The only thing I dislike about my content on Hive vs on my own site is no access to analytics.

A cross chain system of analytics for all front ends is a must! If that could also increase the rewards in some e way for people who bring eyeballs from new users, that would be amazing.

This would be nice. It would definitely improve the experience for content creators.

PeakD has analytics in tools.

PeakD has analytics in tools.

That is interesting, I would like to see it pooled across the major front ends.

They would have to build something to monitor the node requests.
Above my coding skillz.

Justine, my random response at almost 2:30am is that we really still haven't done much to define what "this" even is.

That has always been a bit of a stumbling block for me, in terms of publicizing Steem and now Hive to the greater world. Most people could care less what a "blockchain" is. And they may have heard of Bitcoin. Mostly, they just want to know if they can share recipes and videos of their cats, and "log in with Facebook."

That's really what we're up against.

I use this place — and started on (then) Steemit because it reminded me of social blogging platforms from around 2000-05, pre MySpace and pre Facebook. But that's me. I' a blogger/content creator.

We have certain inherent shortcomings, when it comes to marketing externally. PeakD finally has put page views back into the interface, so at least I can now tell whether anyone reads off external posting. Absent that, writing for an external audience (although I often DO) is pretty meaningless, because I have no clue whether anyone responds and reads.

We need referral/invite links. NOT because I have ambitions to make money from referring people, but because I want to know if anyone signs up if I send out 20 invites. I want to know, so I can welcome them, and follow their content. And that's NOT a stupid thing to have. And it's a pretty simple thing to code, because ALL links to our content has our username as part of the root URL. It's just a matter of cookies...

There's more... but my brain is cooked, and I need to go to bed!

I agree, we need a simple to use platform that is fun and enjoyable. Content will play a huge role in that for some, games and apps with take front row for others.

Good ideas about the referrals etc would be cool to somehow link it to the person who gave it out.

On Steemit, I was writing for Google and my following on Twitter to help bring new users in and increase engagement.

There were plenty of people blogging about the site on the site, so I didn't want to be yet another one talking insider baseball.

The important thought was: "will this post bring in real, live people who will interact and contribute to the community? Unfortunately, many were run out by downvotes and I hope that doesn't happen here.

Downvotes are part of curation, unfortunately some people misuse them. I believe if content discovery tools were better than perhaps more of the community could take part in that curation and there fore it would find a balance/consensus.

But yes you’re right, posts about the site are good imo, I just would like to see more incentive for people to want to bring outside eyes in.

Part of the problem is, I think some people write and think : "If I post it, they will come." Without considering the twin importance of getting the word out about what you just published.

All of my posts get exposure on my Twitter account, where I also share posts from our tribe.

Case in point. Six months ago, concerned about the glut of low-effort posts, I put in a week of research and wrote this article about fire safety:

Life is Precious #6 - The Station Nightclub Fire

I wanted to spark a discussion about the issue, but nothing happened. I look over on trending, some guy posted a picture of a sandwich, with tons of comments.

If you watch, you can see different regions come online at certain times of the day. In the mornings, I can see Brazil posting, other times, India etc. So maybe I didn't publish at an optimal moment.

So I decided to go out and find like-minded people talking about crap posts by using the search box on Steemit and looking through the uploads on my feed.

Yes, it took some work, but soon some comments started coming in, and that's all I wanted. If you're going to put the effort in on these epic posts, you want them to be seen.

I wanted people to know, that the type of foam bedding and furniture commonly sold in stores, can actually cause you to quickly pass out at the start of a fire, which is why so many people are overcome before they can escape.

You're being too negative. Look around and you'll see quality content. It would be far more fruitful to focus on that than to write generic complaints like this.

There is both informative Hive-centric content here that will in time put more material about Hive out there to appear in Google searches and also quality material not about Hive. By the latter I mean, for example, the work of professional photographers like @paulmp, @kommienezuspadt, @axeman, @photovisions, @derangedvisions to mention a few. If you like photography, check out the Photography Lovers community. Pretty well-rewarded photographers can be found there, although some of them should be even better rewarded.

No offense, but I think this post is somewhat over-rewarded at $50.99 despite being a solid reminder of the importance of curation.

Thank you for the mention, I really appreciate it. I've got to say I've been a little discouraged about posting of late as I see inane and low effort posts get voted up and get rewarded with $50+ when high effort posts are barely getting $10-20. Now part of that is I should put more effort into not only creating content, but also in fostering a community... the other part is that what I consider to be good and high-effort content just doesn't seem to get valued here.

> I see inane and low effort posts get voted up and get rewarded with $50+ when high effort posts are barely getting $10-20

That may be a result of the week-long payout window. That could be partly solvable by using an SMT. Some sort of an arrangement could be made to give it value by exchanging it for the base layer tokens. Of course, you could do it by auto-posting placeholder comments once that could be voted in lieu of the actual post to be rewarded. But I wouldn't want the PoB mechanism to be distorted too much, which is why it would best be solved using an SMT or maybe a Hive-Engine token.

Also, some way to find old posts more easily would be needed.

Just testing something:) !tip 0.3

Thanks!

🎁 Hi @markkujantunen! You have received 0.3 HIVE tip from @cardboard!
Check out @cardboard blog here and follow if you like the content :)
Sending tips with @tipU - how to guide.

Hive is sort of interesting as it all depends on either being discovered by someone or building an internal audience. Imo that’s backwards. Your photos are amazing, there should be an incentive for how many eyes they draw. There should be an incentive for you to share your Hive blog with your followers elsewhere. The site should be so easy to use that they could enjoy your content here, without the need to understand blockchain technology.

All these aspects are what I’m trying to bring light to. It’s ok imo for people to build an internal audience, entertain and be rewarded for it.. but if we want to grow we need to incentivize bringing in an audience imo.

Content quality is subjective.. some of the most popular people on the internet make rubbish content, but they draw a crowd and therefore are valuable. We just need to find a balance or have parameters to know what is brining in the crowds.. and to encourage other creators to share their work to bring in crowds too.

@paulmp, we would love to feature your high effort posts at the top of trending, we have a lot of voting power behind this project. Check this out:

https://peakd.com/hive/@trendthis/calling-all-authors-or-is-there-an-epic-blog-post-within-you

Pop into our discord: https://discord.gg/PkFUFMF and we can coordinate.

Why not just vote them then? Why does there need to be pre coordination? Just curious.

Only to discuss the strict requirements and timing, our discord is an open forum. No quid pro quo.

The post is at $50 due to me working on Hive full time behind the scenes for free, another issue with our set up.. content is the only way we can reward contributions.. when I could just shit posts daily, and contribute nothing behind the scenes, and actually make money. Sooooo there is not much incentive to contribute to the platform (which is the point here).

And this post isn’t negative, I know there is good content, I’ve curated it for years. My point is there is no incentive to bring eyes in and the “best” content is not seen.

Please don’t come lecture me when I’m here discussing how to improve things and get good authors an incentive to be here. This post is about getting feedback and starting a discussion. Appears I drew in an audience with it as well.. Ffs.. go bitch somewhere else about my rewards while you enjoy the contributions I’ve done.

Some really great points, that I think everyone should be asking at one time. I often view Hive similarly to patreon. A possbility of earning a continual stream of rewards (which I think is why autovotes are good). It is based on the "average" output for an author (both quantity and quality) and it can therefore happen that a low quality post gets high rewards because the past posts have been above average.

This is a difficult topic and I view this truly as an experiment to try and get answers to exactly to the questions you raised. We have to be patient and remember that there have already been many improvements to when steemit first launched. And probably we will make this a faster process when we talk and discuss about it (which is what you have done)

I'm not complaining your rewards in general. Only this post.

Without @justineh, we'd still be enjoying our $0.12 HIVE. She deserves more thanks than any of us can give. Her rewards "in general" are way,way lower than she deserves for what she has done for this place, so rewarding her highly on one post, for me, is a no brainer.

>Without @justineh, we'd still be enjoying our $0.12 HIVE. She deserves more thanks than any of us can give. Her rewards "in general" are way,way lower than she deserves for what she has done for this place, so rewarding her highly on one post, for me, is a no brainer.

Then those concrete things she has done for the community should be communicated more clearly so that they can be a "no brainer" for others as well.

That's a fair point and I understand how it looks. It's difficult as I don't ask for votes and want to post freely, but also appreciate the compensation for the work I've done. I'm working on better ways to accomplish this.. as I most definitely would rather see high quality content on trending. Just I guess hits a nerve when I don't see others' rewards questioned. I apologize for my rudeness.

I've seen posts that were not that great rewarded all too well even here. But more than that type of posts, I've seen people get rewarded as they should. It's finally starting to work, thanks to the tireless efforts of the @ocdb folks and other curation teams.

But as @paulmp pointed out, there are posts that represent a lot of work done and that they should be rewarded better.

>I'm working on better ways to accomplish this.. as I most definitely would rather see high quality content on trending. Just I guess hits a nerve when I don't see others' rewards questioned. I apologize for my rudeness.

Gladly accepted. I'm not exactly a paragon of great manners myself.

>"...content is the only way we can reward contributions..."

No. HPS is massively funded for that very purposes.

Regarding paying people for their efforts: The SteemIt Inc stake was not burned, but rather put into a fund for paying people to do things.

I thought this was one of the interesting and positive things that happened in the split. While I know that stake isn't active until a HF takes place it would be a great way to solve the never ending problem of using the reward pool to fund "working".

Clearly you've done some excellent promotion, PR and likely more...
Do you see yourself creating an ongoing work proposal in the future?

