Curation Rewards Impact Culture

When people are being paid to "curate" content, they start to adapt selfish strategies. Because then, votes are cast only for personal gain rather than for the benefit of the person they are voting for. Which makes voting a selfish act rather than a generous act. And consequently the spirit of the site changes from one of rewarding content to one of "playing the game"...

Posts with rewards set to burn still pay curators.

Only author rewards are burned.

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This revealing dream was somewhat strange, but also particularly coherent and quite realistic. The curious setting in which this took place, occurred in some remote village down there in the South American jungle. Inside what appeared to be some sort of food storage shed where the majority of the local population apparently went to buy their food and other consumer goods. Up to that point, everything looked relatively normal.

But as I went deeper into the place, everything started to seem a bit less normal and more peculiar and singular. Since at the back, in one corner of that place, I began to notice a large audience of an indefinite number of seated attendees who seemed to be listening attentively to the talk of someone standing on a tribune who appeared to be a speaker. So I decided to go over to hear what the conference was about.

To my big surprise, the speaker was talking about social networks, blockchain technology, online communities, and cryptocurrencies. About these internet ecosystems where your time, effort, and content can be monetized by interacting and socializing with others by posting your own stuff and consuming the stuff of everyone else.

But what I found truly fascinating to watch, was the passion and enthusiasm with which the speaker was trying to convince to his defenseless captive audience to join the online community he was talking about. Something worthy of competing with the most famous and popular evangelical pastors on cable television. ¡A persuasive & impeccable speech!

An impeccable speech, of which I apparently had missed most of it. In view, that I probably had arrived late to the place. And the speaker was about to finish his presentation before entering now into the question-and-answer period with his captive audience. Although truth be told, up until that moment, and from the moment I arrived to the place and leaned closer to listen the dissertation, I don't know why, but everything I'd heard he said sounded way too similar to Hive.

And it was right here, in this moment, during this phase with the Q&A section, that everything became pretty clear. And in which the revelation with the solutions to all the ills of the Hive blockchain was fortuitously presented to me through the witty arguments of a peculiar character among the audience. Someone who, judging by his singular appearance and way of expressing himself, seemed quite wise.

This was an elderly man, although with a strong and athletic body, with long white hair and beard, wearing a colorful poncho and a straw hat, who asked to speak, approached the microphone and said the following:

He said his name was Will Salas and that he was 10x times older than he looked.
He said he knew in depth all the details of the online community the speaker spoke about.
He said he had already joined and has been part of this social network on the blockchain since basically its inception almost ten years ago.
And he said that since joining, although he's never posted anything, he's never interacted with anyone or commented on anyone's posts. Not a single day has gone by that he hasn't closely and attentively observed the evolution, decay and social behavior of the members of this sect and cult on the blockchain.

He clarified that everything he had observed so far was nothing unusual and that it was logical to expect that the harmful influence of those at the top of the food chain with their higher capital investment and wealth would ultimately corrupt the harmony and proper functioning of society within the ecosystem. This or any other "social" ecosystem.

Because the greed, avarice, selfishness and desire for power that money grants to these individuals at the top to exert a greater influence over everyone else so that they behave as they wish and thus fulfilling their whims. In every social and economic system where money is involved as rewards, invariably it ends up corrupting, degrading, stagnating, decaying, devolving and finally disappearing itself unless something different is done about it quickly.

And immediately this wise old man went on to list the evils that he had observed until then:

Extreme inability to attract or retain users. Generalized attrition and desertion of old and new users.
Drought and lack of interaction, comments, replies and feedback among members supposedly still active in the ecosystem.
Burnout, self-censorship, and a massive loss of quality content due to the terrible taste & imposed bias of those who have self-assigned the task of "curate" content.
An economy and currency stagnated due to the enormous waste of resources on useless causes and inefficient marketing and promotional initiatives by those who manage the communal coffers.
The obviously nefarious, arbitrary and counterproductive actions of the self-proclaimed watchdogs and useless regulators of content quality on the blockchain.
The evident passivity, inaction, complicity, permissiveness and financing of these same useless watchdogs/regulators by those who, from the top, are paying them an undeserved salary with our own money so they can continue degrading and sinking the economy of our social network.
The blatant lack of interest and absolute lack of inclination by the present plutocracy to address, attend and correct these more than obvious problems with actual effective measures that please the majority of the userbase.

Well, this knowledgeable and wise old man in my dream also mentioned and added perhaps a handful of other things. But which right now I don't remember exactly what he said. So, in order not to make this post too long, let me now finish this post with my own conclusions from what the old man mentioned, trying to describe below a proposal on how we could start to correct many of the ills of this alleged "social network" on the blockchain.

First of all, let me clarify that I truly believe the "social network" on the blockchain that both the speaker and the wise old man were referring to, definitely has to be the Hive blockchain. But as I arrived late to the conference, I was never really able to confirm it. Although basically, I have no doubt about it. Even though I'm aware that social decline syndromes such as those mentioned above are likely to be developed in any other place with the same monetary incentives, social dynamics and economic characteristics.

Ok, this is what I propose as an experiment to begin curing the current ills...
Given that the long announced Hard-Fork 28 on the Hive blockchain is expected to take place at any point during the remainder of this year, then we're going to suggest the following:

Why not make some slight and simple modifications to all Hive-related main websites and UIs (Peakd, Ecency, Hive.blog and many others) pruning a handful of unnecessary public data which, in my opinion, I suspect is contributing to its current decline and stagnation for all the reasons the old wise man in my dream mentioned?
For example, in favor to encourage a real content consumption by organically reading what you vote and actually knowing the value of what you vote through true human presence and manual curation without any kind of automatisms. Why don't we eliminate from the UI values and scores like:

a) The reputation of the author of the post?
b) How long has the post been since it was published?
c) The number of votes (both upvotes and downvotes) that a post has received?
d) The dollar figure and the accumulated value in rewards that the posts have?

Something that would look more or less like this on Hive.blog:

Why not just start with that to see what happens? ¿Huh?

Don't you think that without those values in sight, people would be more compelled and willing to read, consume, and digest posts before voting them?

That without these values at sight, people would be more compelled and willing to comment and interact with the article's author, leaving their valuable and encouraging feedback after actually consuming the content?

That this new behavior and activity actually would contribute to a substantial improvement in the quality of the content published? Conducive to a greater participation and authentic interaction among the entire userbase of the network?

And that as a final result of all this new behavior and social activity among the current users, we would really be able to heal and sanitize the trending and hot pages of Hive with true interesting content of authentic quality as to attract an audience outside the network that would be truly motivated to visit our platform frequently and tempted to invest and join us eventually?

Don't you think that with these simple changes and modifications, it would be truly possible and feasible to improve and strengthen the potential success of our token, economy and social project on the blockchain outside the borders of our small bubble and echo chamber?

Yeah, yeah, I am well aware that these simple suggestions still do not completely combat and defeat the pervasive automatisms and bad habits of "content curation" that currently exist in the chain and that sadly have plunged it into the current debacle in which it finds itself today. But you have to start somewhere. As long as you're willing to...