I was planning on doing one recently after the one I created checking what games 
There seems to be a general trend where people give away things of little to no value, do it consistently and repetitively and yet the demand stays high which may be a reason why others aren't taking a stand to correct some of the pending rewards on.
Basically they announce a giveaway, say for instance if I were to give away 1000 WOO tokens, at current price that'd be only 0.58 Hive. Now I'm not against giveaway posts in general but I draw the line when I see people do this, so let's continue with my example to better showcase the issue.
I announce the giveaway of 1000 WOO, tag everyone who may have participated in previous giveaways or has commented on previous ones. The content of the giveaway would say something like "pick a random number" and then a winner is chosen who gets the 1k WOO. Next day I do the same thing with another 1k WOO or other token/nft all the while my posts are receiving 1-20$ worth of post rewards.
Okay so what's wrong here exactly?
Giveaway posts in and of itself don't do any harm, especially if they aren't the only thing you do on your account. The harm is that these people are using the giveaway as a reason for lazy post reward generation that turns them a profit.
You can see that if I with the amount of autovoters I usually get would generally profit quite a lot from this activity. It wouldn't cost me any time to copy-paste the content of the giveaway from the previous post and it wouldn't cost me much effort to ask people to pick a number and then pick one winner from the list.
Now of course I'm a bit of a special case here along with others who do receive autovotes on whatever they post, so even though I try not to take that for granted or abuse it, I have seen some reputatable accounts who do receive slight autovotes do or attempt the same. I'm not going to name any names in this post, I'm sure it wouldn't take long for people to find them, but I think talking about this is valuable to make people see why this is wrong and maybe also get the participants to realize that they're kind of supporting giveaways that are mostly just using them.
I'm not even going to get into the whole "even if they gave away something of higher value, they could easily swindle their way out of giving it to a legit participant who isn't themselves", we all know how easy it is for us already here to create more Hive accounts and looking at the inactivity of most participants of these giveaways it's hard to determine if they're unique because many of them could just be 
Giveaway posts aren't meant to be profitable for the person giving something away. They're meant to generate traffic towards something you're giving away, for instance if I wanted more of my followers to pay attention to WOO I'd give some WOO away. Doing so on a consistent basis would quickly fall into abuse/farming if I'm constantly accepting rewards and the giveaways are consistently the same and take no effort to go through the participants' entries.
Giveaways can thus be seen as ads, a lot of people on crypto twitter do these to advertise towards a project. Some with decent following could even be paid/sponsored to create giveaways while others could just be tricking desperate people that there is a giveaway happening to use them to increase their following count and attention.
The way some of these giveaway posts are treated these days remind me of the days of bid bot voting where someone could buy profitable votes towards certain content advertising certain things. How crazy is/was that? Not only did you stay trending most of the day gaining traction and attention towards what your content was mentioning but at the same time you profited from it. Welp, this is kind of what's happening here lately and even though most of the rewards aren't big they're still profitable.
I've seen people do this where they start small, do the giveaways consistently and keep growing the prizes but they never get bigger than the average post rewards they've been making the past week or so. I've also seen people who usually have been quite decent in creating original content and being social and consistent turn into creating these giveaway posts here and there and over time more consistently because it's easy, doesn't take a lot of effort and they get their daily autovote rewards this way.
I'm sure participants don't mind it, it only takes a comment to enter the giveaway and they have nothing to lose, but what they may not know is that the rest of stakeholders do indeed lose out on it because it's taking post rewards from everyone else who may be putting a lot more effort into their content and Hive account.
So from my point of view, doing giveaway posts should be fine as long as the person hosting them proves that he's not just doing it for the lazy profitable votes it generates. Give the giveaways some uniqueness by making them different from each and every one, make the participants do something else than just picking a number, maybe writing genuine comments you'd have to read and evaluate and picking winners with some effort behind it both for you as the host and the participant.
If you're not going to do any of the above then please consider forfeiting part if not all of the post rewards because quite frankly those posts are close to pointless otherwise and I think more stakeholders should keep an eye to adjust those post rewards out to disincentivize such activity.
Okay so going back to the giveaway posts I've been planning on doing which originated from This post and compare it to what I've seen a majority of current post giveaways:
- I'll be picking a few Hive games to do giveaways in that the community showed demand for
- The giveaways will consist of assets of these games worth somewhere around 20-50$
- The idea behind them will be to have participants share posts of these Hive games on Twitter/Reddit and that share will count as an entry. Thus it brings value to Hive in the form of traffic from outside and it requires effort to go through the entries to check performance of each tweet/reddit post, tag usage, etc
- Pick winners and try to do so transparently, possibly in a form of video where you show how you're picking them randomly and not picking favorites or your possible alt accounts
Now, giveaway posts like that for instance I wouldn't mind seeing more often, they bring value to the Hive dapps, giving interested parties access to assets and tokens of their favorite games. Advertising/attention towards the Hive games from more readers of followers of the person giving things away/potential trending time. Getting participants to put effort into their entries to have a chance to win something which will benefit Hive as a whole (traffic towards Hive posts discussing the Hive games themselves from outside of Hive). The giveaway host has to spend time picking and choosing winners, it's not always the same giveaway even if a lot of the text may be copy-pasted others can see it's something that takes time to conclude.
Compare that to what I see often:
- Give away asset worth less than 5% of your previous post rewards of the giveaway
- Participants do something simple that brings no value to anyone like pick a number from 0-1000.
- Host picks random winner but no one knows if it was truly random and everyone knows it took no effort to pick the winner or create the post
- Rinse and repeat
Have you encountered such giveaway posts? Have you maybe thought the same and decided not to participate in them cause of that?
If anything I hope some of the big projects involved in these giveaways take note and don't encourage such giveaways with upvotes as I've seen many Hive-based games do.
Discuss.