I always had thought of the Fund for more hardcore development work and upgrades etc. I had no real intention to use it myself, but honestly had no intention to use the rewards pool either. After taking some feedback and discussion with community members I am considering typing up a retroactive proposal outlining my contributions and asking for possible compensation. I guess in my mind it’s much easier for me (And lazier perhaps) to just post occasionally and let stake holders reward me if they want, then I’m not “asking” for anything... but that also counters my own goals to reward good content here.. so it’s a bit of a conundrum. I personally think the rewards pool will still be used to reward contributions, but perhaps we need to work on finding that balance. And if it’s more beneficial for the community for me to just make a proposal documenting that, rather than posting randomly and then causing frustration, it’s something I should probably explore.

I’m currently trying to just gather documentation and timeline of contributions and try to determine my next step. I guess it doesn’t come natural to me, but I understand the frustration and think there is room for improvement.

Well, I hope you do put in a proposal and I would be excited to see non-development activities rewarded.

Clearly the early successes of Hive have been a group effort and until there is some respect for non-development type activities.. Meh.

Good job on the PR and Exchange work.

I would argue getting everyone talk about Hive was as important as any dev work that happened and getting on the exchanges was the most important piece of all.

I sincerely hope some people see that and reward it.

when no attention is giving to content creator it tend to lose that creativity and urge post to post daily i think all post shouldc be well look and assess before been voted upon instead of auto voting

Yes lack of engagement can be very discouraging, but also it’s an authors job to build their audience. Imo if incentives lined up with those who do draw a crowd then more would be encouraged to do so.

Also content discovery is difficult, and therefore readers can’t even find the content they like.. so that’s something else that I believe is a barrier.

yea you are right

Simply. Excellent and because it was said by you, it carries a certain degree of gravitas. Take a look down trending today.
It is though, rather naive to imagine that the blockchain is about community. It is about making money, and I use the term 'money' as anything that can be exchanged into stuff you want or need. Content is just the vehicle and carries no real significance sadly.

I think content about the platform is indeed needed and I enjoy it, I would like to see better organization of it personally. But yes many times it’s not for engagement or views, it’s how to do minimal work for the most $.. and if it’s autos, people just shit post to get it without even caring if people read it or not.

I will say that trending is an unfair view as many times those working behind the scenes can only be rewarded for those contributions when they post.. it’s something I would like to see somehow improved but on the other hand, the rewards pool is for contributions that bring value to the ecosystem.. it’s just the content may not be that actual value, it’s just the place people can go reward them for their work. Something we will have to find a balance in.

I don't begrudge the devs etc their pound of flesh at all. I was thinking about this today and thought it would be nice if they had their own 'community' and could simply circle jerk (in a nice way!) each other to get a decent return on their hard work, a community that was programmed NOT to appear within the trending feed.

As a consumer as opposed to creator, I will consume content wherever I find it interesting. I'm fickle in that sense.
>the rewards pool is for contributions that bring value to the ecosystem

Then we need to define what the 'ecosystem' is about exactly and create guidelines to suit. The problem comes when one realises that Hive, the blockchain, means a million slightly different things to a million different people!
Content has zero actual value, the value is only created by the consumer's opinion but here, it doesn't work that way. People have a sense of entitlement that if they create something, they should be rewarded and because people with large stakes can earn curation rewards from upvoting, their opinion of the content matters not, only its value as a means to reward the curator.

There is something all a bit skew-whiff which means we will never find that balance I guess and the whole system will be (as I've writte many times before) no more than a computer game.....

Thanks for taking the time to reply @justineh and I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe and sane :-)

If the content was still stored on a blockchain without fear a third party censoring me then I think I would still use Hive without rewards. If Hive was never born and Steem inevitably died at Justin's hands my plan was to take my personal website to IPFS to continue with content.

As for consumers I would consider myself that more than I would a creator. I will go weeks without making a post on Hive but am here nearly every day reading content. Hive is my number one social media application followed closely by Twitter. Both of these sites I lurk far more than end up posting.

In the end to grow I think we need a reason to be here. Rewards are nice but are never going to make it to small authors just joining. Instead I think we need exclusive big names primarily using Hive. Convince an Alex Jones using Hive exclusively and that would be something to bring the normies. They need a net benefit and since rewards won't make it to them they need another exclusive reason to be here.

I'm a multi-faceted content creator/performer, and what really hooked me onto Steem back in the day was the engagement.
I uploaded a cool music video I made the other day. I don't fully yet understand communities, but feel like communities is key.
I have posted my video, and put it on threespeak, but can I repost it or share it with the music community somehow?
I think unlocking and building communities is the way forward, but I'm still scratching my head at how it works, or how to utilize it. Like some sort of way to just post, and also cross post it to different relevant communities would be sweet. Maybe that is already possible. I don't know, but I am going to HIVE more frequently until I get the ins and outs of it.

Also we need more people which will come with time. Is there any sort of Discord for HIVE? I would like to see, discuss marketing ideas, and how to grow our global influence.

Long live HIVE!

Great feedback, thank you!

First, yes there is a Hive discord and it’s full of helpful people - https://discord.gg/Uk9kDY

I hope one day we will have a help desk/Q&A community that can replace discord but for now it’s a great tool.

Peakd.com does offer cross posting but I’m not exactly sure how it works with 3speak. I would imagine you could login into peaked and cross post your 3speak post.. but discord would be a good place to ask this.

I also agree that communities or some type of organization of content is vital for it to be seen, as currently it’s very hard to find what you are looking for. I’d also like to see an incentive for creators like yourself to build an audience .. that would be the goal imo.

There is a Q&A community and we have @askanything.
https://peakd.com/question/@askanything/askanything-is-back-on-hive
Questions with the tag question always get an answer.

Cool looking community! between AskHive, AskMe and AskAnything we are getting things solved! 😌

>I hope one day we will have a help desk/Q&A community that can replace discord but for now it’s a great tool.

I have a userhelp community here. Been waiting to use it when Steem said they would have a huge influx of new users.It was designed to be a "help desk/ticket system" in which people could tag #userhelp in their posts and we'd be alerted to it. Which reminds me I need to clean it up to take off the Steem references haha... But if you ever need to leverage it let me know!

> I also agree that communities or some type of organization of content is vital for it to be seen, as currently it’s very hard to find what you are looking for. I’d also like to see an incentive for creators like yourself to build an audience .. that would be the goal imo.

I am a polymath and relatively a bit anti-social. I think that a lot of excellent creators are somewhat anti-social, as they are possessed by a genie who drives them to constantly create. They have less energy than other people to socialize.

If the system is designed for creators to build an audience, it will be generally the mediocre-good "bubbly" content creators who rise to the top, excluding the anti-social outliers/cream of the crop.
I was very fortunate when I first started Steem, due to being seen by curators who upvoted, and resteemed me, giving visibility for others to see my works.

I have put on a lot of theatre performances for example, and I always use a different production company name, and never try to create a following, so the audience won't know what to expect, and will be blown away by the performance (letting the performance speak for itself). It isn't in my nature to build followings, and I don't think I can be incentivized to go against my own nature. And I believe this to be the same for a lot of creators who fail to get recognized on HIVE, and on Steem. It just isn't in them to bring people to their content, when they are chiefly or solely driven about producing content. To make it about building an audience would kill the flourishing of art.

The majority of people who use the internet are "downloaders". They consume content. With a minority being uploaders. They produce content.
It makes more sense to target the "downloaders"/consumers of information/content, and bring them to the content creators. I think this can be achieved through better use of communities, curation, and possibly some sort of recommendations, like youtube does. I generally don't search for things on youtube, and find them through recommendations.

> It makes more sense to target the "downloaders"/consumers of information/content, and bring them to the content creators.

They (downloaders) are more important to the success of a social media platform, so, yes, they should be where the members of the community who want to drive success here aim most of their resources.

That said, a fairer reward system for content creators than currently exists would almost certainly have a massive positive effect, too. And the fairest reward system that I can conceptualize is one that pays out to the content creators 1 to 1 to the collective amount of time that the content consumers spend consuming their content.

Attention is the most valuable currency within the human species, but that isn't currently reflected in the voting rules, neither here (on Hive), nor on any other social media platform (that I'm aware of). I do believe that YouTube includes "average viewing time" in their algorithm for recommended feeds, which indirectly rewards attracting a lot of collective time spent consuming one's content (more people being directed to the content that will likely lead to more ad views, subscriptions and future viewers), but I'm convinced that directly rewarding time spent is a more accurate and objective measure of how valuable one's content is (perceived to be by the collective).

The whole point of allowing thousands of people to vote on content is that what is "good" content is highly subjective.

I might write a long treatise about some subject I'm interested in, but maybe few others are.

Alternatively I might be the first person to post about Hive passing 10,000 Satoshis or the first person to notice Bittrex has listed HIVE-USD pair and only put a screen shot and a few sentences and this might be more useful for more people and thus get more votes.

I know I vote for short posts that inform me of something important I didn't know about, even if the post is quite short.

Sometimes I really don't have time to read long posts so I either vote or not based on a short skim.

Overall, the content is much improved in Hive compared to Steem and with communities its easier to discover content that is interesting to you.

Even more important in my view is the quality and civility of the discourse in comments.
On Facebook, every discussion on a topic where there are marked differences of opinion quickly degenerates into the most appalling, rude, abusive, uncivil and unpleasant online brawl (among people who are supposed to be friends). The Facebook platform deliberately manipulates people to get a reaction and its often a bad one.

The situation on Hive is completely different. One can have a debate with someone with a different opinion in a civilised fashion, because bad behaviour brings downvotes and everybody knows this.

CIVILISED DISCUSSION of sometimes controversial topics is the biggest advantage of Hive over any other platform.

I totally agree.

Also I think it is REALLY HARD to see content right now in general.

