Let me preface this by saying that I think to a certain degree it is human nature to expect things in return. Let's say you've spent and invested a lot of time here, made good connections, generated content that gets consumed, etc, you know, all the "right" things that people seem to be in unison over that the network/shareholders should eventually reward you with some monetary value if you've kept at it. I don't think it would be crazy to expect to see something in that scenario and I don't believe the network has kept many accounts down in that case either compared to say most of the other platforms who mainly focus on rewarding the top 0.5% while the others have to get through minimum barriers to even make a few cents per day.
I also understand that this feeling can be subjective. We all think differently, are in different periods of our lives, live in different countries and economies, etc, etc. There are however times where it feels like some people expect this too early and for too little. I do wonder what it is that makes them believe they're owed rewards in those cases.
I'm not going to grasp at the lowest hanging fruit here where a lot of what I assume misinformed newcomers come barging into discord servers dropping their links or asking why their posts aren't getting curated when you see they've done jack all but post and expect rewards to just magically appear because they exist - which in and of itself is going to get harder to prove over time with tech and AI.
There was this case recently from a user who's joined the chain around the same time I have, so he's one of the early birds so to speak, but compared to my involvement I think it's safe to assume he hasn't spent as much time on the chain as I have. Naturally he also doesn't earn the same amount of author rewards, but this isn't really about that. The weird entitlement that I couldn't understand in this case was that he had invited a new user to the chain, which he confessed was his fiancé, who someone else had some time ago recommended to me to curate in one of my "who are new users I should follow" posts. For some reason, he was dead set on upvoting all of her comments with all of his voting power. This is something I see happening from time to time, some stakeholders favorite some users extra which to a degree is also okay as long as those authors in the receiving end of that voting power are putting in effort and time. But why every comment to the tune of spending all of your voting power on just one user? Naturally this stood out as I had just started following this user from a different account's recommendation so I asked why that was the case where he was upvoting every comment of this user.
The answer was that the user's posts aren't being rewarded well enough so he's taken it upon himself to spend all of his voting power on her comments to "make up for the lack of author rewards this new user (his fiancé) was earning".
What do you think about that scenario?
To me it was quite weird because for one, this user should know better having been here as long as I am that author rewards aren't supposed to be guaranteed and autovoters don't instantly land on users quickly since autovoters don't often adjust their lists (something I'd recommend they do more often honestly). More than that, this is a new user, they're still in the process of "proving themselves", investing time, effort, etc, into the network, and even so they weren't doing too bad because people had noticed and were recommending her to curators and she wasn't really doing "bad" in terms of hivepower. I guess some people only see pending rewards in $ so assume that someone is not doing as good as they could just because the price of hive is low currently, they don't think in terms of how much of a % of inflation is this user being allocated.
I tried to reason with him, I told him that I had just followed this user and am curating her which was the reason I had noticed this weird comment spam voting activity, i.e. they're in the process of doing better curation wise so his small stake (small in terms of having been here for almost 9 years) and voting power being used this way is only going to drive negative attention toward this user rather than giving her a real genuine chance of receiving curation rewards from more people in a natural hive way which many others are proof that it works.
I quite literally told him that him going out of his way this hard to spend all of his voting power on a single user, something that would make this place a shithole if everyone did the same thing, was quite literally affecting my curation on this user who I assumed was innocent at the time. I.e. 100 comment votes of his in a week would barely even be worth half a vote of mine on her content that he's now jeopardizing by insisting on continuing to do so because this user seemed to deserve the curation in general, as others had also noticed since she was very engaging and socially active.
Either way, after someone else jumped on to tell him off for his activity he decided to stop doing it (as if I had any ulterior motives to recommend him to stop so that another big user had to step in to also voice their opinion for him to consider it), which was great to hear.
Thus I continued curating the user for a while when I saw a post of hers on my feed, until I started noticing something.
She had pretty much stopped commenting completely.
???
Why? Were you only commenting and engaging so much for the $0.025 votes that user was giving you?
It's just baffling to me, they basically sabotaged themselves because every one of their comments couldn't get upvoted anymore, not understanding that the two go hand in hand together. If you're engaging genuinely a lot and others notice it, you have a higher chance of doing well in terms of author rewards, engagement, following, etc, etc.
I just really couldn't understand where this sense of entitlement comes from. Is it because they've been here so long that they think they can vote however they want and others shouldn't have a say in it if they feel it goes against curation?
I decided to unfollow that user after a while because they had quite literally stopped commenting almost fully compared to how active they were when all of their comments were getting those small upvotes. Naturally this came with a nice little "retaliatory" unfollow or was it a witness unvote or something.
Dunno, some times this place is quite weird, or at least people who make it weird. We have something insanely fair here that I'm sure no one else is even going to attempt to replicate because no one wants to give away so much power or make it so easy for rewards to be distributed in this way due to selfish reasons and yet we have people acting selfish even though this chain is barely worth anything.
Have you noticed this kind of behavior? I feel like all of those vote-trading, buying votes through delegations or other forms are kind of in the same boat. They feel entitled to rewards and over time their effort does not match the rewards they're getting, but if you dare to downvote then all hell breaks loose and they lose their minds real fast like taking drugs away from an abuser.
Again, I'm not saying that this entitlement or feeling of getting something back for having invested time and effort into this place should go unrewarded, but are we just going to ignore that 99% of content creators on other platforms end up making nothing having spent even more effort and time there? Is our bar not low enough here, where we instead have to stomp it under the ground so everyone gets a participation trophy?