Automated Posting: Let's Talk About It

Building the next v4v.app v2

Support Proposal 265 on PeakD
Support Proposal 265 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 265 on Ecency
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This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.

Flying Spam

My latest Proposal started at the end of last week and is currently unfunded. Getting a proposal funded is not easy and that's a good thing. I fully appreciate that the bar should be somewhat high.

The way it works

For those of you who don't understand the proposal system here's a brief backgrounder. You can put in a proposal by paying a fee in HBD. The Fee is 10 HBD for a proposal that lasts 60 days or 10 HBD + 1 HBD per day longer than 60.

My current proposal #265 is for one year so submitting it cost me 315 HBD.

You set the start and end dates and the Daily Rate. You can ask for as little or as much as you want but you have to justify what you ask for.

In order to be funded you need to get more votes than Proposal 0. In practice this is a relatively high bar. The Hive Power of the voters dictates the position. So you need some large whales and also a lot of smaller votes.

Getting votes

I believe I have a reasonable reputation on Hive and I have a number of large account holders who like what I'm building and vote for me. Winning over other large stakeholders is a personal interaction and I don't need to know the specifics of how everybody decides what to vote or not vote for.

Automation

When I saw that I wasn't going to pass the bar, I took a step which I've taken before to good effect which is posting very targeted comments automatically and asking for votes.

There is no easy to use tool to do this which in many respects means only developers or people like myself who've learned a lot can do it. This is both good and bad.

I set my script up to comment only on posts made in the last 30 days by anyone who has ever supported any project of mine and users of the v4v.app itself.

I also give an upvote to every post I comment on (not a big one and this does whack my upvote power) but for sure it amounts to a few cents worth of HBD.

Results: the good

I've sent something like 500 automated comments so far and I've had exactly one complaint. I did have a slight bug which left a few double comments and that was pointed out to me but I hope I've squashed that bug (I think it related to posts which had been edited).

I've had a large number of votes in the last few days, somewhere over 100 which is around a 20% action rate. That's an incredibly high rate of success which I attribute to being a very targeted list. I'm trying very hard to not spam indiscriminately here.

When someone replies to my comments I always reply and upvote (I'm using @arcange 's seriously amazing Engage tool).

The Bad

As I said above, I've had one complaint! I replied to him.

I'd actually like to screenshot the complaint but I'm not sure I can even find it: it came from an account with a reputation of 25 and exactly 0 HP. I'm happy to hear and respond to proper criticism, but you have to have a little more skin in the Hive game than this.

... it was bugging me so I had to write some code to find it...

Bad Comment

And just to answer his point about buying BTC: I have sold Hive to buy BTC to keep my node stoked but right now as the Hive price has declined vs BTC I haven't been converting and hold more than 5,000 Hive which I really should have converted to BTC. I'm holding on to it in the hope the rate gets a bit better.

The Ugly

If this seriously pisses you off I want to hear from you. I just can't argue with the results. I also fully acknowledge that I'm in a somewhat technically privileged position of being able to run a campaign like this and there are some other non-technical proposals that probably never get made because they can't deploy these skills.

That said I'm currently unfunded so who knows if I will get more funding. If I don't I'll have to adjust my work and the capabilities of my apps accordingly but I don't foresee stopping V4V.app in the short term, I do make a reasonable amount from posts and running my witness.

I'm still short and I do have some more replies to send but I will take seriously any comments I receive here.

V4V.app languges

I'm looking for translation help to convert v4v.app into other languages, especially Spanish. I'm going to post about that separately very soon!

Value for Value

For the last few months while building @v4vapp I was generously supported by the DHF. Going forward I have a much more modest support which covers direct server costs and a little of my time.

If you appreciate the work I do on and around Hive, you can express this directly: upvoting posts on Hive is great. Also consider a direct donation (there's a Tip button on Hive or a Lightning Address) on all my posts.