[IMAGE: https://images.hive.blog/DQmWQxB92e9T6Zk4LeY3evK4yJWTnoRUNg8rzghyPzUHTx8/image.png]

Why did the browse tags disappear?? Comparing the amount of posts in a particular community vs a particular tag, the tag has like 95% of the posts in it and the community has the other 5%. So its like 20 to 30 posts in the #informationwar tag for example and 1 post in the informationwar community. The fact that I only can get to see the #informationwar tag or the #politics tag by manually manipulating the end of a link is very annoying.

The community thing seems to not really be taking off compared to using tags, at least for our group and some associated groups I have observed. Most people are using tags NOT communities, and rightly so because its way better and gets more views. But then you all made it way harder on hive.blog to see tags...

i feel that it is on a community to push users to use communities. people use tags because they are used to it for 2,3,4 years and people are creatures of habits.

To specify who is writing this as this is a shared account, @truthforce writing.

It is pretty hard to grow your community when you are placed at the bottom of the rankings. In order to find our community for example, you need to continually scroll down. The odds of someone finding our community is extremely extremely low. We have maybe 20 to 30 posts a day in our tag which is pretty good for being a specific tag that doesn't have huge whale backing(which is another issue that is hard to get around).

Coupled with the fact there is no such things as being able to "browse tags easily" almost nobody manually navigates to https://hive.blog/trending/hive to see what is trending in that tag, or in https://hive.blog/trending/informationwar. Only the people who understand how to do that are able to do it and that isn't many. Any new users will only see communities and think that is the way things are done and might not even realize what tags are at all and that you can browse through them.

The way that this is currently setup on the front page of hive.blog and on peakd is that only the big communities have any visibility at all. The way this is countered on such places like Reddit is they take a metric of velocity of upvotes and factor in how many people the subreddit has. For example, a velocity of thousands of people upvoting a post(in a community with 10,000 people) would make it to the Front Page of reddit("ALL" as it is called) if a community upvoted that post within a small time window of 30 minutes. A large community with tens of thousands of upvoters(in a community with 100,000 people)might not get to the Front Page of reddit because their velocity of users upvoting it and how many people upvoted it might not meet the % threshold. This gives smaller communities an actual chance to appear on the Front Page instead of it endlessly being dominated by whoever has the bigger number of upvotes. Which Hive is following the same model of only the biggest voted posts appear on the top... AKA the biggest communities with the most money get bigger.

Is it up to us to get the word out on our community it sure is, but working against so many factors essentially makes this task impossible to be discovered.

EDIT: And I wanted to add to this in that the post that @justineh wrote the title was "what do we want from content" and she used this image.

I agree with the sentiment. What is the point of us posting in the communities we are trying to grow if nobody sees it? If we aren't whales to start with we don't get visibility. Incorporating a secition like "communities you may be interested in based on your viewing habits"

Or something like "tags you may be interested in based on X Y or Z".

Or "you follow this person who frequently posts in X community".

Theres a lot of things that can be done to make this better.

[IMAGE: https://images.hive.blog/DQmYekdbimCCvGeK55YHfPebzXvhFiozHBNEFGnR7HUT2sK/image.png]

i don't disagree with you, i was just replaying on the people still use tags of something and not posting to that community. if you have a tag for your community, like informationwar, you should encourage people that post under the tag to post into a community. i seen it on contests that have communities, and almost no one posts in that community.

you will always have someone that is not happy about algorithm that puts stuff on trending and saying that does not mean that this one is good :D it is really bad for content discovery.

communities are created to give mods the possibilities to censor posts... which they can't with the general tags.

but if you want to post in some kind of community and you join it, post with the tag of the community, most probably you like that community and want to be a part of it. maybe i am wrong, i do post conspiracies, not really that controversial...
And you can always make a community that will not censor anyone.

also if a community censor you, you can always reblog it so it is on your blog.

so why not use the simple tag? it removes the risk of the moderator...

you don't like communities, i have no problem with that :D

thanks a lot for regards to my little opinion, and btw it may change :).

And you, do you like communities? and why?

have a nice day.

yeah because my opinion is big and important :D

i don't know. they are underused, and we still don't have enough people for the full potential of them, but we don't have enough people overall.

i seen a lot of tags misused just because they are popular and you could scroll them and not find what you were interested in, but then we are back to what you said, moderators could censor, and in some cases it is useful and in some...

again i am not that much in to controversial stuff, i rarely have things to say that are censor worthy so...

also i think that the initial idea was that communities will be used together with SMTs.

Yeah, it's crazy how so many people prefer to post on zero revenue sharing system... mindblowing... anyway, sometimes, less is better :).

Yeah, true your argument of tag pollution is very valid, I personally spam a lot the informationwar public tag :). yeah mods have positive impact too, sadly, in my personal own experience, they all end up serving an agenda, and most of the time, I end up on the censored side... everywhere to be frank... and all the times with one issue first, which then later expose their all farming, and it's soooo boring, that I prefer the noise... than even the risk of censorship...

the problem is it's impossible to know when a mod will get triggered... it could something you find totally innocent, but may expose a cognitive biais in the mod or his agenda... impossible to know.

hmmm... interesting... the smt was about the side token? I didn't really saw a potential in that... so if I get it, is that each communities could have it's new little token next to steem/hive to incentivize it's users? problem is liquidity... and I guess, only the mods who will instadump as soon as they have a pool big enough :).

I remember reading how they wanted it to help a local newspaper and co... I mean... there are enough major cryptos to not need another crashcoin :).

have a nice day.

Yes, they should definitely bring back browse tags.

The whole community vs tribe vs tag thing is a bit confusing. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

It would be good for the Hive Community to develop guidelines for this issue.

I use the community feed on PeakD.
Looks like the Devs that originally made condenser continue with their unhelpful changes.
That is why I switched.
Communities rendered so repulsively that I refused to use it again.

communities are created to give mods the possibilities to censor posts... which they can't with the general tags.

It's very hard to use and difficult to explain (impossible?) to new people.
I've heard it described in various ways, like a sub-reddit for example.
I'd describe it as a clusterfuck.

What the point of having domains like hive.blog or peakd.com if you can't find any new content on them unless you subscribe and actively browse "communities"

Bring back hashtags ffs.

I don't think we need to explain to new people, but just point them to the great content.

We don't have to explain to them that they can earn money, how to sign up, etc, but share the content with them.

When we share an article on Linkedin or someone's blog we don't expect them to then sign up and engage every day on those sites. We just want them to see the great content that is there.

The same should be the same here. If they see 10 great shares from peakd maybe they will look into signing up and then you can point them in the right direction.

True, showcasing the examples is pretty effective way to pique the curiosity of the uninitiated.
But is that enough of a differentiator between content that is great being posted on HIVE blockchain vs the easily recognisable (and in my case the easily avoidable) layout and format of a Linkedin post that is also great?

What about explaining communities and how they function though? The communities feature on hive/steem is unwieldy and restrictive. If someone sees 10 great shares from hive/steem, it's not going to be all from content posted in one community? What is the benefit of a community grouping and sorting utility within these hive/steem APIs if only to all for the NFTs and tokenisation of posts made in that community?

I still get confused by the apparent utility of communities. I don't see (or maybe don't understand) the alleged benefits from having them.

>CIVILISED DISCUSSION of sometimes controversial topics is the biggest advantage of Hive over any other platform

That is a very nice idea lol. But sadly I honestly do not think you guys have a clue about how to do that.

This!! This is our greatest strength and weakness. We're a handful of people who want civility in an environment that's engulfed in flames. The reason FB has the traffic it has is because it pushes people's buttons. We're a boring, non-reactionary/non-inflammatory bunch hanging out on the porch while the kids run out to light fires or watch them burn. We need a CONTAINED garbage fire or septic backup to draw hooligans we can "My Fair Lady" into citizens. 😁

Keeping it simple: It should be what has the best potential to give new exposure, attract users, retain an active community and create new network effect as content and engagement attracts new people.

But I think it is mainly on stakeholders and developers to create a platform whose reward mechanisms correlates better with what brings in sustainable value. And where creators and users don't have to think about much other than creating the best of their ability, making the most fruitful connections and having the most fun. That's what Will get people excited to share the platform with their friends.

What do I want for content?

I want a lot of content, different content. High quality content, but also spam content. Just all kinds of content that are available on social media, all the things that people put into the world.

And I want content from many different people. I want diverse perspectives and no herd leaders who dictate the opinion.

That is also what massively disturbs me on this platform. Since I've been spending a lot of time on this platform for a few weeks now, I keep coming across the same names over and over again. Especially in the trending area. And often I don't really see the uniqueness of the content, but a high stake that creates this position on the platform. For the normal user of social media this is probably a mostly frustrating experience, because he notices how messed up the attention mechanisms of this platform work.

What do I care if someone has a stake of X? I'm interested in content from people who have very specific views and are not interested in making a business out of their mental effusions. I have nothing against business, but in my experience business changes the way things work. People become greedy, jealous and optimize their sources of income.

I know the answer seems a bit out of context now, but this is my answer to the question what kind of content I want.

Let's see if there's any long-term changes or if the same ones dominate the trending pages here. In this case you don't have a chance to build up a great reach in the long run anyway, because the content of the social media is the main part of it.

In this sense

good point! Perhaps it will get better with more users?

I don't know, I didn't sign up with Steemit at the time because I saw too many negative aspects. They are not gone here on the platform and they are at the heart of the system. I think we would have to rework these algorithms so that the payout is not the only basis.

>So, content creators - if you only received rewards based on the audience you drew, would you change anything you are currently doing?

nope :)

I look for little contributors and upvote them manually. I do have a few autovotes set for a couple of curation trails. I do the best that I can to source good content even if I don't agree with what is said. Sticking to factual information is what content I want to see. As a community we should support the posting and gathering of factual information to be placed on the immutable blockchain systems.

