Acidyo has gotten to me. I see him posting with his thoughts and ideas around Hive ecosystem and after this week I have my own thoughts that I needed to get out!
Cue the ranting post!
What Started This
Look I am not going to lie. When I got back into Hive and learned about posting here and rewards and all of that I found a website that let's you basically autovote whenever a curator votes on a post. I immediately signed up and did the things. I figured it was a no brainer to put my HP to work passively and earn curation rewards.
I kept it up for roughly 3 months until last week. I posted a article that honestly I specifically wrote because of conversations between me and acidyo and wanted to show them how to buy pokemon cards with crypto without KYC. It was something I have used for years and love the service. Here is the article in question.
And I know what you are thinking.. 51.79 in rewards is insane.. and you are right I was BLOWN AWAY by the response to this post. But once I posted it I was watching it and watching my notifications. It was slow going for like the first hour or so.
Then... Acidyo voted on the post..
And within a mere 10 seconds my votes on that post went from like 10 to over 200. It was insane. Now granted most of those posts were super small and didn't meet the threshold to send a notification but there were some which did. And it got me thinking...
The actual point of this
Again as someone who is trying to get more involved in HIVE blockchain and ecosystem I am trying to think big picture here and long term goals. And the more I thought about it.. the more I really didn't like the autovote system. And it's for a few reasons.
This is MY personal opinion and what I will do and not do. No shame towards other who have a different opinion though.
Cons to AutoVote System
- Autovoting takes away from the personal aspect to interacting with the blockchain. You are just grinding for the HP and not truly interacting with your fellow Hivers. It gives a false sense of accomplishment to the author
- If I write a article about Frogs and then 1 person who curates votes it and so hundreds of other upvote as well. I would assume that hundreds of people like articles about Frogs so I should keep posting about my pet frogs and shit. But in fact maybe that 1 curator was just upvoting because of a catchy title and thumbnail. Or maybe just because of the work put into the article and nothing about Frogs at all.
- You waste your Voting Mana.
- If you autovote even if it is set to say 70% of your Voting Mana.. then you come across a article that you like and want to vote on it. Your vote Strength will not be as much as it would if you were at 100% but instead you are at 70%. So you are lessening the amount you vote to authors that YOU enjoy or want to reward.
- It feels like it's just a way to passively interact with the blockchain and try to milk out as much as you can from the blockchain with minimal effort.
- Now I am not saying that is the case for everyone but why not just manually vote for the articles you find. You can search up curators and find what they post on to discover new authors or topics without autovote.
Pros to the Autovote System Redesign
- I could see the benefit to a Autovote System though. I am not just grumpy completely.
- Let's say someone (me for example) is going on a vacation for 2 weeks. My HivePower will just sit there and not be benefitting the people I like and want to support.
- So I would LOVE a system that we could call "Vacation Mode" which would act similar but a little different then AutoVote. This is how I see it working (for smarter people than me to code it though).
- Vacation Mode when checked, you set a time frame with a minimum of 5 days and a maximum of 14 days.
- You set which accounts you want to autovote or which curator you want to follow their votes
- You would use your HP and Voting Strength to upvote those articles BUT you would not earn Curation reward for it.
- So you could still support people you want to support passively but without any rewards for yourself..
Put my Money Where My Mouth Is
To prove I am putting my money where my mouth is. Here are the screenshots of me removing access to autovoting. And if you REALLY don't believe me.. you can track my votes onchain and see for yourself.
So now that I am not wasting part of my Voting Strength on random posts I never read.. I can actually upvote the articles that I LIKE and have those votes worth something.. hopefully 😁