I Really Like The Flat Curation Reward Curve
What is the flat curve and what's the problem with the non-linear curve?
The five-minute curation window and competitive curation where you try and front run other curators in order to win a kind of reverse auction within the first five minutes to gain the largest curation rewards possible has been a failure. The point of it was to motivate Hive users to look for fresh high-quality content to upvote and reblog for better rewards. It just doesn't work. The whole point of curation is to read a post in order to judge it properly and vote accordingly. Stumbling upon a post during the first few minutes after it is published is pure luck. A manual curator is like a fish on dry land in system like that. It's as if the five-minute window were designed to be exploited by bots.
The positive effects of removing competitive curation
Heart Rate Monitor Flat Icon Vector.svg from Wikimedia Commons by Videoplasty.com, CC-BY-SA 4.0
On LeoFinance, the flat curve does not equal a flatline. Quite the opposite, in fact.
After a week or so of life with the flat curve (=your curation rewards depend only on your stake, voting power and voting percentage used) I have to say that the effects are like a breath of fresh air. Comments are getting upvoted left, right and center. More comments get made and upvoted than since the peak of the last bull run in late 2017/early 2018. This is fantastic because making long-form posts is not everyone's game. There's a lot of value in engagement.
Engagement is key
In fact, you could say that engagement is the very goal of posting. Earning a few pennies or even a few bucks on the odd high-earner per post on posts few people read or ever interact with is unlikely to motivate most people to continue posting. Not that some people's earnings are anything to scoff at. As an example, if someone cranks out 2-3 posts a day and earns $10 per day that would be a living wage in most of the world. Even in a first world country, that would be roughly equivalent to earning an extra average wage earner's monthly salary a year. So long as a content creator would've created that content or something else on some other platforms anyway there really is no downside. The problem is very few users would see that kind of earnings right out of the gate. Not only would most social media users not be able to offer anything worth anywhere near that much but that getting there requires time and a fair bit of consistence.
What would motivate users to be consistent without seeing much in the way of token rewards for a long time? Engagement, of course, and recognition. The very same things that keep people coming back to any social media platform. What the removal of competitive curation does is level the playing field between manual curators and bots and give manual curators to go and read the posts they vote on without suffering a financial penalty for it. Those curators who have significant stake don't like losing money to bot operators, which they no longer have to do.
Content discovery
Content discovery need have anything to do with competing curators. Now that the curve is flat, curation projects can dig up great posts while individual stakeholders have nothing to lose by piling on upvotes on these posts. Content discovery is something that a front end can do on its own, too. Crowdsourcing it to stakeholders is but one way to do it.
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Fully agree - Hive needs a flat curation curve - that is such a simple way to improve the platform
It would actually even make the code simpler and the chain more efficient thus improving scalability by some small(?) margin.
Engagement is the key to attracting and keeping new users. Most people that blog are looking for that engagement. They want their posts read and I think a good comment is the greatest compliment. Upvotes are nice, but engagement is key to keeping people around and actively posting.
I've always felt the same way about the curation reward being abused by bots too. Should be interesting to see how this new system works.
When I go to any forum on the web about a topic that interests, I not only read the top-level posts but usually find a lot of value in the comment sections. In fact, in most cases most of the value is in them.
I fully agree with your statements and thoughts. I would say more - this flat curation curve change was the best what could happen to LeoFinance. My personal curation and voting scheme here is 180 deg apposite to that how I do it on Hive and steem (yes I still do some posting on steem just because Actifit and Appics stays there).
Everybody can see what my results of these two opposite chemes are. All data is public. Check hivestats.
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I just auto-vote on Hive for the most part. Also, the 2 cent cut-off would render the vast majority of my votes on comments pointless anyway. I think Hive could benefit tremendously if the curve was flattened there, too.
Reading this post makes me realize how horribly far behind I am with the latest changes on hive! I miss the daily videos of @exyle which kept me up to date 😅
Anyways, of all that I understood I totally agree with. Even for the mere fact that a good in depth article of story could take 10 minutes to read. Why would you want users to vote within 5? Doesn’t add up really...
I loved @exyle's videos, too. I really liked those daily updates full of enthusiasm and positivity. The worst part of it is that unless you respond to all notifications on your mobile front end within minutes, you are going to miss the five-minute window nearly every time. Manual curation on Hive is a financial losing game.
I agree entirely, it's been really nice being able to give small votes on comments without being penalised for it!
Now all we need is some decent content for the Whales to upvote - other than posts about LEO and Dcity.
Besides @dalz and a handful of other people there's very little good content around, and most of @dalz's posts are about Hive (good stats though).
Fingers crossed it'll come soon. Trending looks a little embarrassing atm.
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Well, I think @taskmaster4450's videos are pure gold. Or should I say pure Bitcoin because Bitcoin is digital gold. He doesn't even talk about crypto all the time but the economy, technology and power structures and the culture in general. Have you noticed his series on Tesla? He also uses the @taskmaster4450le account. He's rightfully in Trending and a high-quality author good enough for any platform. I also like @edicted's posts. They're both entertaining and insightful. I think he's got the formatting down pat for a forum like this. His posts are easy to digest and get the information you want from them, all packaged in an entertaining and fun way. There's also @khaleelkazi but he usually talks about LeoFinance as expected. Nothing wrong with that.
What we can all do is try and copy the best parts of what we like. Formatting is good not only for SEO but attracting readers, too.
Oh they're all great, but I can count them on one hand!
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But they do dominate Trending. But yes, a greater diversity of great content is needed. At present, it's up to us to create it.
Yes fair point! About us creating it.
TBH I'm happy if any of my odd non-leo economic content makes 40 LEO, that'll do me!
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But you're also right about there being too much of the kind of content you're talking about. I looked at trending and decided to try and do something about it by writing content that isn't about LeoFinance but crypto in general and which I hope to be useful. Anyone is welcome to follow suit and do better. :)
I agree with you, the trending starts to look a bit like hive, just in this case full of leo stuff :)
I guess its a course that projects seems to have.
I have been trying to diversify my content lately, posting more about uniswap, ethereum, defi and probably a few BTC posts on the way.
Hope with the metamask onboarding initiative we will get more authors and more topics :)
For that to happen, I think the diversification needs to happen now.
This.
Engagement is key. It's vital for the success in social media/blogging. How people seem to have totally ignored or perhaps even missed that part on both Steem and now Hive is truly odd. I don't understand why they ignore the fact that engagement is the reason for people to return and be active.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You name it. Millions and millions of active users. Most of them earn nothing in terms of money, but they continue to use these platforms because they get rewards in forms of likes, shares and comments. Engagement.
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Flattening the curve should be on the agenda for the next hard fork on Hive.
By the way, Ecency seems to be the only front end that works properly again.