and was met with an unfollow right back after a short while - understandable.
I see them posting about stuff and the content isn't bad, it's actually pretty decent, but the way they're going about getting rewarded for it was what went against my ideal form of curation.
Thought I'd make a quick post mentioning why that was an issue for me and why always trying to get the most amount of rewards may not always be in your best interest here.
The account in question also leases Hive Power, something that usually is not profitable because why would people lease out their hive power if they can just earn 8.5% APR on curation alone, thus if they are to lease it you'll have to pay them more than that. How can you earn more than 8.5% of that hive power? Well, by vote-trading.
Now as I've said many times in the past, some reciprocal trading is okay, we all have friends and better connections with some people, maybe we talk to them off-chain, maybe we believe they're here to stay long-term, maybe we think their content are a great value-add to hive, and many other reasons. When this crosses a line however is when most of your voting power goes to accounts of a similar sized value and it seeming random in terms of the connection of these authors other than everyone trying to make the most author rewards they can.
This has happened to me in the past as well, I remember a time when I was blessed by a 500k SP delegation by blocktrades (among other people) and these "fishers" would start appearing. What do I mean by fishers, well, to put it bluntly, they'll vote a post of yours even though they may have never done so before even though you've both been around for a long time, noticed each other in trending or here and there, etc. The first vote can be a sort of and introduction in a form, no words exchanged, no harm or foul meant and some times it'd be natural for an author to notice the vote and then go check out the content of that other user to bless them with a vote as well. If you do this, and some times I have, the fisher moves on to the next step - voting for your next post as well.
Now you're in this scenario where you received another big vote by this user, you may never have interacted with them, you may not even understand their content aside from a few nice images, etc, but you now have a choice to make, do you still give them a vote back or do you go on voting other people and see what their next steps are? I usually tend for the latter. Some times they don't instantly give up, they may vote on your next post as well, they may even start leaving comments here and there as a soft reminder of "hey, aren't you forgetting something?" without mentioning it. The desperation comes out some times and eventually they stop voting your content - bummer, eh?
Okay, so what is this unspoken scheme and handshake about? Well, it's about accounts of similar stake or vote size trying to build a relationship of vote-trading with another. Once that becomes too apparent and obvious, that's usually when downvotes start to enter if people notice and can be bothered but it is also when drama unfolds.
Let's take a deeper look at this certain account to see their voting practices, I'll try not to make it obvious who it is as that's not what this post is about, it's about this vote-trading activity that doesn't even really need to be set up through hive.vote, some other schemes or any exchange of words.
Through hivetask we can see the votes they've sent out the last 7 days, these are by weight and by amount. Meaning how big the votes were compared to their total hive power and how many of them. So what I did next, was open up the top 7 users on that list on hivetask as well to see their outgoing votes.
I was initially going to post everyone's votes and how they're reciprocating each other with votes as it boosts their author rewards but I don't think there's much point to it since I'd have to censor the usernames either way.
I'll talk a bit more about the idea behind all of this instead.
In one way you can see it as a "perk", if you have a lot of hivepower but don't wanna get judged by others for using all of it to selfvotes constantly, you can hide away that activity by voting for 9-10 other authors of similar stake and as long as all of them return a vote you're now technically self-voting 10x per day but only having to post once. This is a common activity on hive, I'm sure it doesn't take a genius to notice and figure out what's happening and as I said, to a certain degree it's okay, but if all you vote is only people of similar stake that also give you a vote back you're not really participating in "curation", you're just looking out to earn the most author rewards you can while also piling other random votes on top here and there.
Now as I mentioned early in the post, some are doing this with leased HP as well, meaning they don't even have any real skin in the game and are relying on those reciprocal votes so they can keep leasing HP to have a bigger influence on Hive and keep giving big votes to those orca's/whales. They've skipped the "grind" that's usually common on social media platforms and instantly dived into vote trading with other people's stake and are making sure leasing of HP is profitable for both the lessor and lessee.
Now why is that bad? Remember when we talked about vote selling and delegation for voting projects? If both parties are profiting of the activity then the people losing out on it are the rest not participating in this. The people in this case using hive-engine to lease out delegations and the author to rent those delegations in exchange of hive and hive-engine maybe taking a middleman fee there as escrow (not sure if that's a thing) are all profiting it means that those not actively participating in this activity are being diluted.
Rewards can't come from nothing and we all share the same reward pool, so if some people are unfairly getting votes through vote trading, making leasing of HP profitable, etc, it means the rest are earning less because of this, both curators who don't lease out HP and authors who don't use leased HP to vote trade to increase author rewards "unfairly".
Now, I'm not against the leasing of HP, but it has to be an "investment" so to speak. Ask yourself why no one is leasing out HP at a lower cost than 8.5% APR, naturally because they could just vote to get those returns so why lease out stake, everyone wants more stake. Then ask yourself why almost no one is leasing HP for a higher cost than 8.5%? Well cause if you'd just curate with it it would constantly cost you more to keep leasing than what you're getting from curation rewards. The "investment" I speak of is a long-term strategy, you curate with leased HP users of all kinds, preferably of course those who post content you're interested in so that over time you can have a rich following with users who consume your content and reward you with their votes based on you as an author and user on Hive and not solely based on how much hive power you have.
The long-term investment could also work in different ways, let's say if I leased HP for over a year and it cost me 10,000 Hive to do so, but now for the next year I may have built connections with minnows, dolphins, orcas, whales, etc that are interested in me as a user and will continue to support me even though my HP is much smaller than back when I leased it.
These users though want the influence, the long-term investment of "consistent rewards" and to profit off of the lease as well making this whole endeavor risk-free for them.
Anyway, I probably wrote enough about this subject, and no, I'm not going to get in the way of such activity at this point in time, just thought I'd make a quick post about it and give you some food for thought. I'm a bit too busy with other things lately but figured I can at least not support users any longer, hence the unfollow.