I'm kind of shitposting about things that happen on a daily basis and may remind me of, instead of making this post about a recent conflict where I tried to nicely break up excessive vote buying schemes and the buyer apparently decided to leave hive instead of, you know, stop buying votes - I'll be looking back at a thing that occurred many years ago early in our community incubation program at OCD.
We stand for fair rewarding, whether that's authors, the content, the history, the reputation, activity, etc, we try to look at as many things as possible before we decide how much to reward an author - and the same goes for curators.
Now I know some reading this may not agree with the way we reward curators with author rewards but if you'd try to put time into doing the same thing on a daily basis that they do, you'd understand that it's not something people would wanna keep doing without some incentives behind it. 50% curation based on your stake is not enough when auto/blind voters get the same.
Either way, without getting too into the weeds, although I have planned on making a few videos here soon on the ins and outs of ocd activity, let's focus back on this one part of our iiniatitives and what happened way back.
In an effort to empower unique niche communities with voting power while at the same time having the backing of experienced curators with a variety of tools to make sure only authors in our scope are rewarded, especially to avoid those outside of our scope - we launched the community incubation program. Nowadays many have graduated from it as they grew well and started doing well on their own, other curation projects/stakeholders spending time and voting power in their communities that didn't require our aid any longer. We still have over 20 unique communities in our program and often look for new ones that are unlike the ones already on there, but there were a few that decided to opt out of the incubation after having been part of it for a while on their own and I'd wanna discuss how that came to be.
You'd think this wouldn't make sense, why would community leaders and their team of curators/mods not want to direct more voting power towards their community and at the same time earn some extra rewards for the work they're putting into their community - and to this day I ask the same question.
So let's say you have 20 unique communities all with different leaders, curators and moderators involved in your initiative. On a daily basis you go over all the posts they nominate from their community, cast the votes and at the end of the day you try to decide on how big of a reward you wanna cast to the curators who put in effort behind it that day. This is of course not something a curator can easily do because a lot of contributions that go into this is not always something that can be easily judged, a curator could be nominating a lot of posts after having curated, checked for abuse, etc, but there could also be moderators who have spent time muting abusive accounts/posts before the curators got there to do their thing. We wanted to reward everyone in a fair manner based on their contributions but letting the community leader decide how to split up the rewards through beneficiaries from the curator rewarding posts.
The idea behind this is that not only do the community leaders pick a way that's universal with all other leaders, but in the rare occasions they wanna use some part of those rewards for other things it'd give us an idea on how to reward the posts by looking at the beneficiaries. Other things could be things like wanting to collect some funds for a specific contest they wanna run within the community, allocate some funds towards tipping great community members based on their engagement or if they're continuously generating amazing posts but may be posting too often for us to be able to reward due to restrictions not to focus too much voting power on a few users, some extra "pettycash" so to speak.
As you can see we tried to empower unique niche communities in different ways with our votes as long as things were kept transparently and fair towards our standards. If everyone used a universal method it made it easier for everyone else involved and kept things as fair as possible without the risks of funds going missing that had occurred in the past and we didn't wanna see happen again.
Let's look into the few instances of abuse that had occurred in the past and then you may understand why this universal suggestion of beneficiaries, etc, was a good idea.
There were some community leaders in the past who were very active within their community, had a couple helpers as well both in the community and in our discord contributing. The beneficiaries to the helpers started to dwindle over time, they were earning less and less even though at a glance you only ever saw the helpers being the ones providing links to curate and what seemed to be the ones contributing the most. The "extra" rewards that weren't going out to the helpers were staying with the community account, i.e. the leader wasn't sending himself beneficiaries either which could've pointed out how much contribution he provided that day.
We ask the leader if the rewards being kept with the community account represent his contributions and they said yeah, they just prefer to keep it there rather than send to himself through beneficiaries. This is all okay but you can see how this now opens a leeway for abuse as the leader could be saying this to us but to the helpers he could be saying something like "we need more voting power on the community account so I'll be forfeiting my rewards to go to it and reduce some of the rewards you earn as well". This is a red flag because "growing an account" is the first step into "I'm gonna randomly leave and take all that stake with me, because I'm the only one that has the keys to it". Of course not everyone may do or plan on doing this but even if the intentions are good you never know what happens in life, you may have to use that stake for other reasons either way and then the "tax" the helpers had to endure all this time was for nothing when the leader could've just delegated his own stake to the community account or asked other stakeholders to provide it delegations, trails, etc, to grow its influence.
Another instance some of the helpers of a different community quite literally contacted me directly letting me know that the community leader is doing nothing and hasn't been doing anything for months but is taking a large portion of the rewards we give that are supposed to go to the people putting in work.
Either way, a big reason to all this were previous shady activities that lead to us wanting to be stricter about how the community posts are set up to make sure everyone got their fair share of rewards for the amount of work they put in, and if they don't like our requests they could simply not nominate those posts for our votes at all as we didn't wanna be involved placing our vote on another case going bad.
This simple request led to a few communities leaving the incubation altogether.
Some blamed it on my being too controlling, some blamed it on my being too rude when going over the reasons as to why we wanted to enforce this, others not sure anymore it was quite a long time ago.
Some of them kept doing what they do and started receiving support by other big accounts while the helpers putting in most of the work were only seeing a fraction of the rewards.
Hive is about rewarding contributions in many forms that may bring value to other users, keep them staying here or distribute stake properly and fairly, but for some that was not enough because they wanted "free rewards" just for having founded and built up a community so it kind of touched on the issue from a few days ago that I had to combat with downvotes as well, they were eerily similar even though executed differently.
Anyway, it's kinda late and I should try catch some shut-eye, just thought I'd drop this thinker in here and share with you a couple different ways people could potentially start taking advantage of others and the platform at the cost of others. It's not the first time and I'm sure it's not going to be the last time. It is however important we keep this to a minimum by consistently fighting off such bad behavior.