It's only been a week since I did an article on the recent changes to the way tipping works on noise.cash. If you missed it, they basically changed away from a free tipping system that allowed its users to freely decide how much they wanted to tip to whom to a system where every time you like a post there's a chance that the author will receive a tip between 0.01$ and 0.03$. Needless to say, I wasn't a big fan of the change and described several issues that I saw with that change and also laid out in detail what I expected to happen because of this. Only 7 days later, basically everything I've expected came true. Not only that, though, it happened a lot faster than I expected.
Engagement and average quality of content did indeed decrease at an alarming rate during the last week. Looking at my feed right now, there are several people posting basically each hour with only a couple of other authors in between. By now, about 80% of the posts are made by about 20% of the active people in my subscription list - and I'm already only following people that I found to make quality content in the past. The sad truth is - with the recent changes, the only way to get close to the payout you had two weeks ago is by more or less spamming content each and every hour. About two weeks ago, I was making up to 1$ with each of my posts. By now, this is down to like 0.3$ - 0.4$ at best. Now people are likely going to argue that this is still more than what you get on Twitter, but then again I do not use Twitter and I will continue to only use services that I find to be worthwhile.
At the same time, interaction on the site is at an all time low. My most recent posts only found like 1 or 2 comments compared to 10 or more meaningful comments a few weeks ago. Again, this is the obvious result of removing the ability to decide how much you want to tip. Now everything is just some randomly selected pennies and it feels like people are just mindlessly clicking the heart on their subscription list every now and then. At least it's what I'm doing if I'm perfectly honest. It just feels like the whole system is dying down and if nothing else, it serves to proof how important the ability to give bigger tips was for the overall health of the system.
It's probably not too late to change things again. As of now, there's no serious competition out there and I'm sure a lot of people still look at noise.cash even if they use it less right now. Nevertheless, I'm already getting tired of the service and if nothing changes, I'll be leaving it behind for good eventually. Only 2-3 weeks ago, I was making 4$-5$ worth of BCH with the site daily. As of now, this is down to like 0.5$ daily. Obviously, with this kind of decrease, it just feels like it's not worth the effort any longer. This in turn leads to another question, though. What are the key takeaways for Project Blank from the whole fiasco?
To me, there are two key takeaways from all this and while they are two sides of the same medal they are both very important for the success of the whole project.
You need to reward quality content
This seems like such an obvious point but it still got ignored by noise.cash. If there's no differentiation between random gibberish and quality content, then people will obviously follow the easy road and just spam whatever comes to their mind. If you want to see quality, you have to make that more lucrative. Quality needs to pay better than quantity. That was the case with the old tipping system, but it obviously is not with the new one. I'm quite confident that Project Blank won't have any issues with this as it's going to be a proof of stake voting system just like what we have on Hive. This way, it will be up to each of us to decide how much of our voting power we want to use on each individual post and thus a good quality post is likely going to reach several dollars (or more) while random gibberish will only earn a couple of pennies.
You need to stop rewarding low quality content
This might sound just like the above and while the goal is to promote overall quality, it still is a completely different topic. noise.cash did have a lot of issues with spam for all of its existence. Their way of fighting this was taking away the ability to hand out free tips from those accounts that only put out spam. They still were eligible to receive tips, though, and so these accounts just kept spamming in hopes of receiving the odd tip. Project Blank hopefully will have us covered on that as well. I expect to see a downvote feature, again depending on your staked tokens. This will allow people invested in the project to remove any rewards from random spam. This might sound a bit cruel and there obviously sometimes are cases where downvotes are used in the wrong way, but overall this feature is crucial for the longevity of the system. At the same time, it takes away the necessity of having a centralized authority deciding who gets rewards and who doesn't.
Ultimately, the whole proof of stake/proof of brain concept is just a way better way of providing rewards to the right people in my opinion. It sure has it's flaws, but having a central authority decide over everything is never a good thing. noise.cash went through a lot of iterations for the last 5 months and it seems like they never managed to end up with a configuration that they felt confident with. If nothing changes, numbers are going to get worse with engagement dying down completely eventually. Even if they do change things again, though, I don't see how they could stand their ground against Project Blank so either way, the days of noise.cash are pretty much numbered in my opinion.
And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!