Comment oriented communities - an idea

in #idea4 years ago

I've been thinking about some additional options to certain communities where the focus and effort would mainly lie in the comment section lately and wanted to drop off some thoughts in a post and some possible solutions to see what you guys think and if you have any better ideas or improvements on mine.

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Basically certain communities such as the Ask the Hive and The Manipulation Station community where in the former an author could just ask an open ended question without needing to put too much effort on the body of the post to allow for a lot of answers and discussions revolving them and in the latter the author would drop an image they'd think would make for entertaining photo-editing results where again the editors in the comment section would be the focus of the post and where the most effort would lie.

Aside from rewarding engagement with the ENGAGE token we all know that comment voting does not happen as much as main post voting, mainly due to autovoters in general and at the same time the curve and tax making it harder for comments to gain the vote strength posts past the threshold would - thus disincentivizing certian stakeholders as they know both curation returns and the comment rewards are taxed than if they voted on any other post.

The idea I had was based on the very beginnings of the chain before "the payouts" occurred where comments would automatically receive a share of the main post's rewards. One way this could be achieved is through the use of reward.app, say for instance if the rules of the communty would enforce using reward.app at 80-100% beneficiary (I wouldn't be completely against disincentivizing authors from earning something for posting a question or an image they've found in the above community examples) and the reward.app bot would notice that if posts are in this and that community, instead of sending the rewards back to the author it could (maybe - I haven't talked about this with the dev or any dev yet so this is just an idea without the thoughtprocess of how viable it is to be coded as a second layer service) instead send the rewards to the highest voted up comments and maybe even replies to such comments in percentages. Think 50% would go to the top comments of said post, 30% to top replies of those comments and 20% to the author.

Now I realize you may already be pointing at all the red flags of how this could be abused but if the communities would have to be whitelisted to enable this service then there would be curators and the authors making sure that there was no abuse going on in the comment section to unfairly take a cut from the post rewards.

Anyway, I'm sure there are maybe even better ways this could be implemented but these were just the basics of the idea so you'd understand where I'm coming from. I'm sure over time and with more and more communities being created where the focus and effort is directed at the comments there could be a higher demand for such a distribution to make it more engaging and active. r/askreddit is for instance one of my most favorite subreddits of which most of my comment karma stems from as I've spent countless of hours reading through people's stories, jokes, discussions and replies to them and the same goes for r/photoshopbattles where some photo manipulation's are so funny and well made I keep on wondering how many never bother and skip doing them even though they have the skill or a fun idea because there's just no incentive to do so with just karma points and some attention being the reward. As we know here on Hive things are different so I can't wait for a larger userbase to exist and for services like this idea to not even be needed because there'd be enough eyes and stake checking the comment section so the tax curve wouldn't matter.

Would love to hear your thoughts on it, though! Maybe we could experiment some more. :)


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@acidyo, see here it is a beneficiary comment

shit... I think I just gave acid 2 cents...

ah that explains it, i was just about to ask if it was in yet

"that's not it" :D

Very good idea ... simple and practical.

Yep, I think there should be some reward for generating discussion and it would be nice for it to be able to differentiate good discussion from "nice post" shit.

btw, nice post.

Thank you kind sir

You are welcome dear.

For real now, seems like the "kind sir" days are sort of gone, aren´t they?
I remember in Steem it used to be massive when every single coin was mooning there was an invasion of kind sirers everywhere. On the comments, in Discords, SteemChat and so on.

I guess that BTC needs to break the 20K mark for all of them to come back to kiss asses.

We're going to the moon!

https://hive.blog/hive-167922/@joooi/re-tarazkp-202081t18941313z

A lot of it has diminished because of RC costs I think. But, when the price rises, they will return - it is an indicator :)

Oh true, I didnt think about the RCs effect on this matter.
If more Kind Sirers mean BTC=mooning... then I wouldnt mind them coming back :D

it's almost the million dollar question! Id like to share my thoughts from my experiences over the last three years.

back in 2017 when i was getting going with ecoTrain and Steem in general.. the engagement was really sometimes overwhelming. The number and quality of the comments made everything 10x more exciting and dynamic.

