Curators Based Communities - How Do You Choose The Soil For Planting Your Hive Content?

avatar

It's probably needless to mention how much Hive has changed in the past two years and how different it is in comparison to "its degenerated dad, Steem" but I had to do it anyway. I've had my fair share of dealing with Steem and I am an active hiver since the early days of the chain.

I don't remember exactly if communities got live prior to the hard fork that liberated us from Steem or if it was after the chain got launched, but I sure know that tribes/communities have been a hell of an upgrade for how the social media platform looks and works as a whole.

I'd even say that since communities have been created tags don't even matter that much anymore. Personally, I have had a period of probably a year or so when I would only "consume Leofinance content", thus I had no incentive to search for any posts based on any particular tag anymore.

Communities somehow played an important role in sorting out content on Hive and almost every popular community that we currently have somehow has "its own patron". Meaning that the founder is usually pretty "HP wealthy" and thru his upvotes on active community members that account somehow encourages users to post in that particular tribe.

DSC_0238.jpg

That doesn't mean that these curators don't get out of their own yard and share the love with other yards gardeners, but overall this is how things work for Hive communities. @leofinance has leo.voter, @ocd has its juicy stake too for upvoting content posted in its community, @3speak videos are quite often curated by @theycallmedan and the @3spek account, and so on and so forth.

There are "exceptions to the rule" as well, as in the case of @appreciator, @haejin, @ranchorelaxo, @trafalgar @spot, and some other large whales who upvote posts quite randomly not following a particular community for curating content. @appreciator at some point had his own community, GEMS and it was trending for a while.

Quite a few of us were uploading content in that community cuz of the "potential upvotes" coming from @appreciator. Now he's all over the place and he's definitely a wealth creator for bloggers on Hive. In some cases such as @leofinance, having LEO as a Hive second layer token that is distributed "inside the Leofinance community" among creators and curators means that we have our own whales incentivizing creators to post too.

Toruk(@onealfa) is an example of such a large LEO whale, probably the largest, who really has an impact on one's content LEO rewards. Personally, I have scored plenty of upvotes from him over the years and I gotta say that this man paid some bills for yours truly...

A community without a fatty whale curating content posted in that community is going to have a short life. I've seen quite a few of these coming and going in my 5+ years on Hive.

However, I got some sort of a musing for whoever reads this post and this is: how do you choose what community "is worthy of your content"? Are you going after the patron whales swimming these waters, the community as it is, the people "living there", topics discussed... or what?

Personally, I chose @leofinance as my go-to community for over two years because now because I had plenty of crypto and finance-related posts, and although I "got myself dragged" in here pretty late, I don't regret a damn minute spent here. Lately, I've been posting photography posts through the official @liketu interface as well because I have such posts to share once in a while, and somehow @liketu is the Instagram I asked for since back in the early days of my Steem experience.

What about you?

Thanks for your attention,
Adrian

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

hive communities vyb pob posh neoxian hodl leofinance
0
0
0.000
6 comments
avatar

I will just chime in a little bit -

I think communities that are driven by patrons are less healthy as they are at the whim - and by extension - bias of that group of patrons. I recently mentioned that this configuration amounts to a smaller group of people asserting and coercing a greater number of people that they know what is best for the platform.

But content isn't esoteric. It's meant to be shared and consumed and curated, on the margin, weighted by skin in the game. Further, the effectiveness of the system increases when a larger number of people participate.

Granted, creators are likely to optimise for reward and so participating in communities with larger "patrons" - irrespective of whether they themselves own that influence or not is not their concern.

On the other hand, we are only beginning to see some evidence of outcome driven curation, and I would like to see this more. What this means to me at least, is that we curate based on the network effects any given post brings to the table, as opposed to some predetermined (and yet impossible to justify with pin prick precision) metric of what should or should not be curated.

In other words, yes, we should strive for a meritocracy, but the barometer of quality isn't the post itself, but to what extent that post brings positive network effects to the table.

IF we still believe in the attention economy, then creators should be measured by their ability to bring attention to the table. With less entities competing for attention, as is the case now, we have a lot of odd and frankly inorganic behaviour.

0
0
0.000
Reply
avatar

In other words, yes, we should strive for a meritocracy, but the barometer of quality isn't the post itself, but to what extent that post brings positive network effects to the table.

Couldn't agree more on this one. The other way was how Steem worked for a while but as we can clearly see now the gap between the two blockchains has widened a lot.

0
0
0.000
Reply
avatar

very right - even worse if these 'patrons' expose themselves as just scammers..

0
0
0.000
Reply
avatar
(Edited)

fully agree, great post

just honestly wish leofinance would not be SO OVERCURATED

often appears to me there are a lot of people just farming leofinance because it appears to be very easy to get big daily votes?
while their posts often are shit and they have no clue about trading - at all
but fake it till you make it? maybe not through trading itself but big votes? lol?

while I can probably hope forever to get any big votes like in leofinance..
while already being for ages here.. not a new account (even though I lost my master & owner keys to my first account, so this is my second)

many newbies also get votes into oblivion, I think because curators try to incentivize new users to stay?
but does it really incentivize this or only make them pay out and milk rewards?

I have seen sooo many accounts over the past years, most of them are gone or at a few hundred HP
because they are just paying out

time to time a little demotivating
I am dolphin (finally again! - had to pay out to survive and still am in survival situation, also have permanent pain, I live very much under living minimum and being criminalized - still I can do it - but the hopes for new users/ stakers is set in people who already get everything and are used to it - pay out)

I guess Hive needs to grow up

incentives are key
it is not hard - I've written a new post about it ^^ (though probably very few care and even less curators)

https://peakd.com/hive-122315/@woelfchen/dear-hive

0
0
0.000
Reply