The recent events that occurred with the vibes community got me to thinking a bit about things, naturally it also made me curious to make sure nothing of the sort is happening with my projects so I went ahead and took a deeper look at things. Which is a good thing to do every now and then, but it did make me wonder how others would even take a look.
I was kind of skeptical of the person in charge of that community, not just cause I remembered him from way back, but the way they had found their way back here again after all that time at the optimal time when there were "rewards" to be had again did trigger a few warning signs. He's way of entering random community discords with "raps" or "rhymes" trying to get people to join was also odd to say the least, but I don't wanna discourage people from being unique in the way they approach things so I should mention it was mostly many things stacked on top of everything else. The more obvious ones were some late voting I noticed happening which seemed to occur to hide the fact that his posts got rewarded so much while making the account voting late be the one to suffer the consequences with substantially lowered returns while encouraging others to vote before it which just ended up giving the author more and more "undeserving, if you will" rewards.
All in all this is the life long question I've asked myself on chain and why I've decided to run things the way I do, even with some being against it early on and some who kept being against it forever. If you don't give someone incentives for doing things, but they have a lot of power to direct the reward pool any way they see fit, they will eventually figure out ways to reward themselves. That's just human nature.
Now of course I can't speak much of the inner workings of vibes as I don't know how it worked nor is it that important for this post, I just know valueplan insists on not "paying" people and relies on volunteer work while they instead pay for necessities such as travel expenses and stays. This is another thing that's made me think of things lately though, while I'm sure majority of them are good people volunteering for hive to do better, it keeps making me think that there's some there taking advantage of things for their own gain. I doubt they can 100% verify all the costs or that there's no trickery happening there.
Anyway, this brings me to the main topic of this post.
Transparency and rewards remove the need for trickery, usually. Now I'm not saying ocd and my other projects are 100% favoritism-free, I think that's kind of impossible to remove unless we'd employ AI to do the work for us. People are people. However, the way we have things set up rewards curators for doing their job while openly keeping track of all their curations so that over-favoritism doesn't go unnoticed by others.
I truly believe that if more projects/stakeholders did things this way, we'd have a lot less accounts that would go unnoticed and underrewarded along with not rewarding accounts that may not deserve the rewards as I'm sure there's still many that exist of those. Whenever I see some big upvotes go to accounts that have barely done anything other than create content on a daily basis, I wonder if they care how they are distributing inflation or if whoever is in charge of voting is doing it because of different ties to whoever is behind the account posting. With lack of transparency it is impossible to know A. Who's voting with the account, B. why they're voting for certain accounts this often/much even if there's many more deserving authors out there putting in more effort/time/energy into their social presense or even the content. We simply can't know who's doing the voting, we don't know who the stakeholder has entrusted with the voting of their account and we also don't know how this voter is rewarding himself for their time.
This already leaves a giant loophole in the system which may over time encourage abuse in the form of voting up alt accounts, friends/family and it also encourages the bad things that come with autovotes as well, such as authors becoming lazy, taking the upvotes for granted and neglecting the things that may have lead to them getting upvotes to begin with, such as building and maintaining an audience of consumers. They simply don't care anymore and they may have an idea of how big of a stigma downvotes are and how bad of a thing some people here make them out to be so they feel safe from them and continue to, well, farm hive inflation.
Just the other day I saw an account who was simply farming hive with daily posts of farmy content, had barely engaged in a long time and instantly took offense towards myself adjusting the rewards down by ~60%.
But I don't wanna get into autovote abuse from the authors now, it was just an example of what can happen when there's no consequences behind the curators of certain projects/stakeholders. If something like this were to happen to my projects, we could simply remove such a curator from their position and their abuse would be easier and earlier to spot as there's a lot of others able to follow each and every vote. They are also rewarded for their work without having to rely on rewarding themselves for the work through the position they're in. Now obviously there may still be people double-dipping, time's may be tough, we don't know what kind of position people are in in their day to day, but point is this system cannot get as bad as some other projects let theirs go.
If you don't have your incentives lined up properly from the beginning, they may cause long-term harm.
You are so right. The word is ' transparency'. That is a must. Am glad you have this setup for your own projects. What I think we still missing in our ecosystem for the last 8 years, is central place where transparency is shown to all those who like to have a view at it. Sure, we have some reporting tools. Yesterday I found this HIVE Analytics tool. But still, even that tool is too basic for true transparency. I mean the data is shown down to the account level, but one still needs to spend tons of time to analyse. I do hope someone who understands coding and understands deep analyses, will find energy and time to develop a tool which will increase not only transparency, but also make analysing our ecosystem and what happens in it, way more easy. Perhaps use AI, as you suggested, to help out in the analysis process. I know, we desperately need this since we can't just rely on a few projects and individuals spending the time and effort.
