Putting my Money where my Mouth is: I Have Contributed Over $5,800 of my own Funds to the FreeCompliments Community Account to Support its Growth

You may have noticed the Hive Power of the FreeCompliments community account increasing over the past several days. From where did this magical power arise?!

Inspired by a post from @taskmaster4450, it occurred to me that I may as well invest in the idea I believe in. FreeCompliments is that very idea. Thus, I have used my own personal hard-earned funds to increase the amount of Hive owned by the community account, @hive-140084.

An Investment in a Worthy Idea

Before I discovered Hive, I had nearly given up on the idea of bringing FreeCompliments back to life. Its existence on other platforms had transformed into monstrosities. Hive has given me the opportunity to build it exactly as I envisioned, without the interference of centralized entities that would diminish or halt the vision. This is true ownership of an idea. I was inspired to recreate it.

Seeing the potential for its growth in a financially-focused space, with incentives to help new users, I decided to invest my own funds into FreeCompliments. These funds will be used to help the community and its proponents grow. We will strongly support new users and quality contributions. Most of all, we’ll support those who are here to help others and do not ask for anything in return. This is truly what FreeCompliments is all about.

How Will This Investment Be Used?

In the name of openness and transparency, here is a description of the short and long-term vision for how these funds will be used. These may change over time, and I’ll be sure to inform you of any changes, and will seek feedback from the community for major decisions (including this one!).

Initially, all funds are converted directly into Hive Power. This Hive power is delegated largely to Ecency so that: 1) it will earn Ecency points at a much faster rate, and 2) it will earn some additional Hive rewards to stimulate its growth. The delegation to Ecency comes from the idea that we are Boosting posts which add the community account as a beneficiary in order to stimulate growth of both the community and of its users.

A small amount (50 Hive Power apiece) has been delegated to @vetfunding (in a campaign to support the veterans on Hive), and to @tokenpimp and @thealliance because several of their members were a part of the early support system for FreeCompliments. That’s a total of 150 Hive Power.

Most of the remainder goes to Ecency (as much as the platform will allow me to delegate!). The current plan is to keep this delegation until we reach approximately 65,000 Ecency points, which is enough to Boost 1 post per day for an entire year, plus an additional 1 Boost per month (the use for this will be discussed in a separate post pretty soon), and in order to allow for some additional leeway, and some possible promotions. As we currently have just around 12,000 Ecency points, it will take another 53,000 Ecency points to reach this goal. With about 12,400 HP delegated to Ecency, it will take approximately 43 days to reach this goal.

Once that goal is reached, we will slowly start to decrease the delegation until we reach somewhere between 5,000-6,000 HP delegated to Ecency. This will maintain a steady flow of incoming Ecency points so that Boosts can be continued without interruptions. This also means that we may be able to significantly decrease the beneficiary percentage to this account that we currently ask in order to provide a Boost to posts, and will eventually equalize the requested amount for all posters. This will make things more fair to all posters.

The undelegated portions of Hive Power will be used in a couple of ways: a portion will be delegated to accounts that provide vote curation. I will use the community account to post template-like posts announcing our themed days, i.e. Motivational Mondays, Fun Fridays, Selfie Saturdays, etc., and possibly some other announcements as well, and these accounts’ curation will thus help increase the FC community account’s Hive Power over time. We’ll also start to funnel some delegation towards @leo.voter in order to gain Leo Power, which users will themselves gain when we vote on their posts.

The remainder of undelegated Hive Power will be used to increase the community account’s voting power. This means that this account will be able to more effectively discriminate its votes to curate quality content – both posts and comments. It will also help us rely less on Ecency Boosts (although we’ll still give them out freely), so that we can curate quality content more effectively. This will be more fair to all users.

Inevitably, curation and delegation rewards will be distributed to this account; all of these will be powered up. Some of those will be used to invest in Hive-Engine tokens / diesel pools to help grow the community account. Some of it will also be used for limit trading of Hive/HBD. These portions will be considered a bit of a gamble, and since this is the case, for the purpose of transparency I’ll make sure to post screenshots of the pools and trades. Other portions will go into delegations to the aforementioned accounts to encourage growth, and some will remain undelegated so that the voting power of the community account can increase.

For transparency purposes: since I did place my own money into the community account, I’ll pay myself by using the community account to vote on my own personal account’s posts. That would be my compensation for keeping this investment in the community. Keep in mind that some of my rewards still go back into the community account, as it’s always a beneficiary on my posts.

Loyalty Rewards to Early Members

As per my current plan to reward loyalty to the community, early members and content contributors will be more likely to receive increased vote percentages than those who join later; we’ll figure out more concrete ways of applying this voting method in the near future. Additionally, those who make more meaningful and frequent contributions in terms of comments and posts will be more likely to receive higher vote percentages – independent of when they join. For the purposes of quality control, spamming will still not receive positive votes. Illegal content will still be muted and possibly reported to authorities.

This proposed method of voting should thus maintain a balance of quality control and rewarding loyal members of this community. There is no doubt that it will be subjective in nature, and we always welcome feedback on how we’re doing.

Delegation Rewards

This set of rewards is currently under consideration, and not finalized by any means. Users who delegate Hive Power to the @hive-140084 account will receive certain rewards. The model I had in mind would award the top several delegators with HBD and a predetermined APR of Hive distributions which would still permit the community account to grow. This would require a considerable amount to be placed in HBD savings, and further calculations will have to be made to make the delegation profitable to delegators and to the community account before a final announcement is made. The calculations and distributions would be done manually, as I currently don’t know how to automate such a process.

Conclusion

The FreeCompliments community is going to enter a period of increased growth and reach its goals of supporting its users quicker than before. This is because I truly believe in this idea and want to see FreeCompliments spread joy and kindness all over Hive, and bleed its incredible effects into the outside world. Let’s help grow this thing together so that it becomes bigger than all of us.

What do you think? Are there any other uses of these funds that you would suggest? Are all the ideas outlined here fair?

I would love to hear the opinions about these methods of increasing FreeCompliments’ financial value on the blockchain from everyone who is currently a member of FreeCompliments, since you’re all inaugural members! Anyone else who finds this page is also very welcome to voice their opinion. We’re all about free speech, and everyone’s experience has value.

@wesphilbin @jamerussell @thekittygirl @crrdlx @stayten @bambukah @corvidae @ijelady @blacardi @sequentialvibe @eddylight @deraaa @jhymi @stdd @ganjafarmer @raj808 @ndk.focus @saffisara @melinda010100 @uthantzin @palomap3 @lady-bellar @tikki00taffi @fizz0 @jerrytsuseer @lorennys @chairoul @headwan @teknon @luchyl @hive-197626 @romanie @smc.arike.oba

More posts with further ideas incoming soon!

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Disclaimer: FreeCompliments will be a beneficiary for this post, and I will attempt to boost it via Ecency points as well.