The HoboDAO's Adjustment To #NewSteem
The atmosphere after #NewSteem has changed the experience for many users and community projects, and it is forcing the HoboDAO to make changes as well.
The aim of the HoboDAO has always been to foster high quality content on Steem and enhance the incentives for curators to actively curate authors of high caliber.
The motives of many of the users on Steem that are liberally using downvotes to discourage behavior and programs they dislike is understandable. They hope to get down to true Proof of Brain reward distribution. However, that initiative is also driving multiple programs to shut down entirely.
Photo by Thaís Silva from Pexels
Is it really a good riddance situation?
One of the most active and engaging communities is the Steem Basic Income program and it has recently become a target of this free downvote #NewSteem movement. The HoboDAO has been involved in leveraging the SBI system to reward our contestants and now both our contestants and the DAO's primary account are being targeted for doing so.
What will be our response?
If you can't beat them, power down... The HoboDAO is going to function as a decentralized curation community, but we're going to do it exclusively with our partnership token programs. We will be rewarding winners of our contests in Natural tokens, Lotus tokens, Build tokens, Foodie tokens and Intrepreneur tokens.
When voted against with Steem Power, vote back with STEEM.
We will keep only enough SP powered up to cover RC needs for our @hobo.ntrl, @hobo.lotus, @hobo.build, @hobo.int, @hobo.foodie and our @hobo.media accounts and no more. We will not be giving out any more SBI, we will not be utilizing DLease.io's services anymore and we're not going to use Steem Power voting for rewards.
Do you feel this is an extreme action?
The HoboDAO from its beginning aimed to reward quality content in a 100% positive manner and that's what we will continue to do. It is not the HoboDAO's role to enforce its principles on others, however, the foundation of the HoboDAO is positive reinforcement and downvoting is an action that has the potential to create negative energy and to discourage free expression.
In our contests we encourage our Casters (contest judges) to highlight the good and not underline the bad in a post, because we want to encourage content producers to try again and to incorporate the successful traits of the works of winning authors. Steem seems to have become a battleground, and the HoboDAO will not be taking part in that battle.
We will focus on our partnered communities and working with them to improve the quality of content that exists within their communities rather than the wide community of Steem.
In the future, if Steem voting becomes less political perhaps the HoboDAO will return to using SP for rewarding quality content producers, but until that happens we have to adapt and change strategy and that means moving on to rewarding from alternative reward pools.
HoboDAO Delegation Mining
This policy change does have an impact on our delegation system. If we're not going to be rewarding in SP-based upvotes then it does not make a lot of sense to continue this program.
The benefit of ending this program is that it tightens up the circulation of the Hobo token, which could be a good thing since circulating supply is quite a bit more than the current demand.
We will continue rewarding delegators up to 12/31/2019 and after that point any remaining delegations will not be rewarded with tokens. If you have been delegating to the HoboDAO please adjust your delegations accordingly and thank you for your support and participation!