incubation program. The time has come where we have to start becoming a bit more strict with how the communities adapt and set some baseline expectations to them so they're not just being abused as a placeholder for the owners to receive rewards out of them. Not saying that this is something that's actively happening, but voting power is quite restricted and considering the penalty curve to try and get posts to a certain amount so neither the authors nor all the curators on the trail lose out on being under it we'll just have so much voting power to continue supporting a set amount of them. Since there's many others who also want a chance to enter the incubation and see what it does for their community we'll have to be more strict with those that have joined/have been invited but have shown no motivation to really make the most out of the program or use all the tools available to have their community blossom.
This is why we're going to be a bit more strict with the base guidelines and if some don't adapt over time and growth then we're just going to have to replace them either with new communities or with similar ones that we have so far denied but may be more motivated to make the most out of the communities features.
One idea we had recently that we'd like more communities to actively implement is the "beating the curve" tipping funds idea. As we all know engagement is very low and even with the !ENGAGE token giveaway to many community curators and moderators it hasn't been used that much. Partly it's understandable and can be confusing to newcomers to also have to figure out what these sidechain tokens are, etc, but partly it's also just been laziness or forgetfulness not to use them. We'd want to also make more use of the tipping feature that is made so simple with either the @peakd front-end or the !tipu comment tipping functionality (which also automatically adds your tips to the @peakd front-end for those who didn't know).
Other than that once certain communities grow to a certain amount of activity and subscriber amount we'd want the leaders to adapt to it by inviting more curators and moderators to keep them clean, active and not miss out on great submissions to them. We don't want single people to just have started a community but then start slacking off midway and our efforts to help get them going go to waste because they're not scaling. Not many can alone take care of both curation, engagement and something we'd want them to do more in the future is set tags for verified members through our @poshtoken Twitter verification database (more on that soon). For them to continue to try and do it alone is going to seem a bit selfish unless it shows that they really can and do put in the time for it, else they're just hogging a good community niche and spot in the incubation program but at the same time bottlenecking its growth and engagement themselves (even if they don't want to).
With this we're also going to check within our Discord everyone that's already there if some are interested on working on several communities and if the leaders are okay with them joining to help out.
We're of course also determined that such activity and curation should be incentivized with rewards similar to how we do with the @ocd compilation posts where the editors of each and curators that submitted nominations receive the beneficiary rewards. Now we're not going to enforce that all the rewards go to the editor's and curators, the owners of the community can keep part of them but over time they should be okay with the delegation OCD is providing to their accounts and only receive beneficiary rewards for the work they put in like some others already do through the curation reports.
To make it more clear what I recently meant with the @reward.app beneficiary setting for some tipping funds I drew up this rounded rectangle real quick. Read below how it will be used.
So the rectangle is basically the post rewards of the curation reports. Whoever is in charge of adding all the nominations onto it and post it receives part in editor rewards, rest should go to the curators who found the posts, checked them for plagiarism and submitted them for a boost through OCD. Of course they can also add other posts they curated that day/week even if they felt like they weren't great enough to be sumbitted to us, the main point is that community leaders scale their communities with more moderators and curators and through these posts reward them.
Over time we're going to stop supporting some of the curation reports that only have one curator or the leader doing it all by themselves, unless they're really putting in the time and effort and their community just isn't big and active enough yet.
Alright so now about the tipping funds. We'd want people to add an extra part of the post rewards set to @reward.app, for example 30% of the post rewards would go to @reward.app. This means that when the post is paid out, 20% would go to the editor, 50% to the curators/moderators and 30% to @reward.app which is returned as liquid hive & hbd. People might think they're missing out on rewards by doing this but when we see that there is a 20-30% beneficiary set to @reward.app we understand that this is set aside to be used as tips for comments and engagement of users in their community - we will add a bigger vote to the post than we initially would have. So the leader and curators wouldn't lose out on this, we'd make up for the cut by voting bigger and this way they'll have funded extra tipping funds while beating the curve penalty and can share the tipping funds within their community moderators so everyone can use them in their daily rounds of curating and engaging with comments.
This only requires the community leader or whoever is in charge of the account that posts the curation reports to send out the liquid tipping funds to their curators/moderators without compromising/sharing their active keys. Then it's up to the curators/moderators to make use of these funds and up to them to see that if one week they didn't get that much engagement to reward they would just set the next curation report beneficiary cut of @reward.app lower than 30% as the example above.
If you have some questions about this as a community leader/curator feel free to ask here or in the discord.
