Since many have been asking, what constitutes an ocd vote, what doesn't, I figured I'd write down quick some main parts of our daily curation activity so you can maybe get in our scope easier if you're having trouble with it.
First up, community incubation.
Here we invite 1-3 community leaders/curators from a unique niche community (unique as in we don't have a similar one in our incubation yet (with few exceptions due to big demand) and niche as in the genre is about something specific that in one way or another has consumption demand outside of Hive and thrives). These curators then get free reigns as to what they would like to curate through us, i.e. receive a bigger vote.
There are some restrictions here, some of which are universal in our voting requirements.
Some of the requirements being the focus on newer accounts, some focus on underrewarded authors (not just the post itself happening to be underrewarded, but the author generally not receiving a lot of curation in terms of rewards on most of their posts), then we also look at general social activity of nominated accounts. We don't believe that content alone represents deserving votes, partly cause most users on Hive aren't big/famous influencers outside of Hive (there we may excuse the social inactivity as long as they attempt to bring traffic to Hive) and partly to avoid sockpuppet accounts from previous curation rules (vote sniping, it's a whole TL;DR there but also due to our restriction mentioned later with *). Meaning that if authors create content, they shouldn't just expect votes just for the content, they also need to maintain a social activity to attempt to bring traffic either from outside of Hive or from within towards their content, if no one's consuming it from any sources then the content is not of much value to anyone and shouldn't be receiving inflation from every stakeholder. * We also restrict how often an author can receive our votes throughout all community nominations and other initiatives, this is something that some try to bypass by creating alts but often times they can't bring themselves to be socially active on all of them at the same time, and you know the rules of the chain and immutability around it, one mistake and your reputation is usually gone. In general this rule is to make sure stake is distributed as far and wide and to avoid favoritism from curators.
All of the votes, like in most initiatives that'll be mentioned below, are double checked by ocd curators before being cast. With some communities it's easy to determine if posts and authors are genuine, while with a few it's not as easy since the content may be streams from @vimm for instance where we may not be around to check the stream out or since most of the activity happens on the stream chat on the front-end thus not showing up on chain. There are a few similar examples where we give trust to the community curators more but try to check up now and then that everything is running fairly.
Other niche communities
This is for communities not in our incubation but may still receive great posts from time to time, the reason here is that the niche is either not that popular, the community isn't big/active enough or we already have a similar community incubated but people are of course free to post wherever they'd like. Here we allow curators both from ocd directly and those from communities to nominate as it may cover quite a lot of posts daily but with similar rules and restrictions.
Trend-worthy and comment curation
We also have channels for explicitly great content/posts that we'd like to see trending, this one and the one for great comments is not incentivized by us to prevent overusage and attempts to be in charge of putting too many posts on trending daily and is reserved for truly exceptional posts.
Lovesniper
This initiative got started from the simple idea of "what if we had a bot that alerted us when an account makes their first post". It covers exactly that, having curators take turns looking at the first posts of many users daily, checking what seems genuine, if they need some help, recommending introduction posts if the first post wasn't, and if it was then curating and recommending communities depending on the newbies interests.
On top of that we also follow these genuine accounts with the lovesniper account to further curate their posts in the near future until they hit a certain reputation or break their reputation. ;) Anyone can assist in curating and commenting on these newcomers by checking the @lovesniper/feed. (protip: you can exclude reblog's in the @peakd filter to make it easier to go through posts)
POSH
Proof of sharing, here we have a few initiatives combining POSH with OCD that we think work well to incentivize bringing traffic to Hive and also curate good tweets or curate the posts that get tweeted out. Hopefully soon we'll have Reddit integrated as well. Not going to go too in depth about the curation activity here as it's a bit complex, but feel free to ask in the comments if there's anything special you're wondering about.
Onboarding
We also offer onboarding tools and incentives to those wanting to focus a bit more on onboarding new users to Hive. We have some cool ways to generate unique 1 time use account creation links for onboarders that grant them some beneficiary rewards from the onboarded accounts (but can be removed at any time) and also get some post rewards per onboarded user once they've made their first post. They also have the option to nominate their posts for curation after guiding them through their Hive starter experience, the do's and don't's, etc. Here we have restrictions where over time the onboarded users can't be directly nominated for curation in hopes they've learned Hive well enough to have blended in with communities, dapps, layer 2's, etc, to receive curation either on their own or through our other initiatives such as Community Incubation. We've seen quite a lot of success with this program and hope more people join in to see it scale up, we've even had onboarded accounts become onboarders themselves after they've learned Hive well enough, which has been great to witness.
For Community Incubation or an Onboarding Role, please join our Discord and apply in the corresponding channels and we will get back to you when we can.
Abuse
This is also not incentivized but we have two great devs who've created a couple helpful bots to prevent us from accidentally nominating accounts we've either noticed do things against community consensus ourselves or if @hivewatchers has successfully blacklisted them for abuse. There are quite a few other things in terms of abuse but these are probably better to keep private rather than helping the bad actors get better at avoiding them. :)
Apart from all this we also try to focus some curation on certain dapps and projects we think could use some more attention in the form of writing contests that have been quite popular in the past and will certainly only gain more popularity with the growth of the ecosystem. Make sure to follow @ocd to not miss them and check on the daily reports there + @lovesniper in case some users grab your attention to give them a follow. All the rewards are distributed to curators and community leaders/curators who share the reports on their own accounts. In our Discord we also have a list of all active incubated communities if you'd wanna check them out and diversify your community feed!
Our goal is and has always been to focus on retention and stake distribution, on top of that we want people who earn Hive stake to work for it rather than take it for granted. It doesn't matter to us if users are selling their stake or not, as long as they've put in effort to get curation we believe the market will handle it by itself. That said it also doesn't matter to us from where authors are, what their beliefs are or other things that may impact their earnings in #web2, we treat them the same as long as they have a good standing with the community. The same philosophy goes towards curators, we try and reward them similarly along with communities in our incubation based on the amount of work and effort they put in rather than what kind of stake they have or other things.
We've heard some concerns of people who've been around quite a while and shown dedication not only to the blockchain but also to the work they put in and are currently trying to figure out a way to also reward them for their efforts so our focus on newcomers and onboarded users doesn't overshadow them too much. Thanks to @livinguktaiwan for bringing this to light and started a discussion that may add a new initiative in our books for the "old-timers" who think we've muted them or something rather than not knowing it's mostly cause they either do too well for our scope or our focus on newcomers gets in the way of curating them.
Hope this may have cleared up some questions to some of you but if it raised more then feel free to ask in the comment section and I'll try to answer them as best as I can. :)
We got a lot planned for 2023 so keep an eye out!