Combine money and people and you will always find some abuse. Some in the plain open others do it more professionally and hide it better.
For sure community votes and curation accounts have favorites. I am seeing that some authors do get a daily upvote from a major curation account. No idea why, is that the payout for their daily curation? No idea.
But it what it is.
We have a saying here "Trusting is good, but not trusting is better.", even in everyday life judges get corrupted, obviously would happen here too... People make pother people die for money, imagine on a harmless environment like hive... It's always good to have transparency and so is check your helpers
I just wish that more people had the mindset of monetizing their projects or their content through means other than the reward pool.
How would that work?
I guess it would be dependent on the project. But the content could be monetized in the same way that Web2 platforms do it. So they could do it through advertisements or through merchandising/selling products, especially if they accept Hive for payment.
It's true that sometimes people go through tough times and do anything, but as you say, in Hive we need to be more vigilant because a community is at stake. That's how I understand it. We must protect everyone's interests and be fair, not let scammers steal what others work so hard to obtain. It's awful to scam people. My family is poor but honest. We should all do good.
I get why there's always abuse in systems that offer monetary incentives and I appreciate anyone who is fighting to keep the ecosystem clean(er). Despite that, I wish there was more focus on genuine content on Hive than on content about Hive, if you know what I mean 😉
There's plenty of that too, check out all the different communities and you'll find it.
I get that, it's just that compared with something like X I don't immediately find interesting new content every time I open the app. It's obviously a numbers game, but anyone coming in new, seeing most posts in trending are about Hive-specific topics might throw some people off who "just want to consume social media".
We don't have algorythms, it's up to the front-ends to take care of that rather than telling people what to post and not post about I feel like :D
Of course, didn't mean to dictate that 😅 I'm personally interested in anything related to Hive, just also curious on how to create something that is financially sustainable.
My mom says money is nobody's friend. I think it should be done like we do at my school; a group is in charge of keeping the accounts for our graduating class.
This way there is greater control because I don't think a single person is the most appropriate.
That is, working together as a community and being accountable to one another. And so far, we haven't had any problems. Everything is clear.☺️
You explained this so clearly. It’s true that without accountability, even the best systems can be misused. I respect how you’re choosing structure and openness instead of relying on blind trust. Proud of you!👍🏻✨
Accountability removes the weight of speculation and brings and certainity 🙂
Honestly, I was demotivated that there was not quite observation to see things that it used to be.
Strictness has been a peak part, and that I felt was slipping away.
I saw what you did, and where you did.... I respect you for that!
100% agree. the farming hive using FARM content is so ironic! :P but yea.. very sad and upsetting to see that kind of stuff.
Greetings friend, I'm unfamiliar with these schemes and scams and how they operate. So far, the only thing I've received is your delegation to do a job, and I will do it very well. I'm very grateful; it means a lot to me that you considered me. I will try my best to work with the short formats; I've already started.
I've always viewed money as a tool rather than a goal. Besides I am far too lazy
Then what measures can be put in place to checkmate these kinds of excess.From the little I know as a newbie and I stand to be corrected,every transaction, vote, and piece of content is recorded immutably and verifiable by anyone, reducing hidden dealings or opacity right?
@acidyo,let the community do something about it, by enforcement.
The hive blockchain to me is mainly on Trust and Transparency, which are fundamentally important.Anyway,thank you for updating @acidyo.
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STOPThis is serious, brother, but I imagine that blockchain fraud problems require both technological and human solutions. In my limited experience, I believe that assembling a reliable team willing to give their best for Hive is the solution. I've seen many truly committed people; the bad ones are few and far between.
I don't understand why people feel need to create scams? This platform let's you already to success if you are genuine and nice to others
Yes, thank you very much for this concern, the most exciting and attractive things in this Ecosystem that had attracted many people here are transparency and appropriate votes being given to quality posts.
But I noticed that of a recent, quality long form posts are nomore receiving good votes.
Many times quality efforts and best authors are no longer well voted for or well rewarded as it supposed to be.
You can clearly see others that are in the same community with you being voted far away, above some who had even presented a more perfect content. It's so, so painful and not good at all.
I'm so excited that you have noticed this error and as well really ready to correct such that happens everyday, thank you for this decision of intervention you have set up to bring accuracy for all of us to be rewarded better and according to our works and our efforts in building up this platform.
Thank you very much for the delegation you have given to me, I'm already voting quality contents with it, thank you, I'm grateful.