One thing that's been bothering me as of late is seeing some projects that still operate in a way where they focus their curation based on who delegates to them.
I've made countless posts over the years discussing things and let me pre-phrase this by adding that you can curate authors based on many different metrics that are generally acceptable by the "community". I have biases as well, some friends I vote extra compared to some others who may be dishing out content of similar if not higher quality and matching their social activity and other requirements we as curators may place upon authors. I don't think there's anything wrong in doing so as long as that author's rewards they're getting are generally accepted by others and not seeming overrewarded. If the case that I were to overreward certain authors and the community rightfully points that out and adjust the rewards to the downside with downvotes I should not take it personally or become defensive about it as long as the reason for doing so is primarily the overrewarded point - I.e. if I've been pushing my bias too much in favor of those few authors. That is how we protect the reward pool and don't end up like other copycats where proof of brain/curation is merely a figment of their imagination.
To make it even simpler, here's the reason I upvote certain authors quite often.
- They produce not only great content of high quality in text, photos, etc, but are generally active socially and drive engagement to their posts even without my votes.
- They may be producing valuable activity towards our platform in ways that don't directly show on-chain and aren't obvious to people quickly glancing over their accounts - this could be sharing their posts on web2 to drive or at least attempt to drive traffic to their posts/our platform, building tools, communities, other things of value that will generally make this a better place for others longterm and lastly, they don't just constantly sell everything they earn. This last one isn't my most important point but naturally as people we do look and judge such actions over time because when hive leaves the blockchain it goes into the unknown and whatever you say may or may not be true about what happens with it. I say this because I know some people may need whatever hive they earn here for their day-to-day but that could also just be an excuse because they'd rather wanna bet on other currencies/stocks than believing in the hand that feeds so to speak.
- Having said that, if they're putting in extra effort with their free time and it is showing I generally want to reward that. The beautiful thing about this place is that you can contribute in so many different ways and we can make sure to reward that effort, time and contributions if we're around to notice it (yes that's kind of a diss to autovoters).
Alright, so what is it I find should not be accepted which this post was meant to talk about?
Curation to me means rewarding someone for many of the factors I talked about above. It is a beautiful way to reward work which many other chains just base it on close to useless calculations or only based on however much stake that account is holding. It should not matter if I know that person directly or if they're also rewarding me with their votes and the latter is where most of these projects tend to fail.
Let me give you another couple examples from my own projects.
@ocdb accepts delegations in exchange for sending the curation rewards as liquid hive to delegators on a daily basis minus a fee. One of the most asked questions lately from new users has been "if I delegate to your project will I get votes?" and that answer is and will always be no. That's because we curate authors on many of the factors mentioned above with stake from other users who are either too busy to curate themselves or don't mind the fee to delegate to us because they know we're putting it to good use. If we were to curate users who delegated to us it would quickly end up as a form of vote trading or excessive self-voting which I've also posted often about and is one of the main problems with these smaller but growing projects I've seen lately.
Vote-trading and excessive self-voting is bad because it ignores the factors mentioned above and focuses most of the new hive inflation back to those who already have the stake based solely on quid pro quo or stake. The content itself doesn't have to be amazing and can be minimal and often leads to authors neglecting the effort behind it in an effort to just collect the daily rewards while ignoring new users who may not have stake but are trying to contribute and grow a presence here. In many ways it also causes for centralization of stake since other users aren't receiving any of it even if they're on par in terms of effort, post quality, etc as those receiving votes.
Yet a lot of projects base their voting solely on who is delegating to them and ignore others. Sure they may add some kind of blacklist that if someone truly is abusing, posting plagiarised/AI generated/other form of abuse content they may block them from receiving votes even if they are delegating but since they profit off of that delegation in one way or another it's quite obvious that they would prefer not to have to blacklist people as much as possible. Much of that content and votes also does not get supervised because people generally enjoy earning passive rewards even when it comes to curation without any effort behind it. Who doesn't love free money while you're sleeping, eh?
Anyway, to not make this post too long, I'd wanna re emphasize that it shouldn't matter how much stake you have, how much delegation you give someone, how much tokens you hold of a certain curation project, etc, etc, to affect the votes you get. Sure we all may vote people based off of different things they say, things they stand for, things they do, etc, but it shouldn't be based on self-interested in terms of gains. I.e. if I vote this person he might vote me back - if I vote this person, he might buy my tokens with part of the rewards - if I vote this person, he might delegate HP to me/my projects. Naturally it's something we may think of at times and in desperate situations but HP already has many amazing usecases for us to go that extra mile to have to use it mainly in selfish ways imo.
Either way, what's your thoughts on this?