Just as my journey into the wonderful world of Hive, my journey into Leofinance started a bit slower than it did for many others out there. Being completely honest here, I had heard about Leofinance in one way or the other, but I never really cared to dig any deeper. It was about 3 month ago, when @revisesociology mentioned that I should really consider posting my content to Leofinance as well.
I did so, just to test the waters. At first, I simply put the Leofinance tag to my articles and moved on to post through hive.blog. I eventually migrated to the Leofinance interface for posting, but that was mostly because I liked the interface more, not necessarily for anything else. It took two more key events to really get me involved with Leofinance on a broader level. These events were the change to a linear curation curve and this post by @taskmaster4450le.
One thing that had bothered me about Hive was the lack of interaction and involvement with most of the articles. My articles rarely got more than a comment or two and often these where just "I've voted on your article, now go vote on mine"-style comments just fishing for attention and a vote from me. Not that this was much better back on Publish0x but at least there I had a couple of regular readers that did leave meaningful comments that I wanted to interact with.
So in theory, I really liked the suggestion made by @taskmaster4450le - publicly make a commitment to do at least 10 comments on Leofinance on a daily basis. The upside obviously was that this would help to create more interaction between authors and readers. Still, I was afraid that this would simply mean more one line comments simply fishing for attention. This certainly did happen to a degree, but it's been a lot less drastic than what I expected. Instead, we really saw a huge increase in meaningful comments and earnest interactions between users. This certainly has multiple reasons, but among the most important ones is the aforementioned change to a linear curation curve. So what does that mean?
On Hive - and before the change on Leofinance as well - there is a rather complicated function in place deciding how much rewards you earn for voting on a post or a comment. Basically, the more people vote after you, the more rewards you get. So if you are the first to vote on anything, you'll earn the most. But if you are the last, you basically earn (almost) nothing. This has several other bad side effects that I might talk about in a dedicated article some day, but the most apparent one is this - there's almost no point in voting on a comment if you hope to receive any returns from that. Of course you could still vote on a comment if you wanted to show your appreciation for it and ignore the loss of reward, but this rarely happens, if at all.
By changing to the linear curation curve, this changed completely. On Leofinance, there's now always a 50:50 split between the author and the curator. No matter when you vote on anything, no matter who votes before or after you, you'll always get the same return for your voting. I certainly liked the change because I hoped to see less auto-voting and more manual curation (and thus actual reading before voting). It did have an additional effect I did not foresee, though. People started to vote on comments they enjoyed or found helpful.
The obvious effect is that this encourages people to comment more. Not only that, though. Since people will only vote on the comments they appreciated or found helpful, it also encourages people to make meaningful comments. The ones only fishing for attention are still there and probably will be for a while, but their comments will get ignored largely and over time, they'll start to either actually contribute something to the topic or stop commenting altogether because they find it to simply be not worth it.
So why am I creating a separate account for Leofinance? Well, because I want to be able to vote on comments as well. The reason I can't do so with my main account is because that would mean that I'd waste my Hive curation by doing so. Whenever you give a vote on Leofinance, you automatically also vote on Hive. So as long as you are only interacting through Leofinance and don't stake Hive as well, this is not a problem. I do have about 6,000 Hive Power, though, and a 100% vote from there is worth about 0.07$ - something I certainly don't want to waste each time I vote on a comment.
The idea is rather simple - by having a separate account for Leofinance, I can do my normal voting on articles with @khazrakh, but I can use my dedicated Leo-account to vote on both articles and comments as I see fit. This way I can both vote for comments I want to see rewarded and still get my full curation rewards from my votes on (Hive)-articles.
So without further ado, please meet @khazrakh.leo, my dedicated account for the world of Leofinance. I'm going to move all my Leo from @khazrakh to @khazrakh.leo, so it will take some time until his votes actually matter but I'll start to use him right away nevertheless. All my content will still be released with @khazrakh, so @khazrakh.leo exists exclusively for voting purposes. I know many of the big names on Leofinance already did so before me (see, I didn't make it up myself), but if you have not done so yet, I'd encourage you to give it a thought as well. By giving our votes to good, meaningful comments, we can all help to further increase involvement with the Leofinance ecosphere and that's going to benefit us all in the end!
And that's all from me today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!