I want this to be a home for immutable history as it happened now how the historians want to remember it. Because of that I frequently down vote pretty girl pics and the like. I don't down vote many things because I disagree with what was said but disagree with the amount of reward. Many times my attempts to redistribute tiny amounts of rewards have brought overbearing attention to slam down my reputation. That is fine as it has already recovered in a matter of a couple of months here on Hive. Now I just need to move some of this awesome Hive back over to the control chain in order to reduce said control. These two chains running side by side only add to the competition for the money involved. I really enjoy competition.

> I look for little contributors and upvote them manually

You are a good man!

I thank you for your thoughts but feel far from good.

I think these are all important questions, and I'd been working up to a post that was providing some solutions to exactly this issue.

To use the term "solve" this issue, I think would be a bit strong, but can we dramatically improve it? Absolutely. In short it's on application developers primarily and the largest stakeholders secondarily, and the general userbase last.

There unfortunately is also no "We need to do "this"" That is a simple answer. It's a complex problem that will have complex solutions, and of course that's a challenge on a decentralized system where everyone isn't working towards the same goals and everyone doesn't agree on the proper solutions.

On app devs

As the PeakD team has recently done, I think all applications need to create easy to use "tipping" functionality, then this needs to be expanded into even more features that promote people supporting each other with LIQUID Hive.

Along with that we have to continue to chip away at making it easier and easier for a user to buy liquid Hive, with I suppose Hive getting listed on Coinbase being our current holy grail for this. Of course what would be better is a button at the top of all interfaces or apps that says "Buy Hive" and someone clicks it, and buys Hive with their credit/debit card. I know that's pretty hard here currently.

If tipping is integrated across the board and added to the api so that apps can easily access that information, it can be used for better content discovery. So you could sort by best tipped for instance.

This could also help us use ALL the content on the blockchain to draw in eyeballs. The truth is, there is a ton of good content here, but we only(easily) have access to the content posted in the last week. That is a HUGE disadvantage. Imagine using Youtube and you could only ever find content posted in the last 7 days, it would be useless.

In parallel, we need better and transparent analytics so that we can properly reward users that are bringing in traffic, or completing tasks that we find valuable. If you think about it, if someone was bringing in a lot of outside eyeballs, how would anyone even know? IMO, we should create a simple easy to quickly read and understand iconography that shows up on posts that at a glance give a snapshot of the amount of traffic a page is getting. ex a bar that goes from red to green with colors in between representing a certain number of page views. This way, curators can start to "enforce" that large curation won't happen unless you meet x benchmark etc.

Lastly, we need more comprehensive and sophisticated search features, again so that we can use ALL the content on the chain, not just what was posted in the last 7 days.

On Stakeholders

Stop rewarding shit, and ditch some cultural ideas that people have gotten used to around here.

-"We should spread the votes around" I think this is the wrong approach. I think we need better tools to be able to recognize and define what we find valuable, then ONLY reward that. At the individual level everyone has their own stake and no one can control what anyone else votes on and that's great, I think it's most important just that the largest stakeholders are more strict with their stake. All the small stakeholders can support each other so everyone can get SOMETHING, but the correlation to valuable content getting the most rewards can and should be dramatically increased. This in combination with stronger features around people using liquid Hive, I think can dramatically improve our situation.

-"Everyone should have a turn getting a big reward" This one is less prevalent, but I have seen it.

-"Its a bad thing that the same people get all the rewards" Once we have a better system for defining who is adding value, it will almost certainly be a small number of people. Especially in the beginning, but if the user can SEE what the metrics are, so the know what they need to improve, THEN when they improve those things, they can see tangible results, you will see the behavior you want repeated.

In our current state, since there is no correlation or definition of what is valuable and what will be rewarded. That incentivises low value posts, because to the end user, what this system says to them is that whether you put in a lot of time or a little time, you may or may not get high rewards, so in light of that humans are going to human and take the path of least resistance.

In regards to autovotes, I don't think this is bad per se, it's sort of our own Patreon model, where people support the person vs any individual piece of content. I actually think this is a strong feature and should be supported and enhanced BUT, better metrics need to be thrown into the mix so that that can be a consideration when people decide who to autovote.

On End users

I really feel like most of the people here are doing what the system incentivises them to do. Imagine there is user x. They have a decent following on some other platform. They work their ass off to move that following here which for content creators, their community is their greatest asset, in some cases literally their livelihood.

Do we have systems in place to reward that behavior? How long would we? How would we track it? How much would we give them? Can we empower them to succeed more than they would on whatever platform they're on? Basically what would they get for doing that? It's a huge risk, a huge ask, and we don't have anything concrete to offer them.

That was basically a whole post in a comment, but it will be a good rough draft for my post, but to summarize, IMO, it's not up to the end user and it's not their fault, all of us highly engaged users and builders, it's on us to improve the system and I think we're at the point where the most important changes are not at the blockchain level, it's at the frontend level.

Rant over :)

Great rant! I know this is something you have been touching on for quite some time and I really love some of the ideas you’ve mentioned here and elsewhere.

I hope as things start to settle down we will actually have this become a main focus and really help this platform be able to showcase content in a way that can be valuable for all.

I also LOVE the tipping ❤️

Pity that in peakd we cant tip on comments, only top-level posts

> Do we really have content consumers here currently? Or are we mostly just authors competing for the pool? Is that beneficial longterm?

As a full-time blogger, I have questioned this on my post

Some of them even wrote a blog post opposing the idea of getting authors / publishers / writers here... as this is not a "content" platform... rather a social one.

It really is what we make out of it.

For example: Medium is super-huge today. Steem and Medium both had challenges, yet one of them emerged victories.

With Hive, we have an opportunity to fix what was broken. Introduce a mix of readers and writers.

A good indication at the health of Hive's most rewarded posts for me will be when the top 50 rewarded posts are absolutely nothing to do with Hive, or commentary about the platform.

Push compelling stories and amazing original content to the top. Stories about HIVE, or dev updates have the DAO to draw upon. Witnesses have their block production rewards.

Content creators only have the votes of those who appreciate their content, or the liquid tips philanthropic individuals pass on to them.

Large stakeholders have curation rewards to also extract reward for very little effort.

In conclusion, this meandering comment is a plea to anyone who may read it - upvote content - not content about the platform.

I would like to be in your position to ask those questions and not being targeted. But I'm not and I want to encourage you to continue asking those questions so that autovoters and other shitty content creators that are posting only for rewards ask themselves these questions one day.

I know they won't because reality is too much for them, but I'm glad to see others talking about it. MUCH RESPECT!

Lemme try to answer something then...

>what exactly do we want from content?

WE, as a collective, we want rewards on our content. I am talking about the majority.

>What is the point of having content that is only designed for the people already here?

The point is to be more popular here to generate more future rewards. The same answer goes for the next sentence in your post.

>What is the point in auto voting content no one is reading or watching?

To get more curation rewards.. :) I know u know it, but I'm still gonna answer. :)

>Do we just want people to come here to try to game the rewards somehow?

Nah, ''we'' want them to come here to have future rewards from them and to make Hive more valuable to have more MONAAAAAAY! woohoo -.-'

>Is it just designed to get us all a reason to write something to get a vote?

Seems like some big heads are doing that so why not follow our leaders? :)

>What incentive is there to draw outside eyes in exactly?

Not many if you don't have friends here to support it or you need to bring some big heads to Hive.

>I mean, if someone can just shit post and earn $20+ a post and not even have to bring their outside audience in, or build one, why would they?

They won't. They don't. PERIOD. - Majority

>We need to figure out what we want from our content, and figure out tools that help us incentivize creators to actually draw an audience,..

We need our big heads to start doing that, then the majority will follow.

That's enough for today :) Have a good day Justine and keep asking those questions. We need reality checks now and then.

Peace yo,

Mr. Spacely

I'm trying.

You do know how to draw a crowd ❤️

Feels so much quieter here lately. I know they're looking though. It so strange though. Some posts won't even see a comment for an hour, then it's quiet again for a couple more hours. Hasn't been like that for me in years. I work for the eyes though. A working view counter would be awesome... or incredibly depressing.

it is depressing :D
peakd has some kind of counter, but it is really not that accurate and from what i know (and i know little) it would be hard to do a blockchain view count. because on peakd you get info of visitors from peakd, and there are (not sure currently on hive) 3-4 different ways to access it. also from what i learned, people that use brave browser with shields on are not tracked.

Underrated pun!!!!!!

I think this speaks more about the stakeholders and what they prefer to vote on. If stakeholders are unhappy with what they can find we should be seeing a massive increase in them delegating to curation projects that do support what they want to see.

Perhaps there are not enough curation projects finding what stakeholders want to see so they result in just-auto voting anyone that posts a few times a day and uses there VP?

I create content around whatever I’m up to in the gaming world. If I only create a couple of posts a week I’m fine with that. I don’t see a reason to create something I did not have passion behind. As far as rewards there are more rewarding places to go. They just have fewer freedoms in exchange for a chance at a bigger payout.

If people only earned based on viewership I suspect we would see an increase in HIVE only love fairytale posts about how amazing the platform is. As many people agree with each other in an endless echo chamber of self-love pat each other on the back. Hive is the majority of shared interested across most people here and thus a driver of the biggest internal traffic.

As far as people finding the content they want. The 7-day cycle is a bitch. People who are looking to use up there VP for the day are not going to go look at 7-month-old content even if they could find it. As a result, many focus on the short term. It’s rare to find people even linking out to similar content they have created in the past at the bottom of their post that content consumers might enjoy looking into.

