Why do low effort posts feel so offensive?

When users make low effort posts knowing full well that they will get substantial auto-votes, it feels like they are just farming the Hive community without giving back. That is presumably happening, but it's also a somewhat counterproductive position. Social media is dominated by low-effort content - it is the norm. Nobody joins a social network in order to contribute effort, they do it to interact with their friends and family, and to find content that is of interest to them. Low effort content has value because it helps build a larger network that is more fun to be involved in.

And yet, if we allow low effort posts and low effort curation to run rampant, steemit.com is the result. The reward farming grows until it is all there is. Just browse that link for 2 minutes and it is plain to see.

Yet, this problem highlights a flaw in the design of the Hive rewards system. A social network that doesn't allow low effort content is not viable. The vast majority of the most viral content on Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok etc. is low effort content, and you never know what MS Paint edit will become the next mega-meme.

How to Allow Low Effort Posts without the excessive farming?

There are many possible ways to re-engineer the incentives on Hive, but with all the attempts to improve the tokenomics over the years, but attempts to tweak and adjust the tokenomics have uncertain results even in retrospect, let alone in advance. All the while requiring a major debate to reach consensus and often requiring substantial development work as well.

How about if we could fix this problem without any hard fork or any development for the core Hive code at all?

Because d.buzz is a short form content platform, they implement a default payout cap to discourage users from farming the rewards with short form content. Users can always set it higher or override it, but if you look at d.buzz trending page, most stick with the cap, and even when they don't, they typically raise it only to about 5-10 HBD. That's inclusive of curators, so a 10 HBD cap is usually just 5 HBD for themselves in reality.

Fair default?

I would suggest a fair default payout cap is 20 HBD. That's only 10 HBD for the author in practice.

If users do start raising their payout caps to $100 for their daily selfie, they are showing that they made a deliberate decision to farm the reward pool for more. In that case, have at them with downvotes, there is no argument that they are just using social media in a normal way. However the vast majority of well intentioned people who just want to use Hive like, you know, a social media platform, will be able to do so in peace.