I have spent some trolling around the some deeper posts across LEO and HIVE and am starting to question if auto votes, or the Fan Base option from Hive.Vote is causing more harm than good for the platform.
I understand the appeal of using the fan base option or other auto voting features. It lets you automatically vote on the creators you want to support even if you don't happen to see their posts. There are plenty of options, one post a day, one post a day, 2 posts a week, any custom combo you can think of. The appeal is easy VP management, supporting people even you are not around for a week or two.
Proof of "Auto Brain"
While it auto votes to posts may not be a problem if the posts is good, what happens when the post is not the same quality that is typically posted? What if they post a quick update - or just a short post that day about a quick thought or idea? Do we really think that if you read that post - people would feel that the post is worthy of a full upvote for 2-4-10 HIVE/LEO/etc?
I think these high value - low effort posts create a optics issue, especially as new users are on boarded. These posts are seen by new creators, and as they look at the content, and the correlating votes I think it creates bad feelings and a push towards producing more content at the expense of quality. Authors know they are picking up auto votes, why not post every day, its free money.
Auto votes break down when posts switch topics or formats. Could be a short form port, micro blog, etc that is not in the same traditional post and the auto votes don't have the logic to avoid these posts and only target the traditional high value content. That is what "we" are supposed to do. We are the brain that places value where it belongs not code.
Can we continue to claim we use proof of combination of POS, that support content creators that provide the most value, when a large portion of votes are actually placed by automation, and the posts may,or may not be quality.
Negative Impacts
This can create a lot of negative feelings of jealousy. While jealousy won't help new creators, than can certainly push them away from the platform. Seeing short posts get 20x the attention your post does, with no comments will make you question why you keep yelling into the wind.
I don't see this as often on LEO as I do HIVE or other tokens and while we are a focused community with high standards, all communities are influenced by the total HIVE eco system. People cross tokens, topics and communities, and may be used to things differently.
What to do -
Clearly auto votes are here to stay - its too easy to program, and too many people like them. I see how they can be nice, and if people only produce one quality post a day, but most don't follow that path.
Personally I will stay away from auto votes, I would rather to delegate to those that have proven to be good stewards than use auto votes that my reward content I don't think is high value, even if I think the creator is great.
The only way to fix the problem I see is making a personal choice to manually vote your state, or follow/delegate to a proven curation trail, it must be something chosen by the community - its a choice.
sincerely,
This post NOT financial advise, it contains my personal opinion and experience and is intended for educational purposes. Perform your own research and analysis prior to making investment decisions.