Of course content is key, for me though, it’s just the simple fact that I am at least being compensated somewhat for my time on social media. I have also had way more actual intellectual conversation and made better connections than any other social media network. There seems to be this big push for super long drawn out articles being the main content form, well I like allot of the ‘shit posts’ too. I would love to see more things like art and music out there on the trending pages. I think that once the ‘newness’ of Hive calms down a bit, maybe the constant posts about Hive will calm down as well. I don’t believe that all posts need to be more than what they are. If the community votes it up, then that’s their choice. Plus I don’t have time to read all these super long articles and such. Same with long videos, can’t watch really long videos all the time. We live in a short attention span kind of world so sometimes short sweet posts are the best.

That being said, other than the trails I am on, I do actually read everything I manually curate. I do even go back and read allot of the stuff that gets auto voted too, because the conversation and feedback on posts are the best part for me! I love the conversation that I have with this community.

But... at the same time, making that sweet passive income is also nice. I don’t know, it’s early and I have already done the wake and bake so this may not make much sense, lol.

I know what you are saying but... don't get me wrong but this post being rewarded over 119 HTU for asking what the content in our platform should be yet there are authors that actually make quality content like cooking recipes, reviews of different stuff (movies, books), different crafts diy style, makeup tutorials and stuff regular normal content not related to crypto talk or even Hive talk and i dont see those posts having at least the half of the rewards a post like yours makes so.... i think the issue is mostly what the bigger whales of our ocean like to autovote on...

i do curation for minnowsupport and focus on as you know small minnows so i see quality content a lot but our votes aren as big as some of the votes you have received in this post, and i dont think is wrong you get them cause you do a lot of work for the chain but.... is kind of the thing u are complaning about in this post.

This is another aspect that I’ve pointed out - as the rewards pool is for valuable contributions to the ecosystem and there are many people doing a lot of things to contribute that have nothing to do with content. Many times only way they can get compensation for these contributions is to make a post (like this one) and the stakeholders who actually know of their contributions then reward it.

This is an issue on a “content” platform, as most users just see a post that doesn’t look like much with high rewards. Imo there are UI ways we can fix this somehow, and solve this issue. As many of the posts people tend to complain about and claim some sort of inner circle unfairness are actually stakeholders trying to reward people for behind the scenes contributions- and I wish there was a better way to do that.

I mean, we could all stop contributing and users could just still be posting on Steem and complain about rewards there.. but the goal is to actually build something better. This means we have no centralized company paying employees to do it, the community is doing it.. and we have to find some way to manage that.

I will have to say that if your only take away from my post is that I’m somehow complaining about rewards and therefore my rewards make no sense, you have missed the point entirely.

I know of the good content here, and it’s lack of rewards.. that was sort of the point of the post. What I’m doing here is trying to start a discussion with the community on how to improve that, and line up incentives with what adds value to the ecosystem. I’m not complaining about rewards.. and I mean, I think the 40+ comments seem to point to the fact that I at least drew an audience with it... so is there value in that? Or only recipe posts?

As I said in another comment - quality is subjective.. and there is rubbish all over the internet that brings in millions of views. Their ability to draw a crowd is valuable, if even the content itself is not “quality” in your opinion.

So imo I would like to see focus on what draws users in, as well as making that amazing content we have easier to find so it is better reward.. and that’s the point of this post.

I just spend 2 days participating to the Project.hope contest
https://peakd.com/hive-175254/@achim03/first-project-hope-contest
and I don't know any other social media where I could have such an interesting discussion.
I must admit that after 3 years, nobody knows what is this blockchain + blog thing.And how we could use it.
What append with the Steem alliance ?
They were supposed to help build interesting projects.

I just made a post about a homemade burger. Did not take forever to write the post but it didn’t take 2 seconds either.

Now I highly doubt anyone would notice or care.

But there are many users here with over 100K HP who 100% vote each other regardless of the post they make.

This is a form of self voting. If I have 100K HP and you have 100HP and we 100% each other’s post all the time no matter what it is, that is basically self voting..

Now there are dozens of users who are examples of this.

Maybe they were lucky, but I think if someone has THAT much HP maybe they should shut off their auto vote bots and go curate some actual users for a change.

This debate with questions is what the community
has to set sails for.
Yes we need to bring more investors, more contents creators( they are not too many)
more curators( way too less of them) more commentators.
This discussion is not over and it will define how #hive is viewed outside the realm of social media.

I do also think this, it was like posting contents in Steemit/Hive focuses on having and getting the automatic upvotes. Yes I do see some contents that was really good and not being noticed in the see of contents being posted in here.

But my personal preference is post what you want, post what you love and be consistent until we earn a lot and huge number of audience in our contents

Hey there, here are my opinions.

I actually don't think we should try to compete with more popular social media in terms of general content quality. It's hard to compete with limited resources than popular platforms that are already nearly perfect in UI etc. Maybe we can focus on something more niche, like to attract certain group that create elusively useful info. For example, I never promote my YT channel nor my blogs, but some of my videos/blogs got much more views than other ones, such as the border crossing video I made in West Africa or some practical ones in more less travelled places. Probably via google search and not many ppl post about those so it easily stand out when competition is low.

It's funny, I have just written a short piece about a popular subject, however I find usually when I try and write something that will attract users, nobody seems to care. Whereas if I write a piece about crypto, or how great Hive/Steem is/was, then the votes come flooding in.

Not sure how I feel about it, I just think it's interesting is all.

Cg

It means our rewards are not incentivizing writing content outsiders want to see (imo). I think this is just a learned habit, we can improve it with UI I believe, or at least we can try.

Yeah, people have been saying that since 2016, and I don't see it changing any time soon.

Cg

We need less hive stuff, I am with you, and... well you know :)

> if you only received rewards based on the audience you drew, would you change anything you are currently doing?

No. because i already do what i think i should do. some posts are for people that know me (small town, people know all the people) and some is for me, and if random people want to read it, great.

> If rewards weren’t a main focus anymore, rather a great site that you actually enjoyed using .. would you still be here?

would pewdiepie make videos every day on youtube if there was no rewards? do he actually care about all of his 104mil followers?

would i post if there were no rewards? yes. would i do it here? I don't know.

back to youtube, i consume, but i don't engage because for most of big creators you are just a number, so why spend time commenting when they don't care (i mean they care for the numbers). Hive is small so most of the creators still care, but if we get big, they will not. first because of the number of comments, second because of general people on internet and the way they comment. now it is a question of what do we want on Hive.

It's sad that will have less content consumers of good/quality posts and that should be a blame to most of us here.
Because we are not looking at value and contents that can create an impact in our lives rather we have programmed ours mind to be rewarding a particular type of contents.
Making more content creators to follow the tide and creates types of posts that get rewarded here

We all got work to do by engaging and rewarding contents with a spiking interests. And also we should give the blockchain something of value with our contents

Yes, you nailed it! We have more content producers then content consumers. Everyone would say they are a content consumer but in reality we are all just producing content for ourselves. Crim and a few others have brought up creating a read-only type consumer time application. It would have feeds selected by a group , or let the user select feeds for their consumption. No need to bring up keys, how to create an account just a basic consumer type application. They can still engage via comments. By doing this we can get outside our own bubble here and draw in more eyeballs. MAYBE we'll discover new ways to monetize. Either way it is a good discussion to have . I'll leave the details to the smart people and excellent post! 😃

This is really true. It really catches my attention. Thanks for sharing your wonderful thoughts @justineh

Your meme @justineh captures the essence of what in my almost 2 years "in here" I have referred to before as "the Challenge." You can't even get to the difficulty of answering / defining "good" content, when no one sees it to begin with. From which we then endlessly talk about what it is worth ...

Normally staying out of what I can classify as "political" discussions, for whatever reason, reading through your post this morning prompted a response which was turning into a post. So ... I just put it on one and finished capturing my thoughts on what reading your post inspired.

Making no pretense to having all the answers, I do think there is value in properly framing the "problem statements." Which, in turn from my background, need to end up in a list of requirements programmers use to code enhancements to software. That is how I view any blockchain, Hive included. Software ...

Since nobody loves me and all my friends are ugly, I just do what I used to do on Blogger and Wordpress before I found Steemit, which is post basically anything I want.

Being a video guy also, I just post what I used to do on YouTube before finding DTube.. etc.

I use the tags that attract upvotes, just in case someone finds my stuff and upvotes it. I'm on some ancient autovotes that are nice but will never get me on Trending or anything fancy like that.

Ultimately, I think I'm just enjoying the act of posting itself more than the actual content I'm putting out.

Edit:

> If someone can just put a bunch of banners in a post to make it look like it’s more than just those few sentences and say “Hive” and get massive autovotes.. because no one reads anything, why would anyone actually want to contribute anything?

also I didn't want to do stuff like this, so I've resigned my mind from the idea of chasing large upvotes.

Good points. I tend to want to provide short quick posts, but avoid contributing at all where I feel I need longer posts rather than quick a quick share of content or ideas like I would on other social media platforms.

I would like to use Hive as a replacement for other platforms that are corrupt / nefarious / bad actors (Facebook, twitter, etc). But, I tend to follow the flow of accepted used. 🤷‍♂

agree totally. Some contents are good but not many upvotes. Perplexed!

And the same people writing about same things for 2 years now.
The worst thing is that those same people write both on steem and hive 5 post per day. Like wtf

Based upon my own experience, having been on Steem since July 2016 and from someone coming from the freelancer world, Steem was incredible in terms of money.

I was used to put in hours of effort to deliver high quality services to my customers. I did that for years. When I suddenly stumbled upon Steem, and I gave it a try, I literally hit a goldmine. I earned a months salary with less than a handful of posts, and that was obviously an amazing experience. It was easier than my work, even for a not-so-talented-writer like myself.

