Before I go into how @poshtoken works, I'd wanna discuss something I think many may not like to hear. Now I understand I'm an outlier in this aspect, because I'm involved in a lot of different projects and services on Hive and I'm also kind of a "no-life" user of Hive where I spend most of my days in and around hive. So it is kind of "obvious" that my posts, without being shared outside of Hive, generate a lot of traffic and views within hive. I'm not comparing myself to others when I say things like "if your posts are getting no "proof of consumption" but still getting a lot of rewards" maybe it's too much and some adjustment is due.
This does not mean that whenever some random "blind votes" happen to target a certain author that I'd jump at the chance to downvote such posts, I think the randomness effect is quite nice every now and then, if that author usually earns say $5-10 rewards and for some reason some accounts vote it up to 40-50$ every now and then that's fine by me. The issue is more if those rewards become consistent and the author shows no signs that there's anyone consuming the posts.
I think it's fair to say things like, if your post isn't getting consumed by close to anyone, it may not be worth much. This is something that's been discussed at length in the early days of the chain and I feel like over time it's become kind of a norm that no one bothers to "be active" outside of Hive to attempt to drive traffic towards our front-ends and their posts because there's little to gain for them. We don't have adrevenue, at least not a model that's actually generating revenue yet, due to visiting numbers being too low. We don't have a solid referral option for authors to refer new Hive users and "gain" something from them having joined through their link or by having read their post.
Something that also needs to be said is that Hive's quite unique in the way it generates inflation, the rewards "need to go out" basically. It doesn't matter if there's only 5000 active authors on Hive in any given week or if there's only 5, they'd all get the rewards pool whatever the case. There's been some bandaid options to this, for good or worse, people have opted to direct their upvotes towards other things possibly due to stagnation of an increasing unique author number, they are now voting for things like @hbd.funder or @buildawhale comments that burn author rewards rather than "overrewarding authors". I'm not going to get too much into that but I think there's value in putting the author rewards to use in different ways which we've seen grow over time.
One of those examples is for instance the SpendHBD community where author rewards are covering some discounts to offer towards consumers and attempting to invite more merchants to accept hbd or hive as a form of payment. Another is @poshtoken which through many ways attempts to reward users directly focusing on bringing in traffic to our posts and front-ends.
I personally think it's beautiful that Hive can be this flexible but with all these new ways of using the rewards pool we need to make sure that it's being used well and not abused. There are often many projects who attempt to do the same but ignore that the rewards they're generating are only affecting a few token holders at best and most of the time the person doing the activity themselves at worst. The rewards pool should not be used for personal interest if you're the one casting the votes and at the same time also earning the author rewards fully as this becomes counterproductive towards growing hive and distributing it widely which helps decentralization of stake.
Okay, now to dive into @poshtoken. Let's fast forward real quick that it was fairly launched with only sharers on X/Twitter earning tokens, no team allocation, eventually delegator allocation existed but that came at a cost of Hive Power delegations as well. Thus no one earned the token "unfairly" so to speak, everyone had to either delegate or share to earn it and it has been running for over 3 years now.
Lately the focus has been on @redditposh. The comments show any and every share of posts on Hive on reddit. Some may never see the light of day as they may get muted on reddit due to not following the subreddit's rules or other reasons due to hive links not being accepted on bigger subreddits due to them being too unknown for others.
Needless to say, to be good at sharing on Reddit you need to learn quite a few things. You need to find subreddits that are accepting of Hive links, you need to make sure viewers there have enough reason to click their way through to Hive and check the full post here - i.e. not give out all the info on reddit solely which may mean there's no reason for them to "read more" and click on the link at all. Then you also have to spend time looking for posts on Hive that may do well on Reddit which may be harder than it sounds at times.
We now have a way to properly reward people who are taking the time to learn and become "good" at sharing hive links on a top 3 website in the world. They've learned to navigate and find subreddits of all sizes that accept such links and it's become a win-win for both Hive and Reddit. A win for Reddit because they're not only being blasted with articles behind pay-walls and those icky sites that shove 20 ads on the same page and you need to browse 20 pages filled with ads to get to the information you wanna read more about. Most of our front-ends have no ads nor are they behind any paywalls asking them to subscribe or become members to read the full information on a certain topic that gets shared. A win for Hive because of the thousand of traffic that may visit our front-ends some may wanna join and create an account or wanna find out more what those "numbers" and "$" means behind the posts and comments.
At current reward issuance we are seeing roughly 2000-3000 hive per week going towards sharers with 20% going back to the authors if the sharer is not the same as the author of the posts that get shared. This is out of the weekly ~500k hive that goes to authors and curators. Not even 1%.
Now I'm not saying there may be some shares that are getting too high rewards and some maybe too low, it's not easy curating these as there's a growing number of shares daily from more and more users joining. I'd lie if I also didn't mention that we've been rewarding some higher than feasibly long-term as a way to encourage more sharers to join and learn to share which we've seen happening lately. Some times it is also hard to know how much actual traffic was generated when only a couple of our front-ends have a view counter enabled which can easily be gamed. What can't easily be gamed however is Reddit because they have over a decade of abuse-fighting and a centralized database behind them where suspicious activity gets stomped out, so we are mostly relying on them not being gamed when rewarding shares to hive.
Compare this to say, a DHF proposal that was supposed to market our blockchain and front-ends through traditional means that received over $150k in funding and showed little to no effects. I think spending less than 1% of our reward pool, ~3000 Hive (~$600 per week) on 50+ active sharers is not "a lot". Thus I'd appreciate it if you took this into account before you decide to downvote or counteract the rewards we're attempting to give sharers for spending time making Hive front-ends more of a household name and getting them in front of more eyes outside of Hive.
There's nothing for us to gain by running POSH and its different services, unless you count the very little funding we've thrown towards our devs to build everything and to maintain it running smoothly along with some server costs, or these posts of me talking about the project and earning some rewards through votes landing on the posts. I'm personally barely even active sharing and you can easily track who's earning what by looking at outgoing transfers from @redditposh.
I'd like to see the reward pool for sharing grow by a lot more and we having a lot more unique users actively sharing on a daily basis and competing against each other for the best shares as they all help bring more traffic to us which may some day make it all worth it rather than we continuing to exist in this small bubble and only attempting to bring traffic already here to our posts.
Either way, would appreciate your thoughts and opinions towards this matter, thank you for reading.