As im sure you are aware, slowly, step by step that got eroded. THe gradual decline in the price of Steem lost quite a lot of people, and then.. what was it HF20.. that we had mana introduced .. that change changed everything.. and from that day things have never been the same commenting wise..

i would say the right now a much large proportion of the people using Hive are here for rewards.. and MANY are from other non english speaking countries like nigeria, philipines and more...i think a lot of these people are not so comfortable writing english.. some have learned to use google translate,.. which does an amazing job.. and i see so much engagement from them.

so maybe one thing i would reccomend is to integrate language translation in any post.. it could be a simple check box that just says "Translate and add this post in english". and the translated version could be appended to the end. Probably there are other or better ways to do it.. there are many services that could be integrated.. maybe the google API allows remote connections or embedding..

Your idea of putting a percentage of the post rewards to the comments is an interesting one! I think that might just do the trick in terms of getting more engagement going .. what i do wonder about is not so much abuse. but more about the less popular posts getting even less engagement than they do now as everyone starts commenting on the top posts... but maybe somehow it could work out..

My final thoughts.. i always noticed that a rise in the price of Hive leads to a flurry of activity and engagement.. so we may also have to be patient as the rewards really do make a big difference.. and as they go up we start to draw in more people who are here also for the community and networking side of things..

Great comment man but I got to point out that your own reflection on the experience here spells out what reality is here.

That almost all Life has escaped this place. Which is why rewards on comments long ended.

On my own experience I reflect when I joined too. I read some posts by @suesa that triggered a thoughtful response from me. Then not long after I got a $10 upvote from @blocktrades that made me think, "shit this thing might just be the real deal"

Anyway that was back before blockhead turned completely evil and decided to only leech money through the services that '@ned the fat toad' granted him a monopoly on. Because when that blocktrades service launched, even suesa stopped getting shit all from him and it essentially saw her get pissed and eventually leave the platform!

So to me that's the failure of this place in a nutshell. It was really organic with the rewards early on.. then sharks said,

"fuck that, my winnings don't need you in the formula, I can simply win by selling hope to fools and taking fees from the rest."

And the lack of comment rewards leads to a lack of comments, and eventually people stop posting because it's discouraging to scream into the void. Aka why my blog has been rather dead.

Yeah that's so true and so sad.
I think you should include yourself in discussion. The inflatable whales can't pretend it's not an issue if the entire community keeps repeating the same issues.

Which is what is happening.

I'm sure many old "steemians" still visit too, wondering if those issues are fixed and just maybe the many honeybees get recognized as the true value of this platform/concept.

Oh I did take part in the discussion. I worked with different communities trying to fix it. I talked to people. Without success. Don't have the energy to fight windmills forever.

A brilliant idea!

You can try - maybe it will work out

It's an interesting idea and I'm not against it but then again, those comments need to be of quality. We all know what happens when a certain category finds out there's a way to earn through comments. And not only them. We have users with high reputation spamming the chain with useless two word comments because they think they are important.
You say communities need to be whitelisted and they have the responsibility of making sure spam and scam don't happen. That is a lot of work but I hope it can be done.

What you point out is a latent threat not only in #Hive. However, I think the solution could be simple if organic commentators spot them and vote against them. I am not a supporter of a downvote, but in these cases, it would be justified.

I remember partiko had some kind of comment rewarding project, the worst I've ever seen. There were spammers all over the chain. Thank God those are gone due to RC costs, one of the HFs took care of them but there are still plenty of spammers.

Another aspect to consider, learn from mistakes to build the right path.

I couldn't agree more.