For those wondering "why?", there's a curation penalty (not the 0-5min one) but one that taxes posts and comments depending on the amount they've earned in rewards. I'm not 100% sure where exactly it ends but I believe it's somewhere around 20 Hive in post rewards (not sure if this means post rewards + curation rewards or only the former) and I'm also not sure if this counts HBD somehow, i.e. if it will continue being that high when Hive goes up in value. Either way, this is also why many curators would either refrain from voting on posts they don't think will make it close past that threshold (the tax deteriorates gradually as it gets closer to the 20 hive similar to how the early voter penalty gradually goes down the closer posts get to 5min age). This tax function was implemented to avoid farming from small accounts in big amount of numbers that would be difficult to detect which I'm sure it has mitigated a lot of it and those who've been trying have probably not even realized why they're not getting as much out of it as they had imagined but at the same time it has made the single votes of smaller stakeholders less significant if not many more minnows/dolphins add theirs on top of the same post to get it past the tax threshold - and particularly comment voting. People voting on comments realize that they're losing out on curation returns.
So for all of that, adding another layer on the curation reports and us just throwing a bigger vote to help funding the tipping we'll avoid the tax curve altogether and generate funds to be used for tipping comments and engagement or posts that are good but not big enough or effort enough to get them nominated through our program. We'd like to see more communities make use of this as there's no real drawback for them.
We'd like to still hear your opinions on this, though, if there's something we haven't considered that would not be good about this idea before we move forward with enforcing it a bit more.
Thanks for reading, look forward to a few new communities added to our program that you can read about in the next @ocd community incubation update!
I feel like the reward app for the way we do the Stock Images curation rewards would make more work. Basically 20% goes to the account, the other 80% is divided between each of the featured authors, the creators of the logos and dividers and the author of the curation post (currently either crosheille or myself). This comes to 8 beneficiaries, which would be a lot more complicated to work out manually.
When you're talking about comment rewards, are we looking at just the comments on the community posts or comments on all posts going into the community? For HomeEdders, the vote is actually big enough that I can drop an above dust sized vote and the community is small enough that I drop them on most of the interactions on anything posted in the community. Stock Images is much more active and the account vote still not big enough to get above dust, so I use my personal vote and ENGAGE for comments on the community posts. I don't always vote on the comments on other posts in the community, however.
Incidentally, once my ENGAGE tokens get high enough I'm wanting to send 1001 to each of the community accounts, so it's easier to use that while curating from the account.
Currently it's just me doing HomeEdders, but there's not much to be done. Ryivhnn usually helps out interaction wise, though, so she gets comment votes (naturally) and the occasional beneficiary from community posts.
When it comes to seeing where the beneficiaries are going, isn't it pretty easy to see if you click on the rewards of the community post in Peakd? I always thought that was pretty good for transparency.
Comments on all posts, this is to drive up engagement and to beat the lack of votes and rewards on comments due to the curve. Yeah like the thing is that even if the vote is big enough to get past the dust vote threshold you're still penalized that say if you vote on a regular post that would get past the 20 hive reward threshold. Obviously many ignore this and curate comments anyway but many don't and the added penalty makes those votes worth even less than the mana spent on them.
I've noticed the beneficiary shares on your stockimages account and that's great, this would just be an added incentive to use those funds that come from reward.app (and we'd throw bigger votes on those posts) to just focus them on either comments to reward people for their time spent engaging or for posts that don't make the nomination cut if you feel they are still okay and could use a bit higher rewards than just the votes they get without ocd.
Yes, it's frustrating that the comment votes get penalised so much. Can you leave a message when you use the tip function? When I first got a tip via this function I was puzzled as to why. A comment with it to say something like "thank you for your engagement in the xxx community" might help there. You can certainly leave that message if you do it as a transfer.
Reading through the other comments on here, I realise I'm not the only one seeing the reward app part as a adding more complexity. It's easier to add the beneficiaries at the time of submitting the post and then all the distribution is calculated and sent out for you upon payout. I see crosheille is just sending the account's payout to reward app, which might be easier. However, for the Stock Images curation, that wouldn't be doable, because we meet our beneficiary limit each time already, but it could work for any other posts like the sub indexes.
My other concern, at the moment, with the SI account is that if we liquidate everything, then there won't be much growth in the HP of the account, because it doesn't have enough HP to get much return from curation. As payout is already 50/50, I can use the liquid part to tip comments anyway. I'm playing devils advocate here a bit, because I am aware that there are some opponents to the idea of liquidating the rewards, who see it as abuse for profit and might argue that this is what it's ultimately about for those running reward app. There are even those who will avoid voting on a post if it has reward app set as a beneficiary.
I like the idea of rewarding engagement more and will certainly expand on that in both communities.
!ENGAGE 25
Is this the account you are looking to build your Engage Tokens in to distribute? I can transfer a few to you if you like, I don't have a lot extra but I do have a few.
