In a few hours from now, the dapp called hive.vote is expected to resume its operations. This is a Hive dapp that is responsible for the automation of upvotes and downvotes on Hive accounts. I use the dapp and almost anyone who has been on Hive long enough will eventually come to use it for curation convenience, or at least come to be aware of it exists. It’s just one of those must know subjects while being on the platform.
Now automating votes are the norm. It’s convenient. It gets you passive income when you can’t be bothered to visit the site to manually click upvote and this gives you a piece of the Hive’s inflation. When an author has grown their social network, they are likely to get more people convinced they are worth the automated support. I consider the autovotes as a badge that someone has entrenched their name on the community to garner that privilege.
Eventually, talks about votes will lead to social rewards, whether the post is getting rewards proportional to the effort to create it, the person behind it, and all things under how content is valued on Hive. I think posting rewards on Hive are driven by three reasons:
The effort to promote quality content and reward the author of that content.
Utilizing the platform like mainstream social media that happens to be powered by blokchain technology.
Maximizing income generation.
You only need to fall into 1 out of 3 as the bare minimum to access those social rewards.
1 is the reason why curation community accounts exist, there is a drive to promote quality content because this is valuable and content present on the blockchain raises its value so rewarding people that provide that value becomes a priority. This is the ideal goal but in practice, only a few authors can consistently put out content that can compete in quality compared to content found on other social media platforms.
But we still got to push these efforts at wide community level or people will loss the drive to better their posts. I don’t know about you but it’s not that hard to leave a platform where your daily feed or trending page is made up of posts that are lack luster.
2 is coming into terms that while 1 is good for the blockchain and the platform as a whole, the reality is that majority of the user base are just content consumers taking a shot at being a content creator. If every curator pursues the ideal that we’re all about rewarding good content and authors that bring in value to the platform, majority wouldn’t get anywhere because most just can’t publish content that’s competitively engaging. This is true for any social media platform out there.
Most of the time, you’ll see featured content creators trending on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and etc as the tip of the iceberg. But the majority of the iceberg’s mass is made up of people struggling to put out content for attention. And this mass of people are the unsung curators liking and sharing content on these social media platforms. See content I like, I press like.
It’s not that hard to understand that while the friends you’ve come to know on Hive are interesting, their content may not be but here’s a nice upvote for moral support. Now increase that charm and twerk those social skills to grow your network, you’ll eventually be a user that can produce so so content and monetize your stuff competitively.
And I think majority of the manual votes may just be a mix of “see content I like, I press like” and see “person I like, I press like”. Just my bias and I don’t see anything wrong with this if done with moderation minding the monetary rewards of those likes. This is what usually happens on other social media platforms, it just sounds more controversial here because we can monetize our social interactions here.
3 is just your standard post to earn, quality is optional, just maximize whatever rewards you can squeeze from the platform, mind your own business and don’t draw too much unnecessary attention to yourself. It’s a straightforward approach and purely explanatory. And some users do thrive under low reward conditions given the nature of compounding or doing it for a long time low key. If your objective is to earn and not make friends, this strategy is enough.
Actually the main prompt of this shitpost is the question:
What does your blog look like when the autovotes are gone?
Will your content make it to trending? Will you get some manual votes? Will you still get the same amount of organic support you’re getting without the automation?
I’ve already know how this post will look like during first few hours it will come to be. A few votes and barely worth any cent and this takes me back to a time when I was new (legacy blockchain days) and knew no one. And this is to be expected since I’ve got my engagement levels on the platform dramatically low because work life takes most of my time.
The rewards are nice but the source of satisfaction I got is just checking the view counter on my posts on PeakD analytics dashboard. There’s some analytics on your posts that helps gauge engagement and I think this is more important if you’re serious about doing the content creation gig. The inconvenient truth about autovotes is that while they do bring in nice $ for your time and effort coming up a post, it’s no substitute for audience feedback and definitely not contributory to your growth as a content creator.
If you can’t generate organic views on your own posts, that really speaks volumes about your progress. Most can get away with a self-deprecating comment that they’re not even trying. I think people do try to better themselves with their posting quality because this increases chances for greater rewards. But the threshold to get any noticeable results requires more sacrifices like putting in more time developing better skills related to one’s niche content.
I don’t know, I’ve seen authors pump out the same thing daily, little experimentation done for several months, sticking to the same topic, and this just screams stagnation as a content creator. You’re not alone though, I’m still far from the goal of building my art account @artofadamada, the only thing I’ve achieved so far is offline sketches and consuming digital tutorials.
Because outside Hive, is a big ocean and being aware that being a Hive celebrity is just being a big fish in a small pond. Even smaller if you consider posting rewards as a metric which is nothing compared to being a competent creator on your niche.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.