I quickly realized what an amazing chance I had to change my life in various ways, but I didn't give in to all the asslicking of whales. I noticed the almost sick attention the rich guys got, just because how deep their pockets were, and I wasn't trying to squeeze them for upvotes. Many of the users I brought to Steem did things differently. They relied on the "get rich quick" method, so they tried to get recognition and earn upvotes from whales and dolphins. They ignored lesser accounts entirely and the main focus were to comment on whale-content. I can also say that I have probably brought in hundreds of people in total through my various marketing campaigns and/or due to how I have been promoting Steem.

I did things differently. I tried to educate, motivate and inspire people around me. I focused on lesser accounts and I co-launched curation projects with just a fraction of the power as bigger, better, more known users had. We tried to encourage people, we literally convinced people to stay even though there were about to leave.

We had great results and it was fun. We didn't earn, we weren't selfish. We did our best to give others as much as possible. We believed that a stronger middle class, or that a more sturdy foundation would benefit the entire community. - Our efforts weren't noticed by the "big guys". We were to small or to unknown.

The "circlejerk"-times were the main focus and that started due to selfishness. Why would people give up on their steady income only to support lesser, pretty much unknown accounts that never got any major recognition? - It was obviously a better choice for people to continue in the same route as before.

Now, I know that this isn't that related to your questions in your posts, but I truly believe that the actual mindset is wrong to begin with. Or that is has been wrong. I believe more in Hive than in Steem. I think that many of the "big guys" noticed were Steem failed and I think Hive will be more successful in the long haul.

That being said, selfishness will never vanish. Especially not when it is rewarded. Those with power will be the most famous or the most "interesting" people to follow, because "the average people" follows money.

Steem stopped being fun when the audience stopped caring about the content. I could still interact with my audience when I was able to reward them something for their comments. It wasn't worth much, but it was a "token of appreciation" when they made a comment. People continued to comment and it was still fun to interact and comment on content. The engagement were still there, to some extent.

I have said this many times before, the key is to figure out how a random, average Facebook or Instagram user can use Hive to share content without giving up the second they realize that they won't make hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Rewards should go to content instead of the person behind it...

Hello Justine,

thank you for the post and your questions. I will not answer all your questions, but take a step back to have a better look at the big picture.

In my opinion, HIVE should focus on its unique selling point:

Censorship Resistance

Why?

I regularly read a dozen internet forums where users are enthusiastically engaged every day, some of them for over 2 decades without ever having been rewarded with a cent. Every time I see this, and then compare it with the situation on HIVE, it becomes clearer to me that you don't need rewards to generate commitment among the users.

Some of the forums I read deal with politics and society, and they are always threatened by censorship or self-censorship because users write politically incorrect things. And even there, it is extremely difficult to lure users to a censorship-free platform like HIVE, because most of them are immediately deterred when they see the enormous rewards on the homepage. Their first question is as always: Who pays for it?

As such, everyone I have introduced HIVE to asks me this question. The high rewards make a lot of people sceptical if this platform is "serious".

The prospect of high rewards out of nowhere also motivates the users to try everything possible to get the upvotes. Best examples of this, we know them all, are periodically posted reports on various topics, color challenges, Actifit Posts, Splinterlands results, etc., i.e. posts that almost nobody reads because nobody is interested.

To make it clear, I'm not condemning the users for using the system in this way, it's just too human to cash in on the "free lunch". Many (former) users, who don't like this vote-farming with trivial posts, find the platform boring and unfair, and tend to leave the platform again. In addition, the sometimes very high rewards lead to jealousy debates and are in my opinion the cause of over 90% of all dramas that occur again and again and lead to users being divided and even more people leaving the platform instead of believing in the same idea and fighting for it together.

To sum it up. It should be clear to everyone that this state of affairs cannot be continued permanently. In my opinion the HIVE chain will only be sustainable if all content rewards are migrated to SMT. Then HIVE tokens will only be issued to witnesses who run the chain or as payout from the DAO for developers who further develop the chain.

>> Do we really have content consumers here currently?

Yes, I am primarily a consumer.

HIVE on!

This comment deserves my vote, since it sums it up in the last little paragraph...

> To sum it up. It should be clear to everyone that this state of affairs cannot be continued permanently. In my opinion the HIVE chain will only be sustainable if all content rewards are migrated to SMT.

Wrt the HIVE tokens: I think witnesses already get sufficient amount of money. Some of the HIVE shall go to the DAO (note: DAO needs to be worked on big time, but that is another topic) and the rest shall go to programs to reward actions and activities that are not possible to market through DAO (ok, when we upgrade the DAO, we may be able to use this as a marketplace for anything what is required for HIVE eco system to grow and evolve, but we are far from that).

This will forever be the discussion on Hive, right? What are we - a social media/community platform or a content platform?

Let's say an example of the first is Facebook: no-one creates content to 'attract outside visitors' yet everyone wants to be on Facebook sharing their blurbs of thoughts or art without a second thought on who might see it - they know who does, their 'followers', in that case mostly friends or family.

Let's say an example of the second is Medium: everyone creates content and expecting it to go viral through sharing it on Twitter or letting it be shared on other platforms. No-one has Medium.com as their 'most important news outlet of the day' yet everyone encounters a few Medium articles casually while browsing the internet.

Facebook has enormous value because people want to hang out there, so much so that they can sell adds on that platform.

Medium has enormous value because people want to read quality content and they even pay a monthly fee to get unlimited access...

So then, what is Hive?

It's neither 1 or 2, currently.

It could be 1 if we (for example) had EPIC apps that were so intuitive to use that people would share their breakfast and cat pics while waiting for the bus. They would tell their friends and family to quit Facebook because on Hive you could do the same and get paid! Even if 10% of Facebook users would use Hive the advertisers would start researching if they could make a dime on here as well.

It could be 2 if we (for example) had ways to actually make professional articles - with view counters, stats on visitors at time of day, more influence on layout and multimedia embeds, and, most of all, a comment section that didn't require a full-on Hive account - because if we send an article to our boss, neighbour or twitter addict, don't we want them to have a seamless experience by having them leave a comment which would even subscribe to an e-mail next time someone else (with or without a Hive account) left a reply, like you can do on Wordpress?

Just me thinking out loud - might copy this to a new screen and make a decent post out of it ;-)

Cheers, good to have discussions :-)

well, im doing my part the best that i can to make social impact trough my work and using hive as a window, i know that if i enjoy what im doing then my content is going to be the best i could do, of course i see a lot of unfairs but also im quite concious about the challenge that is all of this call about and i see a lot of ignorance about what we should do to really make a diference in the world, of course i hope that every grain of sand puted on this by everybody makes the fruits, it's all about trust, i think a good iniciative is the one who @auelitairene is producing where she's going to directly help ancentral towns of the amazonas with art and music, and that's seems like totally the point of make something for all of us, only needs to be fractalized.

good vibes!

This should always be considered when creating a post.
Is there a correct or incorrect answer?
I am not a vote of the lame post of banners or photos with no substance,
but then I can just keep my upvote to myself.
Personally this type of post is my favorite.
It was thought provoking, created great interaction, was educational
and a nice read through including the replies.
Thanks for this 2 AM thought

All the challenges you mention are long resolved. While I have used the word content, I don't really think that way. Thinking that way, thinking about marketing, and about rewards, is the problem, in fact.

Hive isn't the goal. Hive is a just a venue. The goal is society.

We all are social creatures, varying in our goals and interests, with some ubiquitous commonalities, such as Maslow's Hierarchy. While we all need food, shelter, and society, we all consider all those things from our unique perspectives. Food isn't just calories, and posts aren't just content. Some folks get half their calories from dairy, and others fart in it's general direction.

What we post and comment is society, not token mining or marketing. Our communication is creating the world we inhabit. It is why I have so vehemently argued against votebots, back in the day, and still do against curation rewards. What effect do curation rewards have on voting, and how do they impact society? There is no beneficial effect on socialization, and the conundrums you visit all stem from approaching Hive economically, which deprecates far more valuable aspects of society Hive can implement.

The goals you imply should be sought are social, not financial. One of the reasons I have considered the invention of Steem Earth-shaking is that properly implemented, the potential of financial rewards for beneficial socialization enables transcending legacy markets, and as the decentralization of production develops and penetrates society, legacy markets are becoming obsolete.

We don't see that happening, even before the global economic catastrophe imposed by the cabal of globalist banksters, because that decentralization is but nascent, more implied yet than effective. However, look at industrial technology across every field and you will see that decentralization of the means of production is the cutting edge of technological advance. It's a certainty that as technology continues to advance, the flow of resources to parasitic overlords will continue to dwindle, and there comes a tipping point when broad adoption across society will produce post-market economies, and the banksters will plummet off a cliff in terms of wealth and power.

I believe that is why we are under global house arrest today, to prevent that from happening (which isn't possible in the long term) or at least stave it off as long as possible. 'Apres moi, le deluge' is the goal of imperators and plutocrats. It's why Steem remained susceptible to instant takeover by Sun when he bought @ned's stake, because the oligarchy sought to maintain their wealth and power rather than actually decentralize governance to secure Steem from Sybil attack.

Note that Hive is absolutely vulnerable to the exact same Sybil attack today, and also that the former Steem oligarchy presently governs Hive.

The Sybil attack via stake weight is a feature of legacy financial markets. Hive can be immune to such attacks, or it can continue to provide the big fish in it's little pond financial rewards, remaining a legacy system.

