I keep finding myself writing these posts ever so often, it's a bit weird how to some it feels like I'm coming out of nowhere when I bring certain things up while majority of people feel it's quite obvious.
There's a perceived value of content on Hive. Some might say posts have close to no value unless they're driving attention to them which I kind of agree with. There's a lot to bring up in this post and since it's my first one after quite a while as I'm back and settling in from some traveling I'm going to try and keep it short.
If you write an amazing post with amazing content but no one consumes it or there's no proof that it was consumed even if it has many and big votes for one reason or another, you shouldn't be surprised if people deem it overrewarded and want to adjust the rewards down a bit using their (delegated) stake.
I'm not a great example to use here as there's a lot of different factors why I do get attention and engagement on my posts, but there are a lot of great other examples with users with close to no stake receiving a great amount of engagement. We've noticed this in the philippine onboarding initiatives for instance, most of these users are very new to the blockchain but they post in the right communities, engage a bit with others and not just replying to comments on their own posts and others reciprocate that activity by dropping comments back on their posts. Comments are a great indicator that posts were consumed, even if not fully and in some cases maybe not even read at all but just viewed images included in it, etc. I don't even read all posts I upvote personally either but I trust the people I've been following for years that they're not just reposting, plagiarising, all things the community is generally against being rewarded on here.
The reason I bring up the example above is because there's some top earning authors that have way less engagement than literal newcomers to our blockchain but are receiving 10-20x the rewards per post on a constant basis. On top of all that they barely engage, (one of them had no comments in over a month yet posting twice per day earning anywhere from $30-60 pre-pump), not just in their own posts but on posts of other authors. So not only where they socially inactive here but on their web2 socials they also didn't really receive any engagement, weren't bothering to try bring some "perceived" value to hive like backlinks, etc. It really begs the question as to what value do you think you are bringing to this blockchain when none of your posts get any comments, any views (youtube content in the posts as indicator) and you're not even bothering to be social on the one platform that's rewarding you heavily? I personally think it's kind of rude to completely desert social activity when you're being so handsomely rewarded. Aside from throwing a hissyfit initially on a few downvotes I cast it seemed they understood the issue and that I didn't have a personal problem with them but the voters overrewarding this user by that much without a second thought on the lack of perceived value I was mentioning.
Image generated with peakd.com/ai
One of my favorite authors on Hive who does quite well in rewards as well, @tarazkp, receives quite a great amount of engagement even though he posts just as often as the user mentioned above. Taraz not only replies to his own posts but also goes to other people's posts and engages with them, he's also maintained quite a large stake over the years whereas that other user is constantly just selling everything (although I didn't wanna get into this cause it's not really an issue what people to with their stake, I figured it was worth noting here either way as comparison). Taraz brings a ton more value to the chain because consuming his content gives you every time additional content to consume in the comment section. Yet these two users are equally rewarded with the former actually earning more than taraz.
Are you telling me that's fair? Am I an asshole for wanting to adjust the rewards with my low $5 (pre-pump) downvotes to hopefully discourage the voters continuously overrewarding this user which to me seems to bring close to no value to the platform?
I know for many they don't really understand how hive rewards work but let's put it into an example for fun.
Let's assume taraz and this other user are the only ones posting on hive to put it into groups of other similar users in such categories. For simplicity's sake let's say blocktrades and ocdb are the only curators on the chain. While blocktrades is voting properly, noticing that taraz is getting 20-30x more engagement on his posts compared to the 2nd author, ocdb for some reason with stake that doesn't actually belong to it would ignore this fact and vote the 2nd user a lot more than taraz. If we assume both have the same vote strength, this would mean that blocktrades is receiving half of the vote value back as curation rewards while the other half is going to taraz but in total of the inflation of new hive being created, the other 50% of them would go to the 2nd user which ocdb is responsible for constantly voting. Now let's assume this 2nd user is constantly selling the HBD and on a constant powerdown, ocdb doesn't care cause it's not their stake that's being diluted from the inflation, they're only voting with stake delegated to them by someone else. This activity means that the inflation of Hive makes blocktrade's stake 25% less valuable over time because the voting towards this "bad author" that's only causing sell pressure while delivering close to no value nor attention is getting rewards the same as taraz. In this scenario with only these two users and things not improving it would make perfect sense and be obvious to most people that the best course of action would be for blocktrades to use some of his downvote mana to adjust the rewards of the user perceivably bringing less value to Hive since they are garnering close to no attention compared to Taraz. It is the attention economy after all.
Now imagine the above example on a larger scale. I'm sure there's a lot of other users in the same position where they're getting overrewarded from auto, blind or questionable votes consistently and unfairly in terms of perceived value while others doing a lot more and grabbing a lot more attention are barely getting the same rewards. Not to mention some new up-and-comers that may be trying hard and hitting all the checkboxes of what curators should be looking at when rewarding content but not getting the actual votes because most voting power is going to the wrong kind of authors. I'm not even talking "overrewarded" here in terms of hive being worth more, the amount of hivepower authors receive remains the same and the amount of HBD people receive is equal all over the board when hive is worth more.
Just the other day there was a user who quite literally would just post what seemed like the title of a youtube video and the link and earn $3-5 rewards on every post they did on a daily basis. Close to not other activity than that and most voters were always the same, from some tribe tokens where if you delegate some HP to them they'll automatically upvote you or if you buy/burn some of their tokens they'll do the same. We really need to start looking at these things as an issue eventually because a lot of value is being wasted with bad autovoters rewarding bad authors that are only here to farm and don't care about these things or anyone else from the looks of it, not to mention how bad it makes the platform look when curation seems broken due to too much stake being abused on autovotes compared to manual curation. Downvote adjustments could fix this either by penalizing the autovoters and authors so they'll end up with less inflation over time compared to manual voters and good authors or to give them a kick in their butt to stop being so farmy and unsocial and just taking things for granted and expecting it to continue on like that forever at the cost of others.
Anyway, rant over for now. Hope you good people out there are enjoying these greener times and that you've all had a nice new year and a good start in 2025! Hoping to post more actively from now on as I'm trying to change some daily habits for a healthier and hopefully longer future.