How maximization attempts hurt others

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that someone out there decided to take my hint from a recent post and follow through with cutting in to earn higher curation returns at the cost of another project.

This is what I wrote in a post of mine a few days ago:

Lo and behold, they appeared:

We've seen this happen before, for many years the Hive account@steemmonsters account was earning between 3-4% APR on curation that should be around 8.5% because another account was voting on posts it'd most likely vote on before them and Splinterlands was not in a rush to vote them before the 24h limit so they'd quite literally give them a big portion of their own curation rewards because of the rules of curation currently. With a size as big as steemmonsters this meant roughly 500 hive per week which isn't a small number.

With Hive account@poshtoken, I was personally okay if it earned some more curation rewards since it's a nonprofit project and small enough to not take too much rewards from Hive account@ocdb voting late, but now that cannot occur anymore since there's about 12 other accounts casting their vote in early waiting for that last ocdb vote to give them higher curation return APR while they do nothing but autovote all the redditposh comments.

More votes is good, right?

Well not in this case, we have manual curators making sure the redditposh comments don't get overrewarded because if the share barely got any upvotes or comments on reddit it most likely means it brought in no traffic to hive. We're not assholes who zero out some smaller rewards for trying and sharing but shares on your general subreddits already full of hivers don't really deserve $0.50-$1 in rewards, at least not at this price of Hive.

Another thing this causes is that if all the shares are getting rewarded, it'll incentivize spammers and farmers to start using redditposh which not only lowers the reputation of posh but also may affect hive links on reddit if admins notice the spam.

Now to try and prevent all this we have to start curating the shares both up and down to try and discourage these autovoters so their returns come out lower than voting on literally anything else. This means compared to the extra room we had in the past we have to get to these comments before the 24h mark with both posh and ocdb so they're not encouraged with extra curation returns while at the same time downvoting many of the other comments that get overrewarded. Basically a lot more work for us.

tl;dr, shut up about opportunities to maximize rewards in the future.

sending part of the author rewards to Hive account@poshtoken.