“It’s sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you’re sleeping together, you’re alone.”
- J.L. Merrow
First, let it be known, that I know, what I don’t know about this blockchain, which is a great deal. How the sausage is made here with regards to the rewards and rewards pool is something that still fascinates me, and also eludes me at times. Just when I think I have my head wrapped around things, someone comes along and drops some knowledge on me that lets me know that I don’t know jack shit.
With the above said, and the fact I am once again struggling with some sleepless nights, this post is the product. I decided to break out the Hive Whitepaper and give it a read again and came across the section on rewards and my mush brain was hit with a thought that I had to put into a post.
THE NOW
From the white paper: https://hive.io/whitepaper.pdf
V.6. Distributing Rewards
The reward pool is used to distribute funds to those who actively participate in creation and/or curation of content.
The funding for the reward pool is composed out of 65% of the inflation.
When a user submits a post it initiates a 7 day curation window during which it may be upvoted or downvoted until its final evaluation is reached at the end of 7 days. Upon reaching final evaluation, 50% of the earned rewards are granted to the creator and 50% are proportionally split between the curators who have voted for the post with a
positive value. Voting with a negative value does not generate curation rewards.
Distribution is carried out in a manner that automates partial staking. A modifiable percentage of each distribution is granted as HP. The remainder is granted as either HIVE or HBD, depending on the market value of HIVE to HBD.
TURN REWARDS ON ITS HEAD
What if, instead, we took this superior blockchain and tech, along with the smart dudes and dude-etes behind it, did some of that whiz-bang coding stuff they do, and turned things sideways or on its head per say.
When a user submits a post, it initiates a 7-day curation window in which upvotes and downvotes alone without comments accompanying them are not rewarded but are similar to “likes” and “dislikes” and weighted along with other factors (more on this later in the post) appropriately for curation popularity (aka. trending, hot, popular, etc…).
Upvotes and downvotes accompanied with comments made within the 7-day window will receive rewards based on weighted comment length and final evaluation of post rewards with 50% of the earned rewards are granted to the post creator and 50% are proportionally split between the curators who have voted for the post with a positive value.
THOUGHTS TO GO WITH THAT WHOPPER AND CHEESE
If a reader doesn’t wish to comment, they do not have to, they can still curate the content by voting, which still weighs on the curation popularity of the post.
Curation popularity could also factor in how often a post was shared from the blockchain to other social media platforms and also how many times it was reposted (aka reblogged).
The curator can also be given the option to tip the author instead of commenting if they feel the content is worth a reward, but do not wish to leave a comment or engage for a share of curation rewards.
The accompaniment of the comment with the vote, along with rewarded weighted length, I am sure might be a hard task to code but must be possible with our superior tech and code, not to mention all the smart human brains behind it.
WHY AND WHAT
Turning the focus on rewarding the commenting over just voting I believe will increase engagement and could attract more non-content creators.
This is the butts in seats, the eyeballs for content consuming which we sorely need on the social side of this block chain.
This would take pressure off many to stop creating low quality, or worse yet the spam or plagiarized content to try and earn from the rewards pool. Now they can just consume content and engage to earn.
Could they still abuse the commenting on posts for rewards? It is possible and I imagine it will happen, but if we address the abuse from the beginning by utilizing the downvotes and community muting COUPLED WITH critical thought and humanity when welding them, then we can keep things relatively neat and orderly.
Will bots become a problem? Maybe, but with rewards based on weighted lengths of the comments, and the encouraged use of downvotes and muting to police the comments for spam bots, I don’t see bots becoming too big of an issue.
The End
My real desire before I fall asleep and into a dream state of never-ending Hive tokens and upvotes is to get Hive token completely off the social frontends, have each of them come up with their own token pegged to Hive or something.
Shit, I don’t know, maybe I just need to get some sleep, leave the sausage making to others, and just post content, cast my votes, make my comments, shut the hell up, play my role, invest in more Hive, and play within the current scheme.
GET IN EARLY!