I'm going to try and keep this a bit on the short side as I spent way too much time typing on my phone last night about these "issues" that may be hard to get across at times. It'd probably take a very, very long post to write out more concrete guidelines as to when it is okay to use voting power for things and when it maybe isn't okay, even then not everyone is going to agree, whether small or big stakeholder, luckily we have the wisdom of the crowd here at play over time if something can drive the attention of many.
Okay, so the dilemma was about accounts in the form of this one receiving downvotes:
@rs-burn-engine/introducing-the-rs-burn-engine-strengthening-the-rising-star-economy-together
This is their introduction post.
Let me now explain from my perspective why this isn't a good use of voting power, keep in mind I have nothing against people of any size being innovative and coming up with new ways to use voting power or crowdfunding or ways to integrate irl stuff with the hive reward pool as long as it is something that benefits all of hive because the hive rewards pool is being used. See for instance initiatives like @hbdspend by @starkerz that use a portion of author rewards to provide discounts to shoppers for merchants who accept hbd which helps all of Hive.
I'll quote the post with some images and reply under them.
First of all, sorry to hear the game's economy isn't doing so well. I'm not surprised because most economies on Hive aren't doing well, not even splinterlands tokens are doing great AFAIK and that's our flagship game that hopefully still has great funding.
Okay, so about point 1, in future posts you can see that the only "unique thing" about these posts is the daily progress report, in the next post you can see that this mere sentence and "pending funds report" is unique from the previous post because the rest is just a repetition of what the program does:
Second post goes a bit more in depth about strategy, but one can see that upon daily posting, a short paragraph and a proof of burn will be the only unique thing in these posts, and then from another 3-4 accounts, there's not going to be too much uniqueness to them over time.
I'm only saying this because some people yesterday were arguing that these are "handwritten" posts all unique and shouldn't get downvoted.
About #2, using hbd to buy game tokens from the market. This is where the big issue comes, they're business model/donation run/whatever you wanna call it, depends on getting author rewards; hbd (hive), to sell those for game tokens. Basically taking value from Hive and placing it on the game token.
It becomes about intention. If an account who posted regurarly decided to send @rs-burn-engine their hbd or beneficiary rewards, no one would care because they're forfeiting their rewards to help the cause of this project. This project however, from the get go made it clear they'll use rewards generated for this and unlike regular accounts, is from the very first post getting consistent rewards from roughly the same voters:
This means that a lot of curators know about the intention and are spending their voting mana to devalue hive in an effort to increase the value of the game token.
Now I'm not going to go into the strategy of this account, how or why increasing the value of the game token or making their nfts more scarce is going to help the game, their players or bring new players in, as I don't really know much about the game. It is clear however that it is relying on voting mana to extract value from hive in favor of the game token.
If it asked people for delegations and used the curation rewards it earned to do this, no one would care as long as their curation is "normal", in the sense that it is voting for regular unique players' posts. If they asked for hive/hbd donations, it'd be the same.
The issue is that asking for an upvote does not cost the upvoter the same as asking for a delegation or donation. They're using curation as a fundraiser. This affects all stakeholders because it's coming from future inflation. Furthermore it also affects players because now there's 3-4$ per day in curation not going to their posts but to this instead as they're diverting voting power from regular curation towards the funding of these posts.
Why should all hive stakeholders foot the bill to assist a game economy when not all hive stakeholders are invested in it?
This is another red flag because only one person owns the keys to this account, so they could at any point just go afk and keep the HP part of the rewards after having mis-used curation all this time and outgrown regular users by only voting for each other.
My suggestions.
Ask for delegation support or integrate it in your economy somehow, don't misuse the delegation but curate people based on post quality, user quality, social activity, attention drive, etc. We all have to respect curation if we want it to work.
Ask for beneficiaries from players in your game who may be actively posting about other things, a 5% or 10% here and there doesn't feel too bad and can help the project out but it has to be the choice of the author and not the curator. I.e. the curator shouldn't vote with self-interest in mind (I'm going to vote this post because it's giving the game 10% beneficiary, but I'm going to ignore this one because it isn't - regardless of the content or which one got more attention).
It's very easy to use your voting power on whatever, but when it comes to actually donate or invest in projects it's not as easy to magically generate 2-4$ a day. While these initiatives may not seem dangerous at first, i.e. the people voting these posts maybe aren't even invested in the game and just wanna help out, it can quickly get abused where people make it the main goal to parasitically extract value from hive's rewards pool in an effort to send that value to a token that a lot less users benefit from.
Lastly, I realize this isn't a "big" issue, not a lot of rewards were being generated, etc, but we gotta put our foot down when curation gets misused or else these projects and the voting power spent on them will grow out of control fast. It's important for people to understand why certain things go against the general hive ecosystem. Even if curation can be very flexible, that flexibility needs to make sure it is something that mainly benefits hive itself and not sub ecosystems within it.