I reached a milestone recently, while it's not much to talk about, it got me thinking and well, guess there's more to say about it than I initially thought.
I reached 33k subscribers recently, probably due to my recent post encouraging people from all over the chain to drop in and say hi - and while that wasn't the goal of the post - I'm still working on a video for it - it made me think.
I remember when I first joined this chain, there were no rewards yet but people were saying the rewards are coming.
The chain itself was closed sourced with many questioning if it is actually decentralized since they couldn't read the code.
Rewards back then were distributed - or at least calculated - to give a certain % to the comment section automatically. This was one of the things that inspired 
When the rewards finally hit, things started to pop off on this chain. Somehow the token made it up to rank #4 on coinmarketcap, back when Bitcoin was a few hundred $ and eth in the lower single digits (if I recall correctly).
A lot of new people were joining but account creation was quite centralized if i remember correctly, the company behind the chain were the sole creators and they'd automatically assign 25 stake to every new account. In hindsight I could've easily created a ton of new accounts using reddit account registration - as some did (noganoo), but I thought since this chain is immutable and will last for a long time, I'd better just work on my reputation and account history to do it the right way.
For some reason I focused more on curation and engagement rather than author rewards. The automatic reward distribution towards comments was quickly removed and all rewards would only go towards posts mainly, comments would seldom receive rewards due to the quadratic nature of the curaiton curve where the more stake was voting on a post the higher the author rewards would be along with higher early curation rewards for those who voted first (even though that was botted a lot as well).
Either way, without going too much into the history and what I remember while writing this post, there was one instance that bugged me when I saw a respectable user do something.
He was auto-following all active and new users. Basically a bot that would follow everyone en masse. I knew why he was doing it of course but it just annoyed me as I liked to see following happen naturally. You connect with someone, you agree on something, you follow them and maybe they'll follow you. I didn't have a lot of followers back then cause I wasn't posting much, so maybe that's a reason it annoyed me even more.
I remember talking to him and asking him why he's throwing away his "authentic" following for potentially worthless followers just to increase his numbers. Naturally I knew the answer to this as well but I wanted to see what his excuse was.
"Because I can", was basically it.
Shortly after he of course unfollowed everyone and was only following a low double digit number of accounts while he now had around 30k followers.
Wow, this person must be important!
Ever since then I kind of stopped having contact with this person, aside from a few times I noticed he was curating things with others stake badly and asked him to try a bit harder. Think he's still milking that delegation and selling every bit he can.
I'm sure he used that fake following for politics wherever he could.
"Look at me, I'm one of the most followed authors on Hive because I was so consistent and hard working, reward me!"
We've seen a lot of fake attention in web2, and if he'd tried something like this there I'm sure it would've been easier to go unnnoticed compared to here.
Unfortunately a lot of this fakery goes unnoticed and advertisers/platforms continue to reward it. Most people who don't participate in it lose out and many may not even be aware of it. Think of all the "top streamers" in this day and age who fake view counters and overshadow someone who could be more genuine who now misses out on new potential followers, revenue and attention. Fake listener counts on spotify.
They all have a pool in a way that they share rewards from, whether it's advertiser revenue pool or subscription pools. Similar to our inflationary reward pool.
Fortunately for us we have tools to combat this fakery here, with 25% downvote mana vs upvote mana. But most of us don't use it at all. Maybe it doesn't matter much right now and I'm fine with that since our userbase is so small, but it's a good tool to have later once we see an increase in users and methods to fake things.
