I foolishly stepped into a flame war with a spammer who wants to use HIVE in blackhat SEO efforts.
Anyway, the spammer asked the question: Is it okay to drop posts on HIVE which are nothing but a title and link?
The answer is an emphatic "No!"
The reason the answer is "no" is because black hat SEO techniques devalue forums.
I've been engaged in online forums since the 1990s. I have personally participated in dozens of forums which were destroyed by spam.
The forums start with great content and community. Marketers see the positive reputation of a community as an opportunity and begin developing schemes to harvest that reputation.
The Blackhat SEO Experts who harvest the reputations of forums tend to destroy the forums they infest.
The problem becomes apparent when one looks at Google.
The page rank system by Google works by analyzing links on the Internet. Google looks at the links coming into and leaving a given web site.
Forums with good content often had numerous inbound links and only a few links to good quality content. Google gives high page rank to both the forum and the outbound links.
Marketers engaged in black hat SEO learned that they could improve page rank for clients by flooding these forums with spam links.
Every open forum that I used had the same problem: Black Hat SEO Marketers would join the forum ... often using multiple accounts. (multiple accounts is not a problem. I have a personal and business account on Hive.) The marketers would start flooding the forum with posts that had no content sprinkled with links to random sites.
The first hundred or so spam links seemed tolerable. The problem is that there is no end to what black hat SEO companies are willing to do.
I moderated sites. The spam load would start as one or two questionable posts. The number of spam posts quickly jumped from a few hundred into the tens of thousands. One site I owned got 180,000 spam links in a single day.
The spam links aren't just white noise.
Google realized that spam links were a major problem for its page rank algorithm.
Google changed its algorithm so that it would punish sites that had spam links. Google categorizes web sites with a large number of outbound links as "link farms."
When Google classifies as forum as a link farm, it assumes that all of the participants in the forum are spammers.
After the spammers hit a forum, all of the participants in the forum are treated as spammers. This is terrible for the forum owner. The site they worked hard to develop is suddenly hurting the people the forum owner wanted to help.
Hive posts that have nothing but a title and a link aren't just white noise. They actively hurt everyone who participates in the forum.
The only solution is to create a moderation system which penalizes the spam posts before Google manages to penalize the forum.
I fully support the developers who work on #hivewatchers . They are doing something that is necessary to protect the participants in the forum.
I feel sad when people accidentally run afoul of .
But, do you want to know something? @HiveWatchers has a fairly low bar.
The rules are simple: Don't copy and paste from other web sites (even when you own the other web sites). Don't write posts which are nothing but a link. That's all.
BTW, a really fun question is: What should do to people who drop the same post on SteemIt and Hive?
Since SteemIt and Hive are different blockchains, I am inclined to say that HiveWatchers should warn then start penalizing people who drop the same post on both sites.