In my Leofinance post of yesterday I tackled the topic of rewards on the Hive blockchain, quality content, and the distribution process of such rewards which will always be seen with subjective eyes. It's in our DNA to be personal; there's nothing we can do to change that.
Somehow it is great that we are subjective beings because that's what differentiates us from the emerging "society of bots and automation" and such human quality has also pushed us forward in our continuous evolution process.
I don't like too much talking about Hive cuz we all know how things run around here and what a great project it is. Perspectives change over time, though, and newcomers enter our great community every single day. We've become a society, the way I see it, and the expansion process of our society is a never-ending one.
I strongly believe though that we're still in the early stages of the development of this blockchain-based ecosystem. There's still so much to fix and develop upon. Today I want to bring up for discussion, through my #askleo post, the topic of self-votes and auto votes.
It's not a new theme for me, but I'd say it's relevant to once in a while bring these up on the surface of the Hive waters. I mentioned yesterday in that post that I linked in the introduction that @azircon was replying at some point, in the comments section on of @edicted post to someone, that he's not advising anyone to self-vote.
I have personally not used self-votes for years now... I will have to mention that my VP is tiny, thus even if I'd use some VP on my own posts it would basically make no difference. However, I wouldn't upvote my own posts even when I'd had a more relevant HP amount, just because I'm not posting for myself, I do that for my readers, thus it is in their hands to choose whether my content deserves any curation or not.
That's how I see it. I also don't use auto-votes because I like doing things manually. I'm not a fan of automation. I do appreciate the convenience that sometimes automation offers, but when it comes to human interaction, and considering that Hive is a social media dedicated platform, I like having things done organically.
I do know for sure that some users have put me on auto-votes, thus to some extent some upvotes on my posts are coming on a regular basis, but wouldn't mind at all if through a hard fork we would no longer have the auto-voting feature. I'm talking here from a content creator, a daily content creator's perspective.
In some cases Hive is pure business, people have invested funds from their own pocket in buying HIVE from the open market and powering it up and these can't afford to waste their HP by idling it when not around Hive and able to put that HP to use. Hence, finding a plethora of content creators that post content on a regular basis and adding them to an auto voter bot makes a lot of sense for these ones.
Not for me, though, same as self-votes don't make any sense either. The musing for this #askleo post is whether ditching self and auto votes would make Hive a better place, and my answer is: somehow irrelevant. I do have some perspective to share though.
Ditching auto votes means that the ones using these(the autovotes) will now have to use that VP they usually spend on themselves on others, thus "making someone else happy"... once in a while. At the end of the day, as @davidickeyyall commented on my post yesterday, it's one's VP, whether earned on the chain or bought from external sources and everyone has the right to use it as he/she pleases.
Power corrupts, and history has proven to us that sometimes such power can be used excessively on oneself, not making use of it on other accounts at all. This situation often occurs in the case of accounts that are both content creators and curators at the same time and have huge amounts of VP. The accounts that have chosen "the curators path" are not that much inclined to excessively upvoting themselves.
What about auto votes?
Well, considering we are a social media platform and "being social" means engaging and being active around here, ditching this one would for sure make a lot of sense to me. The ones holding a relevant amount of HP who aren't too active would for sure disagree with me, but the users that are active in here on a daily basis would not mind getting rid of auto votes.
If and when that will happen we will be facing ourselves with a situation where only the active ones will have control over the rewards distribution process. Being aware that automation is part of blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency world, I doubt this will ever happen to Hive. However, I've said in the introduction that we're prone to subjectiveness, thus the answers coming to this #askleo post shall be as diverse as one can imagine.
What do you think?
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian