Examining MSP-Active. Rewards for Participation aka POI

A couple of days ago I noticed these incoming transactions from the account Hive account@msp-active in my PalNet wallet. I wondered what they were and how I came to be chosen as a recipient. But I didn't really investigate too far.

Then yesterday listening in to Hive account@msp-waves with Hive account@crimsonclad I got my answer over the course of the show. MSP-Active is an account set up to reward users for being active in the PAL Discord Channel. There is some sort of back end system checking your presence and activity level in the Discord Server and determining how much of the daily reward pool you should receive.

You can look at the MSP-ACTIVE wallet and see that over the last couple of days the account has been receiving about 556 PAL tokens each day. It then goes through a process of paying out those tokens according to the formula it has been programmed with to the people who have been joining the crew in the PAL Discord.

Now, as much as I want to trust the people over in the PAL to be fair and have pure intentions on the distribution of PAL, I have a healthy dose of skepticism. I wondered if this was just another way to line the pockets of the Mods who spend hours and hours a day in the discord server. After all, these folks already have 30,000 PAL in their wallets. They also are the ones posting the most about PAL and by voting for each other they are getting the biggest post payouts at this point until/unless they call on the Hive account@nopal4u account to limit their payouts.

So I went on a little fact finding mission. Steem Engine does let you explore the wallet actions of various accounts, so I went to take a look at the distributions by Hive account@msp-active to see what it had been sending out.

There are pages and pages looking like this. That sure makes it a little tougher to figure out if someone is getting disproportionately more reward than other people. And I don't have the block exploring expertise of a Hive account@paulag or Hive account@abh12345, and maybe eventually those fine spreadsheet gurus will do a little research of their own. But in the meantime I figured I would go look at other people's wallets.

What I found was that the Mods are not excluded from these drops, but they do not seem to be receiving more than anyone else who is participating in the server over the last few days.

The first few days of MSP-Active distributions do see some big numbers going to the MODs who are most active in the discord, but that has tapered off as more people are finding their way in to the server. Let's look at the most active person I am aware of, Hive account@juliakponsford. I can't recall a time I have gone in to the PAL Discord and she wasn't there.

If you start from the bottom, the first distribution from Hive account@msp-active went out 4 days ago, when Julia received 68 PAL for participation. But that has dwindled day by day, and yesterday's payout of 8 PAL is not as high as many non-mod members received. The 68 from 4 days ago does appear to be tied for the highest payout made by the active account, Hive account@bigdizzle91 received the same payout, and then Hive account@torico with a payout of 51 PAL. It is worth noting, neither of those accounts are MODs, and the other MODs are pretty far down the list.

In the three payouts since, no MOD topped the list of payouts, and the top payout has dropped from that high of 68 to 35 yesterday (to Hive account@amberyooper).

So it appears that, while the MODs do have the opportunity to increase their PAL holdings with their participation in the PAL Discord Server, their payouts are not disproportionate to the rest of us. We all have the opportunity to earn through hanging out in the Discord and active participation.

In fact, for those of us with small accounts, this may be the best way to increase your PAL holdings. If you take out the Minnow Mayor Town Hall Post I made last week that got hit pretty nicely, my posts have maxed out at 6 PAL payouts, of which half goes to curation, so my payouts are going to be about 3 PAL. I've received 9, 6 & 9 PAL from MSP-Active and I am not a huge participant in the Discord server. Those active payouts are far more than my post payouts. So it definitely pays better for me to be in Discord than to post on Palnet at this point.

So head over to PAL's discord server, get to chatting and earn some PAL to stake up and increase your influence on this side of the platform.