I've been thinking for a while about how to improve my manual curation on Hive. The goal is to make sure the rewards I give are shared more fairly between the blogs that really deserve it. But I keep running into the limits of the current front-ends.

That’s why I came up with the idea to build a custom curation tool.
I think this could really be a positive change for Hive!

Interested?
Keep on reading!

Curation on Hive

Last week I read a great quote by @steevc in one of his blogs:

Curation is a superpower here as both sides of the vote benefit.

Superpower may be a bit too much credit, but the curation on Hive is quite unique. At least, I’ve never seen this on any other platform (which isn’t strange because I’m hardly active on other platforms :D).
But curation also brings challenges. Everyone is free to use their Hive power the way they want. But the way people spend their powers can sometimes lead to heated discussions. Things like self voting, the so-called ‘circle jerking’ and vote selling are being seen as abuse of the reward pool and not appreciated by our community.

Apart from the abuse I personally have another issue with the distribution of the reward pool. The way the front-ends work have a great advantage for users that have been on Hive for a longer period of time and built up a network of friends that vote on them.
And although I know that a lot of them probably have invested time and maybe money to grow their account, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all their blogs should receive high rewards. Especially when you compare it with blogs that might be of the same or even higher quality from new users.

Front-end blog feeds

Current front-ends have very limited possibilities for showing feeds to users. All of the offered feeds have shortcomings. One of the issues is that they cannot be customized to give the user exactly the blogs they want to see. Because of these shortcomings people are presented with blogs that already have a lot of rewards (hot, trending feed) or vote for the people they regularly vote on (following feed). Both are bad for vote distribution.
More followers often means more upvotes and more upvotes mean more views and reward, which results in a higher chance of showing up in the hot and trending feed or following feeds from others. This way a lot of upvotes will keep being given to a select group of users. This system is a disadvantage for new users who haven’t built a network yet, but do make blogs that add value to Hive.
It is bad for user retention when new Hivers see they get almost no rewards compared to others even though they create blogs of the same value or even better.

Yes, we also have the ‘All topics’ feed where you can see a stream of all the most recent blogs, but this feed contains a huge load of low quality posts. Besides that, in that feed are also blogs that will receive upvotes from autovotes and/or friends.

I personally think there is a need for a solution that can generate a customizable feed of blogs so Hivers can filter on exactly the type of blogs they want to curate.

The trigger

Two weeks ago I created a blog that was called: Rethinking Hive Author Rewards.
In this blog I had listed a couple of things that I think could be changed to improve the distribution of the reward pool. One of those things was providing better feeds/filters.
There were quite a few people that reacted positively on that specific subject in the comment section of the post.
I’m tagging these people because they might be interested in this as well. And might even want to add something to this discussion too.
@ph1102 @clareartista @deepresearch @minismallholding @quark.top @captainbob @stayoutoftherz @acidyo

In the aforementioned blog I also mentioned some of the developers of the major front-ends (Ecency, PeakD) to share their opinions on this matter, but unfortunately they didn’t join the discussion. But I think they are mentioned quite a lot, so they might have not even noticed the blog, so I don’t blame them for not commenting on my blog.

How I curate

I never use the hot or trending feeds for curation because they often show posts that, in my opinion, already have enough rewards. The ‘All posts’ is just too much. It’s an overload of all recently created blogs with a lot of posts that I am not interested in.

When I curate, I usually check three feeds:

• Following
• Community
• Tags

For curation I mostly use the following feed because those are the people I started following because I liked their content. There are two disadvantages to this way of curating. First of all, I’m ‘only’ following just over 300 people. I could follow more people, but I want to keep it manageable. The second disadvantage is that most people blog about multiple subjects. I might be interested in one subject, but not in the others. And people can change their posting habits over time too. And ‘unfollowing’ someone feels a bit awkward I think.
So my following feed is getting a bit cluttered with posts I’m not really interested in.

The second way I curate is via the communities feed. This gives me all the blogs that are created in the communities I follow. Just like with following users I’m quite cautious which communities I subscribe to because I want to keep this feed a bit clean as well. But this makes me miss all the great blogs in other communities. Not only the Gems and other large communities, but there are also a lot of niche communities that have great blogs which don’t show up in this feed.
And you also miss the blogs that aren't posted in communities at all.

The third way I curate is via tags. I have a few tags of subjects I'm interested in. These tag feeds give me all the blogs with that tag. The advantage of this method is that you also see the posts that are posted in communities you don't follow or aren't in the communities you follow. The main disadvantages are that you also get blogs with low effort and blogs where people wrongly add tags.

Managing three different ways is very time consuming. It still gives me a lot of blogs I don’t want to upvote and I also have the idea that I miss a lot of interesting blogs this way too.

There must be a better way of doing this!

The idea

After publishing my Rethinking Hive Author Rewards and reading the comments I’ve been thinking on this could be improved.
I think what’s lacking in the front-ends is the possibility for users to customize their feeds. It would be great if we had a way to filter out blogs you don’t upvote anyways and show us only the blogs we would reward in one stream.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a curation tool that could do this? I think it would!
The curation tool would show a stream of all blogs on Hive with the possibility to include and/or exclude posts based on customizable variables. The combination of these variables gives you the possibility to filter out all the blogs you don’t want to curate and only show those on which you do want to vote.

Although the list of variables can be quite long, I’ve selected a few below that I personally find interesting to filter.