It will transcend legacy financial mechanisms or it will be bought, because that's what happens to profit centers in the legacy market. Decentralization isn't just words, and when it is undertaken it has measurable effects on society. One of those effects is broad distribution of resources, and as long as the oligarchy seeks to retain those resources because they view Hive from legacy financial perspectives, the immense social power of Hive to transcend obsolete mechanisms will remain unrealized.

When folks look past Don King's approach to society*, then Hive will be able to transcend legacy financial mechanisms. Until then, it's at least a relatively safe haven for free speech, so I am here. Soon, that will become a target for those that are spending $T's to censor and spread propaganda in order to craft a narrative that secures their wealth and power to the degree possible. Sooner or later, Hive will be the primary target in their crosshairs, because it will be the most dangerous vector of facts and forthright discussion that threatens their imperial designs.

Either Hive will be trivially bought and censored, as Steem has been, or it will be immune to that financial attack that rules legacy centralized society.

Your concerns are actually about society, and not marketing, rewards, or content at all.

*Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his momma for a dollar.

[IMAGE: https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/lucylin/ve0EYhhF-kha.jpg]

*Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his momma for a dollar.

Never believe a person who has a predilection for eating other peoples ears.

Apart from that, an excellent comment, and one that I will be referring to/plagiarizing, in future posts. (when my frivolity week has drawn to a close...)

All my words are freely given, so freely take from them as you will.

I'm actually more prone to believe the words of a man that has provably eaten ears.

I'd seriously hesitate before commenting regarding distrust of what my ears heard from him, at least. He might have a cure for distrusting ears.

[IMAGE: https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/lucylin/AXz89esR-viking20flats20-20Copy20-20Copy20-20Copy.jpg]

Pretty sure the above refers to the Frank and beans, cryptically. That's what causes men to sin, not their ears.

Don't tell Goolag, or they'll censor pr0n.

I like the music and nature photo communities on here. That is what I mostly read and vote on.

Things have definitely gotten better. They could still get a lot better but at least the trending page isn’t EMBARRASSING anymore.

If we’ve become an echo chamber, it’s partly because the community lost a lot of its diversity during the bidbot era, and some people got lazy about meeting new people or connecting with old ones. Sometimes I think a lot of older users got tired of engaging, they try to reward good content but they don't read or watch any of it.

One thing that I think might be bit weird for new users (and myself) is seeing great post with great payouts and just 1-2 comments. The exception seems to be posts like this one, about hive and with decent payout.

All I can do is comment on everything I read and try to pick good posts to read. In fact there is a lot more I’m trying to do like the Deadpost initiative, but I find that aside from from some good friends I’ve made, it’s a lot easier to get an upvote than a read.

Ideally, we would reward content proportional to the time that we spend "consuming" it. Aside from the masochistic lot of people out there, we naturally spend our time reading pieces or watching videos that we enjoy, would you not agree?

The "fairest" voting (reward) system, dare I say "objectively speaking", would base the distribution of rewards around the amount of attention that we give to x creator's content, relative to all other content creators, as this is a clear indicator of what brings the most value to the collective (content consumers/ curators).

I think it would be awesome if a token distribution system were built around this concept, paying out the same proportion of the reward pool to content consumers who simply spend a reasonable (determined by a majority/ consensus vote among active members of the community) amount of time, say 10 to 15 minutes a day, browsing through content that is saved to the blockchain (and I do realize that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to safeguard this from exploits), paying out the content creators proportionally to how much time is collectively spent viewing their content (perhaps with some type of multiplier in place for tags to certain categories of content that naturally take less time to "consume", such as photos).

I spend quite a bit of time watching a small handful of content creators on Twitch and I think it would be really cool to be able to reward them in a monetary fashion just by watching them, paying them literally with my time (spent consuming their content). An "attention payment system", if you will.

That said, I'm realist enough to not expect anything like that to be implemented into a fairly well established blockchain like Hive. The solution to how one should vote will apparently not be coded into the blockchain rules, so, unfortunately, we must rely on people's own decisions on this. If we all just voted based on what most grabs our attention I'm almost certain that this place would flourish, but this current reward system doesn't incentivize that type of approach, not even close.

What it incentivizes is anticipating what will receive the most weight in staked votes and trying to front-run them. Human greed is in the way of voting (rewarding) in the right way, the way that the hard workers who provide the collection of truly valuable content deserve.

While we can all agree that what is considered "good content" is a subjective perspective, I'm sure most would also agree that the content that brings the most collective joy to the pool of content consumers is most deserving of the highest rewards. That's what we should aim for, both as individuals and as a community.

Can/ will it be achieved in practice? Not likely. Not without the token distribution system incentivizing that type of behavior.

Hi @justineh, I made a post on which I elaborate possible solutions and actions that we could consider to improve Hive actual state.

What I'm trying to do is partially what I think some more users should be doing, which is to go after the possible audience of their post and rise awareness about your content... One of the flaws this place have is that when we click the post icon we hope that somehow people on Hive will notice... that's not always the case (such as in my post) hence you have to get out and try your best to rise awareness....

This same logic applies to people outside Hive, if we don't go outside our frontends and reach people who we know can be interested on our content, then we always will suffer stagnation... The POSH idea is actually some steps into that direction, but I think we should better target our audience... For instance, I love football (soccer) and I know where people who also love it expend time commenting on a daily basis the news around this topic, so if some of us join efforts and go there to try to bring in some dozens of new users it would be awesome (I know that account creation and RC limits are being worked on to make this doable)... There are many communities who can follow this approach and go where their niche audience usually hangs out and start driving users here. (I have been unable to do any of this since my day to day work consumes 16+ hours of my time, and being in the country with the highest economic difficulties on the world doesn't help much lol)

I think that people who's opinion is listened to, such as yourself, dan, crim, blocktrades, bernie (he's controversial but he gets his voice heard), and the many other community leaders (OCD, GEMS, etc) can join efforts to make this actually doable. If this work, we could rethink how we can redo the mechanism to distribute the reward pool percentage that goes to upvote/curation....

As I mentioned many times we should use hive as we use all other top social media platforms
Its depends on users for which purpose he is here on hive

But over main focus should not be to get rewards we must try to develop and community and social media platform which can compete any social media platform in the world if we are able to do they money will follow us because we are all like a founder and developers of this platform and every body knows what founder get if a startup becomes a global brand

Siempre he creido que tanto hive como cualquier otra red de este tipo, debe ser libre. No me gustan las ballenas ni delfines, creo que cada quien debe decidir bajo sus propios gustos y necesidades lo que considere bueno sin que existan usuarios con mayor poder condicionando sus elecciones. Hay cosas que no se pueden tolerar, como el plagio, sin embargo, todo lo que sea contenido original sea o no bien redactado o creado, merece un publico, y nadie debe coartar a nadie de votar lo que le guste.

This site just started.Give some time to grow.It will take time to grow like FB,Twitter

I want my content to be vast and broad. I want good quality well thought out content for sure but I come to social media to see silly, ridiculous, exciting, educational, funny, etc. and that’s what I feel like I’m missing here.

I think the communities upgrade is going to go a long way to remedy that, as the ease of finding content of interest specific to the user just got significantly easier, but even though there are a lot of communities listed I still don’t really seem to get a lot in my feed that catches my attention outside of the specific stuff I come here for (i.e. Splinterlands, Hive-Engine, etc.), and I honestly think that’s just because there’s not enough creators. Many communities have so few members any shitpost can end up on its front page because it’s the only one that day.

So I think maybe if we consider building a few really solid communities that are “moderated” well enough to draw consistent traffic with truly engaging discussion, find crossover in the discussions within them and then build the communities that lend to those discussions we can start getting some roots down. I think the post is almost secondary to the discussion in the comments, which again, require more users to interact.

Another thing is our grand opening. We’ve never had one. Steem ninja’d into existence and Hive exploded onto the scene amidst controversy. Everyone sees we’re having a great time but what’s particularly inviting? The whole place has always seemed like a private club, from a sneaky secret society to a roving party of various types of nerds that nerds think are nerds, or, if you want a spicier analogy, a swingers club. Yeah, people already into it are there all the time but no one just wanders in off the street.

So, getting back to communities, maybe focusing on 5-10 general interest communities to start and pump the hell out of them. Reward content and sharing. When they get enough traffic to support themselves delegate/fund the next in line.

I see a lot of communities using this tactic but I don’t see many that have rewards big enough to encourage putting any serious effort into posting there.

And finally, and I’ve been beating this drum for years now, this seems to be one of the most mobile-indifferent places in cyberspace. I understand a lot of devs are just trying to keep up but everything on hive now, and Steem before, feels/felt like it was geared toward someone sitting in front of a desktop or working on a laptop and anything done on mobile is usually an inferior experience. At least it feels that’s often the case with me. And if there’s a way to set up alerts I haven’t found it, I have to keep coming back to check notifications instead of knowing when I get replies or new content from specific people or communities.

There’s a blue-f**k ton of cool stuff here and the potential is limitless but there’s still a lot that’s off-putting to me and I love this place. We have a lot of work to do to appeal to the masses.

People come here to make money.

Perhaps a referral system as an incentive for the content publishers to try get more people from the outside to join HIVE?

what da actual Hell did happen here in this comment section

We are starting a discussion it seems 🙂 always good to get feedback to future improve.

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LLAMA, GOATS, COFFEE, LOTR CLICKBAIT!!

Here's a truth-serum-inspired rant reply you may see, or no one will ever see... self-therapy.

I've tried for years to appeal to those who "matter here," and have accepted that I simply will never appeal to them. They don't care about me. Few do. That's clear.

I won't tag the right people in my posts/comments, or harass them with replies to stay top of mind and kiss ass. Maybe that's why I'm where I am, or my "content" sucks that much. I've accepted my mediocrity HERE, but am fully aware that I bring immense value to society in the real world, even if people barely respect it here.

