A long winded posts that summarizes the other rant posts I've shared in recent days.
And because we're a Filipino based community, it gives the wrong impression that it's exclusive to Filipinos, it's not. Anyone that really wants to be part of the community can just hang out at the server, get active, make friends, and then have those friends vouch for them to get a membership. It's peer to peer reviews like this that most don't past the screening test to see if they are are good fit for the group culture.
Making friends with the other members is the bare minimum and if you fail at that, you're unlikely going to be invested in what this community will be up to moving forward.
A recurring controversial theme is the use of the #voteme channel, it's a channel where members can trigger the @hivephilippines account to vote on them and other users using a preset vote weights based on their server roles. It currently uses a Merit-Based Voting system where members who do more for the community get more % weights rather than a Stake-based voting where if one delegates more they get more. Voteme privileges are a side perk and never a guarantee while being part of the community. The system was in placed to distribute wealth to new users or users that have less resources from users that have plenty to spare. This let's newbies get a better start at the platform because they aren't expected to delegate anything (no one is) to @hivephilippines just to use it. It's support handed out by community members that want to pay it forward.
It's also constantly monitored to avoid any sense of entitlement. As much as possible, voting % weights are being balanced depending on users usage. If there is more demand for the vote and less voting power to go around, decreasing the weights % helps ensure votes are delivered to as many users as possible. If there is less demand for the votes, the voting % are raised so that the few that use it get more. This system helps give a stable return to delegators.
This can't be stressed enough, delegating to the account does not automatically mean access, we're not a delegate for upvote service. Yet sometimes the message gets lost with some sense of entitlement.
Below is the data for the last 30 days of @hivephilippines voting profile. Frequency means how many times the top 10 accounts were voted. Note that this doesn't give us the value in $ because it only shows the number of times the accounts were voted. One vote at 1% and another vote of 50% in a different occasion can just look like 2 on the frequency counter.
What we need is pairing up with percentage
These shows the top accounts with the largest vote weights. When paired with the frequency numbers above, it adds confirmation of who has benefitted the most from the last 30 days. For users like @juanvegetarian, you can see that he's not on the top 10 when it comes to getting upvoted but because his voting weights are large, he still gets more value out of it even if he posts less. There's no % that says one is benefitting too much because that is arbitrary. Even if one has 30% on their total percentage count, that doesn't mean it's significant if the account voting only has 100 HP, but it is alarmingly greedy if the account doing the voting has a 100,000 HP. So using this metric requires more context before jumping into conclusions.
Managing the voteme channel is negotiating with the age old Supply and Demand, the supply is the votes and the demand comes from users. While our voting power recharges constantly after use, it's not an infinite resource because voting at 100% decreasing your total voting power to 2%, and that 2% recharges fully every 2.4 hours. We only have 24 hours in a day so that means there will be times when it dips below the threshold that no votes can be handed out when there are more users triggering the vote.
A soft indicator I use to gauge an oversupply and low demand is when my own percentage in the @hivephilippines increases and makes it to top 10, the account automatically votes on my account once it gets past 98% VP, and since I've been posting regularly while the VP sits at above 98%, this meant I need increase the voting weights of other users so that my account doesn't get voted by this account.
Now you might be thinking why not use this on another account? that would be fine too, if they have no interest in triggering the votes for themselves. I don't use the community account and if it does vote for me, it's under two conditions, someone else triggered it on my account or the VP is at 98% at the time I'm shitposting. It's a soft indicator that there is plenty of VP to throw around when I get votes so I readjust the weights for everyone with an increments of 5%. The goal is to try and keep things below 1.5% on my own account. Any account can also be used as a sub for mine as long as the account owner doesn't plan on triggering self votes. The feedback comes after 2 weeks to 30 days because this is how long the changes can precisely reflect how users adjust to the new norm.
The /profile command can be triggered on the channel to check the community stats and it's open for everyone to use even on their account for added transparency.
Another method for tracking for user behavior is checking the number of times the user has been using the channel and see the ratio between self-vote : others. @hivephilippines wasn't created to be a circle jerking community account, nobody is obligated to delegate, and people that haven't built their stake on the platform can get something out from community participation. As much as possible, it tries to give something for everyone without the need to be concerned about quality posts during curation. The hard rule set is the post must not be plagiarized, predominantly made by AI assist, and spam. Other soft rules like non-HivePH member, non-Filipino and etc can still be decided on a case to case basis.
Checking the selfvote : others ratio helps me track user perception about the privilege. Ideally, I'd want the active users to be more considerate in using the votes for other users than using it on their own posts most of the time. Since the bot can only be triggered once every 24 hours per account, someone who scores with a 20 self : 0 others is a strong indication that they're not getting the message. Have more folks sporting this number and some readjustments will be made.
It's really balancing the greed vs altruism that is being done here beyond the supply and demand. I had to make a few rants posts as a foundation before letting the message sink in because dropping sanctions out of the blue isn't going to help people reflect on what they're doing. By the time I make some decisions, I'd have spent more than a week at least to evaluate their voting patterns, on chain behaviors and etc to make the call. And sometimes these behaviors get adjustment when some individual get wind of the upcoming changes but by then it's already set, the right time to reflect on actions will always be more than 2 weeks ago.
