Although this post is prompted about some changes regarding our inner workings/accounting of the 
What is lovesniper?
The name comes from sniping first posts with some love, either in the form of a welcome message or advice and/or some of the first upvotes. The idea is quite simple and thanks to a tool created by 
The bot scans the chain for the first post of an account, it doesn't matter when this account was created or by which front-end/dapp or who provided the account credits, as long as it is its first post it'll alert us about it in this format:
This makes it easy for us to get to that post (random one I picked up from the discord), give it a quick read and decide the following:
- did it mention anything about the user (was it some kind of intro post), if not, suggest a short intro post to the user
- if it did mention anything about the user, note down the interests and recommend some active communities related to them
- if it seems genuine and from a unique user, curate it with a vote
Let's talk about these points for a bit, the first one is important because a lot of first posts by new users are a bit random, they either try a dapp that got them to sign up or just ask something we hivers could easily answer but before lovesniper many of these would have gotten missed. Curators can easily take care of that and offer a guiding hand. Suggesting an intro post might give them a better chance to gain a few followers based on nationality, interests and other things the user is willing to share with us in that post and more importantly we can then guide them towards related communities of certain niche's they may be interested in to continue being active on. Pair that with our community incubation and we have a nice stepping stone to turn new users into active users long term if things go well.
The last part is somewhat important too because time and time we get these fake users that either steal content or try in different ways to earn those first upvotes and then abandoning the account after rinsing the rewards. It's important for the curators to also try and check that there's no traces of plagiarism or AI generation but that's easier said than done, luckily Hive has paid watchers in that regard to track it down in case it bypasses us. Something that can help us with trust is if new users mention who brought them to the platform as that places some accountability on the person that invited them and if they have a good standing/reputation with the platform we have more trust to curate the first post of the new user. So if you're onboarding people you know, feel free to tell them to throw you a mention in their first post as it can go a long way!
The lovesniper activities don't end here, though. For all the users we curate and deem genuine, we also follow them with the lovesniper account. This allows us to continuously check up on them by browsing the lovesniper feed, so even if their 2nd or 3rd post gets ignored by others or they post within communities not in our incubation/not actively being curated they have another safety net of not being ignored by our curation team. Here we also curate each post to make sure the users don't go bad and if enough time has passed or the reputation number assigned to the accounts reaches a certain upper threshold, we unfollow them with the lovesniper account thus "graduating" them from the program as they're now doing quite well even without our involvement.
The account is following over 10,000 users as it's been running for quite a while and anyone can check its feed at any time by using links like these: @lovesniper/feed
Although curate at your own risk as people are quite diverse and activities can vary. :D
The cool thing about this is also that any time we have returning users we may be able to pick their post up through this feed which may help retention again with some comments and votes and potentially guiding them towards some new/consistent active communities they may be interested in.
You can also check the regular introduction compilation posts to see if there's any users you personally are interested in after checking out their introduction posts and interests, your follow, upvote and engagement may go a long way in their Hive journey!
This part will be about the improvement of rewards for curators involved in the program and to make it as fair as possible for everyone involved based on their efforts. At OCD we've always believed that going the extra mile to improve retention should be rewarded a little extra. Compared to moderators or curators over on #web2 where they resort to power since there's no monetary rewards, we think that this is something that should become universal over time on the platform where a small portion of the post rewards goes towards activities that mutually benefits the whole ecosystem, especially since curation rewards aren't well aligned between manual curation and autovoting based on the returns being the same no matter if you put effort behind it or none.
For my usual readers, this part may be quite detailed about the changes so it might not be of much interest to you, but if you like what we're doing and would like to apply as a curator, feel free to do so in our Discord but we can't promise any spots at this point in time.
Instead of scheduled curation where you pick which day you go through the first posts of users, we'll have a channel where you just announce that you're curating now to avoid more than one person doing it at once. We could start it off with certain restrictions to avoid having the over-enthusiastic users hog up all of the curation alone. You'd simply note down which username you're starting on and which one you end up at when you stop.
Similarly to the emoji system we've used in the past, we'd go by using the same and an extra one here for each first post indicating a few things.
X - quick no at first glance, may require leaving a comment suggesting an intro post or some other guidance but it was clear it wasn't going to be curated and/or followed easily
?! - you spent some time reading the post but unsure if you ought to curate it, may require leaving a comment suggesting an intro post or other guidance and you decide not to curate but to follow as the content is still coherent
✓ - you've read the post and left a welcome comment and suggestion to communities/dapps and nominated it for curation along with a lovesniper follow
All of these require time and effort to go through, a compiler of the posts will be counting all emojis and assigning them points based on which one. For instance the first one may require the least amount of time so it would get assigned 1 point, the second one may require moderate amount of time and be assigned 3 points while the last may require the most amount of time and be assigned 5 points.
To avoid spamming lovesniper intro compilation posts we would still be able to wait until we've reached an appropriate amount of introduction posts to showcase to the rest of the community, but with these changes we can easily separate who gets the beneficiary rewards based on amount of points garnered through the curation of the lovesniper alerts channel. To then also make sure the rewards are adjusted to match the effort and time spent, each post would note down the total amount of points that went into that compilation post.
Here's an example:
From Monday to Wednesday there were 100 first posts with 50 posts on Monday, 30 posts on Tuesday and 20 posts on Wednesday. 3 unique curators went through each day and in total 10 posts were accepted for curation and a follow.
If we assume all of them had equal X, ?! and ✓ points, beneficiaries would simply be split 50%, 30%, 20% (not counting compiler rewards).
There is a little randomness and luck involved here when for instance there's not that many posts when you decide to curate or not that many posts you would accept for curation but at the same time this means not as much time went into going through the list for you and you'd still get some points and rewards for your efforts. The points can be adjusted as we move forward to make it fairer.
Overall I think these changes are for the better and it gives us more tools to determine what kind of beneficiary the compiler receives based on how many points/emoji's they had to go through to calculate the curator rewards and at the same time allows us to vote the compilation post more fairly based on how much curation occurred since previous compilation post.
Anyway, thought posting this on-chain is good for transparency and it may give outside readers an inside scoop on how much goes on in the lovesniper initiative behind the scenes.
Thanks for reading those who did and those who had to (lovesniper curators :P).
Let us know what you think and if there's anything you think could make the lovesniper initiative even better!
