The recent events that occurred with the vibes community got me to thinking a bit about things, naturally it also made me curious to make sure nothing of the sort is happening with my projects so I went ahead and took a deeper look at things. Which is a good thing to do every now and then, but it did make me wonder how others would even take a look.
I was kind of skeptical of the person in charge of that community, not just cause I remembered him from way back, but the way they had found their way back here again after all that time at the optimal time when there were "rewards" to be had again did trigger a few warning signs. He's way of entering random community discords with "raps" or "rhymes" trying to get people to join was also odd to say the least, but I don't wanna discourage people from being unique in the way they approach things so I should mention it was mostly many things stacked on top of everything else. The more obvious ones were some late voting I noticed happening which seemed to occur to hide the fact that his posts got rewarded so much while making the account voting late be the one to suffer the consequences with substantially lowered returns while encouraging others to vote before it which just ended up giving the author more and more "undeserving, if you will" rewards.
All in all this is the life long question I've asked myself on chain and why I've decided to run things the way I do, even with some being against it early on and some who kept being against it forever. If you don't give someone incentives for doing things, but they have a lot of power to direct the reward pool any way they see fit, they will eventually figure out ways to reward themselves. That's just human nature.
Now of course I can't speak much of the inner workings of vibes as I don't know how it worked nor is it that important for this post, I just know valueplan insists on not "paying" people and relies on volunteer work while they instead pay for necessities such as travel expenses and stays. This is another thing that's made me think of things lately though, while I'm sure majority of them are good people volunteering for hive to do better, it keeps making me think that there's some there taking advantage of things for their own gain. I doubt they can 100% verify all the costs or that there's no trickery happening there.
Anyway, this brings me to the main topic of this post.
Transparency and rewards remove the need for trickery, usually. Now I'm not saying ocd and my other projects are 100% favoritism-free, I think that's kind of impossible to remove unless we'd employ AI to do the work for us. People are people. However, the way we have things set up rewards curators for doing their job while openly keeping track of all their curations so that over-favoritism doesn't go unnoticed by others.
I truly believe that if more projects/stakeholders did things this way, we'd have a lot less accounts that would go unnoticed and underrewarded along with not rewarding accounts that may not deserve the rewards as I'm sure there's still many that exist of those. Whenever I see some big upvotes go to accounts that have barely done anything other than create content on a daily basis, I wonder if they care how they are distributing inflation or if whoever is in charge of voting is doing it because of different ties to whoever is behind the account posting. With lack of transparency it is impossible to know A. Who's voting with the account, B. why they're voting for certain accounts this often/much even if there's many more deserving authors out there putting in more effort/time/energy into their social presense or even the content. We simply can't know who's doing the voting, we don't know who the stakeholder has entrusted with the voting of their account and we also don't know how this voter is rewarding himself for their time.
This already leaves a giant loophole in the system which may over time encourage abuse in the form of voting up alt accounts, friends/family and it also encourages the bad things that come with autovotes as well, such as authors becoming lazy, taking the upvotes for granted and neglecting the things that may have lead to them getting upvotes to begin with, such as building and maintaining an audience of consumers. They simply don't care anymore and they may have an idea of how big of a stigma downvotes are and how bad of a thing some people here make them out to be so they feel safe from them and continue to, well, farm hive inflation.
Just the other day I saw an account who was simply farming hive with daily posts of farmy content, had barely engaged in a long time and instantly took offense towards myself adjusting the rewards down by ~60%.
But I don't wanna get into autovote abuse from the authors now, it was just an example of what can happen when there's no consequences behind the curators of certain projects/stakeholders. If something like this were to happen to my projects, we could simply remove such a curator from their position and their abuse would be easier and earlier to spot as there's a lot of others able to follow each and every vote. They are also rewarded for their work without having to rely on rewarding themselves for the work through the position they're in. Now obviously there may still be people double-dipping, time's may be tough, we don't know what kind of position people are in in their day to day, but point is this system cannot get as bad as some other projects let theirs go.
If you don't have your incentives lined up properly from the beginning, they may cause long-term harm.