When I do get those autovotes for $0.80-$1.10 once a day, most are from people I've earned legitimate rapport with over the years. I have no favor with the newly anointed Hive Gods, and am virtually ghosted by most. Maybe I called a spade a spade too many times before and ticked someone off, or I'm that irrelevant. Thankfully, I do have a few moderate accounts that endorse me to let me know that I have some value here, but it's hit or miss. Most of the time, I'm writing for the 5-10 people who consistently appreciate what I do, that make sure to let me know that I'm worth something around here with nice comments. Those people are immensely appreciated and the only reason I've hung on this long.

Seeing the BS auto/overpaid posts you rightfully called out rubs it all in my face any time I try to enjoy myself by browse. It's ruined my view and how I feel around here, and I'm not sure I can or should recover.

I've met, interacted with, and observed many of these people for a long time... and many are average Joe's who've mined or bought influence/leadership, despite being sorely unqualified, toxic, or counter/unproductive. Some are awesome and I'm thankful they're here, but most are self-serving, faking it til they make it, and trying to wear hats that don't fit.

> People have essentially invented their own position as influencers, soaking in the interviews and pedestals, yet they suck at influencing.

This place is a petri dish for delusions of grandeur, and those who stroke the egos of the inner circle guard and/or trumpet Hive win this crypto high school popularity contest. To piss on the wound, excessive favoritism/lopsided rewards makes authors think that they're Shakespeare with a fucking golden quill. It's an insult to the intelligent and aware, but that's how it is, and speaking up won't do shit.

I applaud those who have principles and leave when they realize the inequality and time-suck. It's finally broken my commitment, so I'll keep powering down what I've manually earned because I don't like feeling bought into a warped social and economic structure. I hope it works itself out for the good apples, but that's not a strategy or likelihood, especially after the same root-issues from Steem resurface when the dust settles. I thought could hang on for that day, but I'm often happier and more productive in real life when I distance myself from this place. I get the sense that that's helped you too. Greener pastures.

I really like posting about what I enjoy, but my niches aren't popular. I'll still try for the sake of recycling, but it's often not worth the time when I can use that time to take more action. It's more fun to do the work or drum, than to post and hope that "this one" might be the one that gets me on the map to snowball some success. I'm happier on my own. Even if I hit a home run on a post, often via a curation pool, it's still 5-15x less than the BS posts consistent pull in. That sucks.

Thanks for speaking to use your platform. I wish I had that exposure so I could try to do that same, but am glad someone can be rebellious for the rest of us.

Group hug?

Lost in the comment section just 48h after this post.

This is my opinion and it worths what it worths:

You are blogging. But are you?
For most people blogging is to share quick thoughts, small events that happen in the day and jokes and hobbies.
But here we are with professional content producers writting articles too long to read and way longer to write on themes related to such specific skills that only a few percentage of people would take the time to read.

I mean you are over the top here with your content production.i am surrounded by scholarship masters that done really good in school with lots of time in their hands to write kilometres of words to express their science, opinions, criticism, discovery and so on.... where do you have the time sitting 6hours in front of a screen writting articles for fun?

If Facebook or instagram is successful its because youngster used it first.

Facebook now is deprecated for millennials, only old people use facebook and by old i mean 35+ for the eyes of millennials.

they chose to go on instagram and instagram became huge after facebook and now everyone including older generations are on instagram but that is going to change for sure but it ain't going to be hive steemit or whatever...
Ask a kid what he thinks of facebook he/she ll tell you its for grand pa. What is the average age of all this circus in crypto blogging? 35 maybe even more, i would say 40 but it s just a guess.

And if they were successful its because its free and easy to use. They don't care about the incentives, wallets, power, multicurrency dynamics, they dont care about being the product blaBlabla. People dont care do you get that?

Now i could refer all of you guys as a bunch of wordoholics, lexophiles, logomaniacs... you have put the level of content to another level, out of reach for a regular person and specially young ones.
You have managed to intelectually regroup some how with different banners: medium, steemit now hive etc.. but do you spend time on social media?
Like the real social media the one where millions of people spend their chill time. You dont really come to hive to chill do you?

Now content producing is an all different banger. Because there are many way to express ourselves not just by writting articles.

In art section if posting an art piece and you have to write 2 chapters about it to make people feel that the content is worth it and that you might get a few dollars thats just a big pile of shit and it reminds me of school.

Guys i put it straight for you: majority of people didn't like school, a majority of people aren't going to write stuff for crypto rewards because you know what? No body cares about crypto and everything is about being entertained on screen. Most of your generation read books or kindle if they want to chill. Maybe you should make hive kindle friendly that might help exposure and audience.

Your intellectual filters are what prevent mass adoption or expansion in fields were we don'tneed to b journalists freaks to talk about we like.
Look at tiktok its booming crazy. Its the shittiest app ever but it s mooning in terms of use. No surprise there its not rocket sciencento see why.

Why are you wondering if content is not been seen ? Because you are not enough and not enough people really have time to put so much commitment in reading an online website. Its rigged from the start in terms of time i dont even go to the whale/crypto stuff.
The masses are not going to surprise you. And your quality content we ll struggle because we are about limited on how much 1 human being can actually take specially when it comes to screen time.

What you have here is quality but it will be ignored, you can try the best you can you will stay a minority.
Fry your brains out as much as you like but to read your article or anything on hive is just out of my lead and that include a majority of people. I have other stuff to do but reading even if its quality the amount of content produced here i have a life and thats the attitude of a majority of people.

I am into photography do you really think people care? Yes the geeks, the geeks always care about what their geeking about but most of people what they want is chill look good and nice little colors on their screen to entertain them.

There are 100 more arguments about why and how things are like this but you are in blogger bubble and that means a very small fraction of people tiny little bubble.

My take on it all is that curators want a heck of a lot for very little effort on their part and are happy to act like all the burden (for growth and adoption) should be placed on the creators.

Meanwhile if you are a whale/curator (or influencer) you can post whatever crap you want to and rake in those circle-jerk rewards from others of the same ilk.

Just look at who is slurping up those rewards on the Trending page and it pretty much says it all.

Just saying the problem is larger than the content its creators and its consumers.

I might be bias but we need to shift to content that does not just talk about ourselves. Imagine if you went to Instagram or Twitter and the majority of all the posts were about Instagram or Twitter (insert any other platform name). People go there to consume content not to talk about the platform. Until we get past this we will never be able to onboard new users as new users don't care about "Hive" they just want to see interesting content.

Speaking from my personal experience it has been very difficult for me historically to bring any following over to Steem (have not tried for Hive yet ). Out of 80k followers elsewhere I think perhaps 10 have come over. IMO we need a good mobile site to rival existing platforms and we need content on the site worth consuming (other than the bipolar mix of self aggrandising and self deprecating content we currently have here).

I would think now we have communities we should open up the tags to say 20 tags so they can actually be descriptive (like proper hash tags). At the moment people just use the tags which get them the most votes and don't have space to include any descriptive tags.

I started a curation trail to try and encourage distributed energy and renewable energy content, but WOW it is hard to find.

It does appear that Hive is stuck in a crypto and we aren't steem echo chamber. The content on the whole is hard to watch.

I hope the day will come soon that it will be hard to choose what ten posts I'm going to put my 100% behind vs today where I have to search and pick slowly taking up way too much of my day.

I don't know the art of writing shit content and getting votes, that sounds hard for me(:... I guess quality content should be appreciated

I agree with you, almost ready to throw the towel.. very frustrating

I'm also here past midnight trying to find the meaning of life. Only I'm doing it 13 days later.
I've found some very interesting posts worth a comment, sometimes I'll even get a good reply. It's very stimulating to engage in a conversation with someone about something you're interested in and it makes me believe in the future of this platform.
Then again, these posts are gems I've found buried beneath a pile of poorly written blog posts with a blurry smartphone picture of someone's soup.

I'm not entirely sure where this is going, but It's helping me improve my research, writing and camera presence for my audio production business.

We'll have to wait and see.

"Which just leads to the author than just throwing out as many minimal quality posts that they can in a day to get those auto votes..." <--- Does this sentence use the word 'than' correctly? Should it be 'then' instead?

What about introducing 'meaningful curation'. Sounds funny but let me explain.

Say a group of six people pool their HP and create a vote worth something. The first voter is the scout, in which a little badge is left from the curation account in a comment like normal curation. Then all six people in the group revisit the content and leave a meaningful and relevant comment.

For sure, it will be slower than regular curation but it will revolutionise the way the platform is promoted. It will encourage creators to make better content instead of quick-buck-content and it will provide a much higher level of satisfaction for the creator.

So, I suggest we change curation itself.

THIS. So much more of THIS please.

You have smashed the nail on the head here. The downsides of this platform you bring up are all the reasons why I stopped posting here last year.

As for me, I have a goal to create at least one high quality post every day. It takes me several hours per post including research, marketing my post on Reddit/Twitter/Discord etc. Before I publish a post, I reread it and ask myself, "is this something that a newsworthy website would consider acceptable content"? Or if it's a blog post, I ask myself, "Is there a story line here, could I be expressing myself better, am I being as honest as possible here?".

The reward I get for posting content is my pride in seeing "@hooked2thechain" above content which I produce. Big upvotes are nice but I'm not here to waste my time or anyone else's writing shitty posts. I've got better things than that to do with my time.

The content must be engaging and comprehensive about the topic. It is worth knowing how to write such a text. If anyone is looking for a good post on this topic, I recommend this post: https://www.articleted.com/article/646002/212688/Content-Marketing-for-Technology-Companies--A-Comprehensive-Guide