Thank you, @bashadow. Very thoughtful of you. Yes, I'm building them up from this account. Almost halfway there for one account.
Okay, 555 tokens sent, use as you see fit, no strings.
Really appreciate it. I think Stock Images could use it the most, so that's where it will go.
ENGAGEtokens.One thing that still confuses me (and I try to understand the mechanics of how things work) is the post reward tax of 20 HIVE you mentioned.
So my understanding goes like this -if a post earns less than 20 HIVE ($3-4) then the actual rewards it receives won't be realised fully at the end of 7 days? E.g. A post is on 15 HIVE at the end of the 7 days but only 13 HIVE gets shared between curators and author due to this post reward tax?
I understand curation penalties so far as roughly 100% penalty on curation rewards if voting instantly then the penalty linearly reduces up to 5 minutes but the post reward penalty is a bit of a mystery still. Also, the comment rewards thing and upvoting comments, minimum amount of 0.025 hive upvote otherwise it goes to dust?
Regard to the incubation project, sounds fine to me. I know you have spread out to help a few communities, wonder if you'd be better suited to have a few ocd dedicated accounts with their own HP tied in for that specific community that curators can use? Then again, trying to have many accounts organised would require a pretty epic level of spreadsheet organising but if it's one thing I've noticed about a lot of Hive folks, they do love a spreadsheet 😜
I think it already displays with the tax in mind. that's why when you some times want to add a vote on peakd it'll show you that say a 50% vote will add x amount of HTU to it but if the post is under the 20 hive threshold it will end up being lower than what it initially estimated. I'm not sure if this penalty is as linear as the early voting one. About the dust amount it does sound right.
Myeah but we don't want to take any power away from the leaders and curators so rather give them delegations and let them "frontrun" us before nominating posts so they'll grow their stake for the future of their community on top of the curation report posts.
Ah ok, then that takes away a lot of the thought needed, I do like the PeakD interface!
Fair enough and that makes sense as well to give the community leaders the tools they need to be become bigger stake holders, nice one!
As I've mentioned before in discord, The Ink Well curation team had already agreed a schedule for rewarding the members of the team, it's different to the proposal outlined above but based on the same principles - increasing the team and sharing the rewards. We review the schedule regularly as things change. Now the hard fork has happened and things are settling down, we'll be introducing our community builders expressly to build engagement. Using the tips to get round the reward curve and help with engagement is a great idea and will be a real boost.
Sure, yeah different ways are acceptable as long as the principals stand. I mean instead of using reward.app to liquidate the post rewards one could always also just manually reward the team members after payouts, etc. As long as we're aware of it and it is being used the way it was said it would be we're okay with rewarding that activity with votes, doing it with beneficiary cuts is just more public and obvious for when we're casting the votes.
I too will have to read over this a few times to understand it all (as far as the tax curves and thresholds).
As far as the NeedleWorkMonday Community there are 3 active admins including myself. Each one of us alternate weeks to do the curation. Since we are a small community that person who does the curation picks the posts, authors the curation compilation and receives the author benefits for that week. We have been using reward.app and setting it at 25% as the author takes the other 75%.
We are currently in the process of adding on Community Builders to our team who will act as inviters and welcomers to help build membership and keep a high retention rate. Once set these CB’s will be added on to our community accounts’ trail vote (up to one vote a day) as well as being beneficiaries of every curation compilation.
I’ve personally been giving commenters a tip using the tip option on PeakD. I prefer it over the Engage tokens because I know not everyone is using the tokenized system or are familiar with how it works or even how to retrieve them. I like the fact that the tip goes directly into one’s account.
So does our method of beneficiary align? Maybe we can implement that each of our admins. start giving out tips to commenters to help reward and to encourage more engagement.
I know what you mean with engage. It does attract votes from Asher's accounts too, when called, but they don't usually meet the dust threshold. Some other accounts seem to vote as well, which can add to it, but they can't always be counted on.
Yes exactly. I just like seeing and knowing the tips go directly to an account and they don’t have to worry about trying to retrieve anything or figuring out how tokens work if that’s not what they are interested in.
My head is spinning. I will need to read through this 5x to understand all of this! I do all of my Hiving from my phone and will have to figure this out!
Feel free to ask any questions here or in the discord. ^^
Since the HF the tipU comment command is not working. If I use peakd to tip am I right in thinking that the tip does not come out of the funds I have on deposit at tipU? And also that peakd does not leave a comment on the post telling the user that they have received a tip from me? The only way they know is if they see it in their wallet?
Yeah it shouldn't as the tipu funds are separate, the peakd tips take it from your wallet directly. No comment but it will show the tip next to the upvote buttons on the peakd interface, same goes for comments and I'm assuming hive.blog will add that feature at some point as well like they did with being able to preview crossposts, not sure why they wouldn't. So yea for those only using hive.blog the only way for them to realize they've received a tip on a post or comment is checking their wallet or notifications.