I think the more we could get people to get on the damn blockchain to comment on things instead of Discord, the better! I think these question sections would be fantastic but it would also need to have a way to truncate some by default perhaps. If we know they are going to be loaded with comments, only the first comment and the first reply to each would be opened by default. I don't know if that would be possible based on a particular community but the fantastic people like the PeakD team might be able to figure that one out!

I know when I go into Galen's weekend engagement posts, the Ecency app and even my browser can't handle the comments if it goes past 200 and it just crashes trying to load them. We would need to figure that part out in addition to the rewards.

Bro, remember how you mentioned to me on Discord the other night about "textwalls" killing you?

I am experiencing that in this post 🤣🤣

All jokes aside, discussion within posts is really important and something I try to heavily encourage when it comes to our @HiveHustlers posts.

Keep doing your thing man - I love that you're so community-focused, which IMO, is truly where the real value in Hive lies.

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Hello @acydo,

Comment-oriented communities, sounds good. In the last two weeks I participate in a campaign to achieve greater engagement, following the popular advice that says something like, if you want to receive attention you must first give it. I think that's what engagement is about. Something that worries me in #Hive, seeing magnificent posts well rewarded but without any comment, perhaps, due to the validity of your argument; In this, I agree with you. I also believe there are no incentives due to the difficulty in manual healing based on the current time window, this affects the effective vote of the post and the associated comments. And if we consider those looking for easy profits using cheats to the system, we need to pause and evaluate it well before implementing it.

In the first instance, I support your idea, I would only add to the rule that the distribution of the rewards in this aside, be done, based on who receives the most votes from the commentators themselves, in the end it is they who judge the importance and relevance of comments. It would be interesting to evaluate a simple algorithm with these rules and their impact on the distribution of rewards.

Sounds good to me.

I like the publication and I think it's a good idea, honey.

I think it's a good idea, but I think for it to be successful, a UI change is needed. Communities still seem kind of buried, at least to me. Ideally, when you log in your communities feed should come up, not individuals you are following, or maybe even a mix of the two.

Of course, this might just be me never using hive.blog and mostly peakd and ecency(okay, I just logged in to hive.blog and it goes straight to communities, nice!). It would also be cool if an author could pin comments on their articles, like on youtube comments.

I personally find it a great idea I've been thinking to, as well! :D

Let's make this happen please.. For me, the comments make up the life the post has. It's where the community finds expression.. making it the main focus of the post now..? Let's begin already!

A while back I tried an experiment on @askhive for people to suggest good podcasts to listen to. I had put up a prize of 5 Hive for the best suggestions thinking it could become a very useful post to lots of people but after the 7 days not one comment and I am still sitting on 5 Hive.
I understand how important comments are and reward all I can with engage tokens.
The tax on small comment votes has been very bad for engagement and I commend you trying to look for solutions to fix it.

As a side note I think autovotes are also doing great damage to engagement and the whole hive experience. Would love to see a #weekwithoutbots to see how it would shift the reward pool.

Acid hello my friend! Long long time, how are you?

The idea I had was based on the very beginnings of the chain before "the payouts" occurred where comments would automatically receive a share of the main post's rewards.

Uhmm I actually remember reading about that but never having seen it. Guess I'm not as much an of as I thought. I like the concept though.

The idea I had was based on the very beginnings of the chain before "the payouts" occurred where comments would automatically receive a share of the main post's rewards.

Uhmm I actually remember reading about that but never having seen it. Guess I'm not as much an of as I thought. I like the concept though.

Hola, como funciona el token, lo he visto pero no se como funciona

I think you have some great ideas. It's completely different from how I approached it. My approach was to create a community (Blockchainpoets) that required posters to comment twice as they made their post. Honestly, it kind of failed, but a lot of that is due to my failed execution. I do think it would have done better if I had some backing of sorts to incentivize people to post in the community.

I was also thinking of rewarding comments in the community, but I run into the problem of dust votes. @dustsweeper might be a possibility for solving this issue.

It's an interesting problem for sure. It's good to consider different ways of attacking it.