This system isn't full proof, as one could just keep curating other users to jack up their "others" number. You're not fooling anyone from the sudden change in behavior. There's another check where I could evaluate who the other people this particular user is usually voting for. Ideally, I'm checking for diversity in the names instead of recurring names that hint about a social group.
Who people want to support and use their vote on isn't something I want to meddle with unless they cross some hard rules, however, there's also regulating those votes because it's a shared community resource. All the previous paragraphs above is just a prequel to larger picture.
Seen from my crappy diagram is a rough value distribution of the community. We don't release monthly reports just for show, we want the community to have some idea of what we actually do on the background.
Green: Value comes in.
Red: Value comes out.
Purple: Excess baggage
HivePH has been using it's gathered income from different sources to buy up some Hive Engine tokens or Invest in its community members. While community staff/members give some of their time and effort to build the community as their costs. This is a simplified explanation.
In a bad scenario that delegators decided to pull out their delegations from @hivephilippines, the @hiveph account still has stake delegated to it and it just keeps on accumulating. It certainly wouldn't give better votes than what it has now if people pulled out their delegations but it's still going to be there. People may forget the concept of how growth doesn't happen in a day. An increase in income for the community like 50-100 Hive monthly isn't going to automatically translate to 1$ upvotes but it accumulates the stake anyway. And this is freely handed value to members that directly and indirectly build on the community. As HivePH accumulates value, it directly transmits that value to the community members but in small drops compared to members having a large bucket of expectations to fill.
Because it's an account that doesn't that only gives petty votes, it's not really that big of deal right? well this value accumulates and compounds over time. It's even going to grow faster if people put a little more elbow grease on building. We don't have custom Hive Engine tokens, I don't think we need to tokenize anything when your base token as Hive/HP is more than enough to access some of the projects on Hive.
The purple highlight where I dub as excess baggage are the users that have no shown consistently that they're not really interested about paying the favor forward and that's fine since your money your rules. But I do find it odd that they'll be using the hiveph tag, guilt trip you into voting because they exist, and have no track record with merits worthy to show for. I'm talking about supposed community members that have been consistently apathetic about the activities of this community and can't be bothered. Since I'm not really banning anyone from supporting friends that qualify under this category, I may as well just reduce the leaks in value the community had to suffer.
Creates shitposts regularly, has been on the platform for more than half a year, uses the hiveph tag, doesn't bother with hiveph events, doesn't interact with members, has a barren comment section, has a history of entitlement bitching about not being noticed by curation efforts when they can't even be assed to market themselves to the community, has no community contribution along the lines of onboarding or information dissemination, onboards users setting them up to the wrong expectations about the platforms, posts ponzi schemes, scams, and all the things that screams I'm not interested in getting involved but I'll be happy to take the votes, thank you.
Ever since the decreased in vote weights for roles and specific users, the hidden benefits have increased for active users, but these come in subtle ways. Before I couldn't upvote more comments to those that are engaging with the @hiveph account but because less VP is consumed for excess baggage, I can now upvote the comments of community members that are active.
Why should the community be resources spent more on users that don't want to be involved? If I can't eliminate, the I can just reduce the costs and divert that VP to members that are worth investing. You can't build on anyone that feels nothing about you, refuses you, and especially antagonizes you so why spend your days worrying about winning people that already made their choice. They have an entire year and more to figure out their destiny here.
There's no shortage of posts / comments to vote, but there is a scarcity of community members that have a team player mindset. You can't build on people who only focus too much about their own accounts, so engrossed with their shitposts that they never question what their cumulative actions make them look in the long term.
If HivePH is able to hand out 5$ upvotes, do you really think these behaviors would change for the better? I say money only magnifies what's already in there, if the individual has been known to be generous and a team player, give them more money and they'll likely do more for the common good, the same thing can be said for bad habits that promote greedy behaviors.
I know I'm not going to be anyone's favorite when it comes to conflict resolution in the community but usually I am reserved when it comes to exposing some shady shit some members do. That's why I always welcome community discussions and transparency on #iron-cage, if you're really convinced that what you're doing isn't wrong and feel wronged about me giving some sanctions on your account, you're always welcome to contest why.
I have an answer for all calls I made regarding specific users and it's usually involved a track record that they've been doing for weeks. Most of the time, I just notice things but don't really mind them. When I do start to mind, you'll know when you're tagged and then it'll likely be too late to change my mind given the track record anyway.
I have always pursued the most fair system that benefits the majority and I'm not even running for president, you can take my spot if you think you can do better I'm happy lifting up some responsibilities I don't need.
Learn to pay it forward, don't do stupid shit, make friends, be a team player, and let your merits negotiate your worth in the community. Follow the concepts and you're going to be fine.
I have an open door policy for the community, feel free to leave and take out your delegations with you. This community project is bigger than any community member, and it'll continue to operate even without me by design, that's how insignificant we all are as individuals within the space in the grander scheme of the community.