I use Ecency and am not familiar with using the other frontends, so thanks for answering my questions.
For Pinmapple, we've been doing a curation report ie our Travel Digest pretty much every day since we started and have passed our 1000th edition last week (shameless plug 😊). There's a team of four curators on a weekly roster who are rewarded with the liquid payout, whilst the Pinmapple account grows with the staked rewards. The stake rewards plus any other liquid reward contributes towards the operation cost such as server and Hive SQL.
We've been working with this system since we started, and believe it strikes a good balance between keeping Pinmapple self sustainable and rewarding the curation team to run the operations.
The thing on post engagement is that its a big job and sometimes you effort to comment something and no ones answer =P
yeah that feeling sucks
@acidyo another thing the NeedleWorkMonday Community has been running is a Community Comment Drive. It has increased activity and interaction tremendously and the members have really been enjoying that. Just wanted to throw that out there in case other communities want to do one.
Each week one winner that has commented on at least 3 other posts in the community is randomly drawn to receive 3 hbd. Several of our members have mentioned they’ve seen the difference from week to week and the at it has encouraged them to take more time to mingle :)
A lot to read and digest, have re-blogged as a reminder and to share wider for more comments from members.
I read your article and it was good information. I just joined here. I was following you on another platform before. and I think I can prepare beautiful content. How can I highlight myself so that my work is noticed?
Cool, welcome! What platform were you following me on?
I'd recommend checking out the @ocd posts that have "community incubation update" in the title and go through the communities we're supporting and posting there, eventually curators are going to nominate your posts if they're of quality and effort for bigger curation from OCD.
So much patchwork to keep afloat a sinking ship when the ONLY solution is to focus on development of the ship.
Look at how many are saying that this is too complicated and that they need to read it over and over. The simple logic is that many more would not even bother.
A post about engagement and the very post itself shows a drop in engagement. This is just making the USER EXPERIENCE unappealing.
This IS NOT how you grow a platform.
Two totally different things. Even with SMTs you have to strengthen the communities. In my opinion these "niches" are what will keep bloggers on the chain, the engagement in a community, from people with the same interest - this "we-spirit", the feeling of belonging is invaluable.
The difference though is that the code should take care of the user incentives to stay engaged. This method relies on self reporting and then moderators to notice to then distribute rewards... if any!
No way that's a good system. That's why 3 years ago when SMTs were announced they presented a very unique possibility for any community to give the "social rewards" a go without really needing to learn and understand Blockchain.
Algorithms are KING.
Relying on humans to manage a system like rewards always leads to favouritism, gaming and even the very opposite of what you're trying to achieve, since the many that miss out or see it as a chore rather than an enjoyable experience simply leave.
As a moderator and system administrator you then don't have that data live to realize if the system is working. Just look at the community stats right now. Subscribers celebrated but then actual participation is a fraction of that. Yet no tools available to understand why and also how you could target the silent majority.
It relies on a post.. then that post needs to be seen, then understood, then participation to take place, then moderation to determine who's worthy.. etc. By the end you're actually killing engagement because as I said the experience resembles work.. with the MAYBE that you will get rewards. This is why rewards are now seen by so many as a failed element of this blogging game.
I agree with that but again... simply because the code is so basic. The code should be able to automatically factor in participation, user reach, onboarding, comments etc. I personally would even reward private chat (if it existed here) because that way you maintain the silent majority on the platform and their attention is kept on THIS PLATFORM to then stay active in all else like voting on content, onboarding users, getting involved in communities by posting and sustaining growth.
Again though it must be CODE that recognises that activity not one human running some initiative. That's just not at all presenting Blockchain as superior. It's like going back to old world village society ... that's just not going to entice masses.
Simple as that.
Also I forgot to say that I DO agree with you on the community spirit, which exists as the glue of social/connectivity. The flaw though is that in a niche and small scale community a human could manage it, but then growth in the millions is what every platform aims for. Humans managing that is impossible.
Hence again: it must be code based.
Attention retention is actually the biggest asset of any platform which can then be forecasted into future development plans such as advertising and business attraction. Attention retention is Hives biggest problem though and there's no code in place to fix that.
Anyway until then as I said all I see on this alleged greatest Blockchain is patchwork to save it from sinking. 3 years on and SMT is still a ghost. I'm not confident on the move to make hive engine the solution because "no-code" stupid-media-tokens will likely be the outcome. Limiting possibilities.
Anyway imo Hive will always be niche.
The hype days of social rewards are long gone. Plus when content MUST BE ORIGINAL the system is too constricted. Only die-hards stay committed. Not masses.