Reward pool on Hive has always been a controversial topic with drama surrounding it. All for good reasons because people have tendency to extract and abuse as much as they are able. Bidbot era was most abuse period and made a lot people rich but also hurt entire ecosystem. After couple hardforks, things are working much better now.
It allowed many more curation projects to be established and build communities. Almost all discord servers have promote post page where countless people had to install and signup for discord if they wanted to be part of Hive and promote their content. Which is weird, isn't it, people came to decentralized platform but we asked them to signup on discord also. Discord does provide good set of toolset for managing communities until we build our own system. Our Ecency server wasn't exception, dozen post links submitted into post promotion channel and we did our best to curate authors based on quality and consistency.
We also wanted to make sure to give people the option not to go to discord, but to be able to submit their posts every time they publish a new post.
Also we wanted to utilize our Pointing system to some extent and allow people to submit their post so our curators can review it. By the way, you can earn points just by using Ecency.
So why not put them into use and people could simply submit their post from website and mobile app without going to discord. That's what we did. We have posts channel as well which our curators see every post made and they curate content from there as well as from boost requests. Sounds great, right? Some extra gamification on top of what Hive has to offer. Not exactly. Other curation projects started to find faults and call it bidbot even though it is not different than just going to discord channel and submit your post in hopes someone will see and curate your post. Or not different than reaching out to friends and ask for vote/comment, etc.
Our curators are all volunteer and every month we ask community members to join and help curation effort. We have diverse group of people in curation who try their best judgement when curating content, just like any curation project on Hive. These are active people making content and building communities, so their volunteer effort is motivated by goal of making Hive better place.
We don't know what methods other curation projects use to evaluate their curators or content, but we had simple rule, make sure content is original and encourages engagement. No matter which app was used to publish given content. Don't judge, inspire/encourage.
Boosting content never guaranteed any curation/vote, it was just ticketing system or queueing system where you could put your post into our discord without going to discord. Our curators would see those boosted content in separate channel and evaluate just like they evaluate other content.
Points have other use-cases as well which is not topic of this particular post but we created it to be useful and extra encouragement when using application. Points can also be purchased from in-app purchase via Apple AppStore and Google Playstore payment. We thought little bit of revenue so applications could explore alternative ways to generate revenue for ecosystem with right set of gamifications.
Again, controversy and drama continue to stop us from innovating further in this field or explore other gamification options.
We are builders and it is disheartening to constantly explain and fight these FUD and let go one of our favorite feature.
Fast forward today, we decided to remove content boosting because of these controversy and drama. We are here to serve every single stakeholder including users. Removing Points system from reward pool will allow it to be innovated further with other creative use-cases.
Going forward, our curators will continue their voluntary curation effort without anyone needing to use Points.
In conclusion of this experiment, we learned good, valuable and hard lessons and we plan to build Ecency bigger and better!
There will be no changes made for how Ecency Points are earned. Watch for new ways that you will be able to use your Points!
