That's a good point and right now there are no direct rewards for the 'marketeer' and brand-manager roles which is probably why people aren't sharing their posts outside of the Hive ecosystem.
I wouldn't expect anyone to fork out their own money to promote but sharing a post or two on Twitter could make a small difference.
To really get more users on a big scale will require some coordinated promotion and that requires partnerships, sponsorships, ads etc. all of which cost money.
The outside views is why they stopped showing view counts on posts in Steem. It would show that a person's post got more engagement than a bot curated post.
At least in the old algorithm, it is clear that views don't matter. Views can be gamed with bots, as with most things, but that's why the bigger platforms have tools to discount such cheating.
I feel like 'authentic' views should be a big part of the metric when rewarding posts. For example, if an author wrote a post and went all out to promote it and got a ton of organic views, then the mechanism should reward him. Maybe not directly, but by making the post more prominent on the platform.
I see that when you write a post in ecency, it gives you are word count and a guess as to how long it takes to read the post. So, if there was a timer on the page to count views by how long the person was on the post, then that might help make for better engagement counting.
I'm sure some bot will figure out how to by pass that as well, but it would be a start. If it was based on Hive users, then if a bot was open on open post and then another post, then it could be caught.
Those are great ideas. I suppose the big centralized media companies track IP addresses as the main component of thwarting botting. I'm not sure if Hive even tracks that as it would go against privacy and all that.
I'm sure they could tap into Google Analytics and see how many unique views the post had.
Fantastic idea and yes, relying on Google Analytics would be a good proxy, without having to do the effort. Perhaps a combination of unique views and time on page relative to the estimated reading time would be a good way to display trending or hot lists.
They stopped showing the view count because the mechanism was broken.
I know that there was an initiative from #ocd that give out extra votes when the post was also placed on the bird feed.
Publish does have a small ref program but I don’t know if that would be possible for Hive. Guess the witnesses should decided that.
This is a good idea. I think if it were done Hive-wide or tribe-wide, for a few cents here and there, it could make for some natural, organic promotion.
But yes, ideally the witnesses should decide so. Not sure who does the governance on Hive tribes. I guess it depends on the tribe.
Indeed probably the tribe owners. But those tribe owners do need to have also an interest in Hive, because that is their bloodline.
And not to mention that I forgot an important role. The advertiser.
The advertiser does curate and then reb-blog the post. This way the post does get more visibility and potentially some more upvotes. Due to the fact that he voted earlier he will get a share of the votes coming after him. But the article was already long enough.