I received an "offer" recently for someone to assist me with my blog here on Hive.
The comment started off with congratulating me on "craking the game" because my posts do well in terms of attention and rewards, so I figured I'd start there.
There's not a lot of "game cracking" going on here. From the very beginning when I landed on this chain I told myself I'm going to do things genuinely and put a lot of respect to my presence here. This meant, no asking people for follows in exchange for following them back. This is something we still see everywhere on other platforms, people thinking these "free" follows will lead to something greater just because their follow count increases. Eventually most of these are going to unfollow you either way so one of you ends up being the pawn while the other benefits from your action, even if that benefit is close to pointless.
There are other variations of this, such as asking people to reblog/share your post and making certain actions a requirement for a prize to be distributed. You may have seen this when people do certain things like "to participate in this contest/giveaway you have to upvote, reblog, and follow my/this account". This is another number inflator but in terms of receiving genuine valuable engagement it does close to nothing - it may generate human bots instead as we see in many giveaways where the activity is real, its real people commenting but the results are comments like "count me in" or "me", etc. There's some giveaway farm accounts still doing this in this day, they receive quite a large amount of participation but for consumers this content is worthless and most of the time the only reason they give anything away is to farm post rewards - not actually try and promote something or make hive more valuable. It's a "farm rewards for the least amount of effort by giving a little away that you make back from the rest of shareholders through post rewards".
Don't wanna get into the giveaway spam too much for now so let's move on.
There's been a lot of accounts that have attempted to use "cheap tricks" to inflate their influence numbers, one of the top accounts in terms of reputation who excessively purchased votes during the "bid bot" era: @chbartist for example, if they came back today they would really not do well in terms of rewards and engagement. Meaning their follower numbers they received due to easy/cheap or "blind" follows just cause they were trending for a long time from bid bot usage would be close to pointless today because they can't buy their way to that trending attention they had back then by purchasing votes and still earning a profit from them. A lot of their followers may not be around anymore and many who engaged with it at the time probably only did it because they saw the posts trending.
Furthermore such accounts usually lack one thing - personality. Their content often revolves around general things, more like they're out there looking for something to post about rather than posting about things they run into or are happening to them. This kind of removes an important layer from blogging in my opinion which having an assistant would squander even harder.
I'm sure there's some prominent members in our community today who don't personally deal with writing their posts but have someone else do it for a portion of the rewards, etc. Maybe they do reply to comments themselves and/or curate them but once that doors been opened it is hard to know what/who exactly you are engaging with. The reason I say what is because in this day and age we may very well see AI tools assist with that activity as well, further removing personality and "randomness" from the engagement. In terms of randomness I mean two people interacting and random misunderstandings or moods or you know, life events causing the conversation to be organic, unique, and genuine for potential readers.
As I'm writing this out I'm realizing there's so much that could be talked about all this while I was hoping this'd be a short post.
There's a lot to say about intention as well, if the sole reason you're posting is the rewards rather than attempting to grow a genuine following that'll be there with you for the long run and with some of them you build connections that go both ways in consumption, you're more likely to present a quality blog to readers and they're more likely to consume your content AND your engagement compared to those with the intention to mainly extract value. They're more likely to get cut off at some point from the rewards they may be taking for granted and not attempting to "make up" for being on that list at that point in time.
There was an author that came into my radar the other day, someone I've seen often being on 
Maybe this user needs an assistant, or just you know, not get too used to the rewards to the point where they just take them for granted thinking their content alone being shared here is worth it. Content alone is quite valueless. Imagine the millions of content that are created daily and shared on web2 but the creators don't have an audience so they never even see a $ in rewards for them, but they continue to invest time, resources and dedication to one day maybe get there. While here you can instantly earn rewards and stakeholders are encouraged by a growing ecosystem to want to reward new users joining and allow them to get some attention through votes, reblogs, etc. It kind of annoys me that some people "when they make it" or "crack the game" as someone put it, they decide to go back on their attempts at making their blog valuable because they're okay with the amount of rewards it is receiving and expect that to go on forever. They've pretty much chosen to "retire" so to speak but lack the stake to make it through curation and instead gamble on their post rewards to carry on doing the work for them.
I don't know, I guess at some point people have to start to realize that their Hive journey is more than just a short term bubble, reputation isn't just that number next to your username but also affects how people perceive you. My perception of this author mentioned above changed drastically now, I'm not going to name names cause I don't want drama to ensue but it was quite difficult not to downvote such content to lower the rewards because I honestly don't want to delve into that kind of activity at the moment when I have a lot to do. If you don't have the time to stick around and maintain some value on your presence, maybe just don't post that day/week? If you have to post because the rewards are so important to you at this point in time, maybe make sure they're worth it?
Okay this post kind of sidetracked quite a bit and ended up being about something else, but yeah, there's still plenty of people who are on here who do value consumption of their content and in some cases even more than the rewards it generates. I wish voters would put a little more effort into changing the way they case their votes and take more things from the author into consideration before doing so and that authors wouldn't become so lazy/spoiled that they'd pretty much force others into uncomfortable situations where they'd have to use downvotes even if they didn't want to.
The questions to ask I guess is, if this was a new user would I vote their post?
Would I post this even if it didn't earn any rewards or engagement?