1: Current rewards (adjustable)
This variable would allow you to filter out all the posts that have more than a certain amount of rewards. This way you can filter out all posts of which you think have enough rewards.
Do you want to reward under rewarded posts? Then set this value to something like < $5

2: Creation time (addjustable)
This is a variable to filter out blogs that have just been published and/or blogs that are over a certain number of hours/days old.
The minimum would be to prevent showing blogs that are recently created. Most of these might have no rewards yet, but when auto-votes kick in (usually within an hour or two) the blogs could get high rewards anyway.
The maximum would be to filter out blogs that are already a couple of days old.
You might want to set something like: Older than 3 hours, not older than 24 hours.

3: Minimum number of words/characters (adjustable)
A low number of characters often is a sign of a low effort blogs (with some exceptions like video blogs). You might for instance want to filter out all the blogs that are under 200 words.

4: Tags (include/exclude)
This one works just like the tags feeds some front-ends already have, but I would like the option to add more tags and make an SQL-like query. Here are some examples:
#photograpy AND #nature
#photography OR #nature
#photograpy AND #nature AND NOT #travel
NOT #crypto AND #gaming

5: Communities (include/exclude)
Same as tags, but then with communities.

6: Users (include/exclude)
Same as tags, but then with users.

7: Reputation level (hardcoded/adjustable)
Although a reputation level doesn’t tell a lot, you might want to filter out rep level < 25 since that indicates that the user received a lot of downvotes.

These are some of the variables I have come up with which at least would help me have a more custom feed with the blogs I want to curate.

Future options

I think we have to start small, but I have some big ideas 😀
The possibilities are almost endless. I've already thought about some future options that might be useful for the tool:

• Adding additional post metrics for instance post/comment ratio
• Saving your default preferences
• Saving multiple sets of preferences
• Sharing a set of preferences with others

If you have any ideas about what could be a useful feature for the curation tool, please let us know in the comments!

Possible benefits

A curation tool like I described above could really make a change on Hive I think. It would give manual curators a custom made feed that shows them blogs of people they otherwise probably wouldn’t have seen. This is also beneficial for authors that are new on Hive since quality blogs would be shown to the curators that are interested in them regardless if you have built up a network or not.
Instead of upvoting the ones you follow or the hot and trending posts, curators could also focus on other (possibly) high quality posts that are a couple of hours old, but haven’t received many rewards yet.
This could result in the rewards of the reward pool being better spread across multiple blogs.
The tool could result in more rewards for new users that add something to Hive which would help retain new users better.

How to continue from here?

OK, I have this idea for a curation tool, but how to continue from here? I’m not a programmer!
So that’s why I just threw the idea out to @ecoinstant in the chat during one of the Crypto and Cola podcast shows.

Eco has already built me a delegation tool and a tipping tool, so I knew he has the connections and also know he is into building synergy on Hive.
A couple of days after the Crypto and Cola show I contacted him and shared a sort of a whitepaper I created of my idea.
We had a little chat and he said the following:

I was really glad he also thinks this is needed!

We also talked about funding the development of this tool. You might already know his “Is this worth money?” series where he and his team of developers build tools for everyone that has a good idea.
And I really think this idea is worth money. Hive will benefit from this in the form of better curation and how I see it, this can have a positive impact on user retention.

There is an English saying: "Nothing comes for free.", but I prefer the Dutch version: “Only the sun rises for free”. Eco is enthusiastic about the idea and does want to start building the tool. But he does need to pay some developers to get started. He has asked me if I could do a fundraiser to collect 100 USD, so he could get someone to start working on this curation tool.

I hope we could get this thing started and I don't know where this would end, but I say; let's give it a try!

The fundraiser

Why a fundraiser? Why not? It’s a quick and easy way of collecting enough money to start this project. Yes, we could have created a DHF proposal, but that would take a lot of preparation and we need to get some whales to vote on the proposal as well.
And we ‘only’ need $100 to get started. I think we can find enough supporters for this project to raise the amount.
Be aware that $100 will not be enough to create a complete tool with all the ideas I mentioned above, but having something to start with and having the possibility to build it out would already be great.

I’ve made a start by donating $5 myself for this project. So who’s with me?
Who would like to contribute to a curation tool that can help Hive thrive?

For the donations I’ve set up a link that I’ve created with one of the other Tools Eco has built together with @thecrazygm ; A tipping tool.
It’s preconfigured with an one HBD tip, but the amount is adjustable.
https://thecrazygm.com//hivetools/give/friendlymoose/1/HBD/HiveCurationTool

You can also use the PeakD tipping to donate funds.

I’ll collect all the HBD and will transfer it to Eco when we reach the $100. If we manage to collect more I will also send that to him of course. I’ll create update posts on the progress of the funding to have some transparency.

I hope you like the idea and want to contribute so we will be able to start building this potentially great tool! Let's make this red pie chart green!
And even if you’re not a curator yourself, your donation can help create a tool that supports fairer rewards and better content visibility on Hive. That benefits the whole ecosystem.

Spread the word!

If you like this idea and also want this tool to be developed, please help me to share the word! You can do 7this by reblogging this post, tagging Hivers that also might be interested in this, or talk about it in Discord channels and podcasts!
The more people know about it, the more chance we have this really will become a great tool!

Let’s build something together that makes Hive even better. Every donation helps—big or small.

Friendlymoose