I know we all here on Hive have gotten used to the way things work, original content, making sure content isn't plagiarised/spun/not credited/sourced properly, etc and when it comes to more general content such as just posting or sharing something on your mind into a post, it is met with controversy or a general dislike. Now of course intent matters there, it's not difficult to see if/when some accounts are just doing it for some easy rewards compared to those who do it rarely or make sure to forfeit the post rewards or limit them in one way or another. Limits I'm not a big fan of, people who have worked hard and been consistent with producing quality content shouldn't discourage curators by placing post reward limits which once reached will limit the curation returns of your supporters depending on how much higher from the limit it would've gone from auto or blind votes, that's why I usually prefer sending rewards to hive.fund or null.
It kind of removes the whole casual aspect of social media in a way, there always has to be a main post where people can be casual in the comment section but the post has to be of quality, effort and originality.
An old idea of mine, which was the "Manipulation Station" community, for those of you active on Reddit you may know what its purpose was if you've visited r/photoshopbattles. The point of the community was that the main post would only be a suggestion photo. Say you found a funny photo on the internet you think would make for a good base of people editing and having fun with it into different scenarios/ideas/relevancies and the edited versions would be shared in the comment section and that was what the community would be about - to reward the comments rather than the main post that was just a share of someone else's photo (preferably credited of course).
That community would have required the posters to read the rules and automatically forfeit the post rewards to hive.fund or something, maybe say keep 10%. This would allow anyone to post without harming their autovoters/supporters but at the same time not using this as a way to milk easy rewards. Then the question comes, why would someone "waste" their autovotes/supporters rewards on forfeiting them, so the idea evolved a bit more into what I'm going to be writing in the next part.
Say there was a bot, which not only accepted post rewards from beneficiaries, but also made sure each post posted in a certain community it maintained had post rewards sent its way through beneficiaries, if not it would simply mute the post and maybe leave a comment to the author to check out the rules of the community.
To give you a better idea of how it would work on a good day, let's say I'm posting an "r/askreddit"/"Ask the Hive" question that states: "What is something you enjoy about space?". In an of itself that post doesn't deserve the say $20 post rewards it would automatically garner, it's just a question meant to raise some engagement and discussions. Now let's say 10 comments appear from 10 unique users replying to the question, some go further back and forth with the author of the post and readers may read a few of them and give them some small votes as well. On a scale compared to Reddit this could become thousands of comments and thousands of upvotes from readers, but we're of course not there yet. Another thing that is common on Reddit is that OP (origina poster) often automatically gets a lot of upvotes for replying and engaging in his own post. The front-end leaves a checkmark if a comment is from the author, similar how @peakd does. The reason I'm bringing this up is because if author rather would have not wasted his autovote support on this question that brought forth a lot of engagement and discussions he could earn back some of it through engaging in his own post with others.
Now what the bot would do, is after payout of the post and all comments, it would calculate 1. amount of voters and voting strength on all the comments and take the $20 post rewards and tip them out to the whole comment section based on "proof of brain" curation in the comments. Author would get some of those rewards back, comments and discussions would get part of it as well on top of the normal upvotes they've received from readers/the author.
The calculations could of course be tweaked in different ways, depending on the community. Maybe one community is for simple quora questions and direct answers rather than the "ask the hive" more open-ended ones. There maybe the bot would only count the comments that the author rewarded with a vote to reward because those were the only ones that were helpful to him and made sense to be rewarded with part of the author rewards.
As you may start to see where I'm going with this, it would open an opportunity for a lot of casual "sharing" communities without abuse being possible. On top of that if they all also had curators who either took a percentage to moderate and curate the community from beneficiaries or compilation posts, abusive posts attempting to misuse them wouldn't go unnoticed. The bot doing all this work could take a percentage cut for maintenance and for whichever dev built it (I talked to @arcange about the idea a while back but haven't gotten back to him about it yet, maybe he's still up for giving it a try), but I figured it'd be nice to post about the idea first and see what the community thinks.
Similarly, I'd wanna give it another go with the "Manipulation Station" community again. This has been one of the subreddits I've often enjoyed browsing through and many times thought to myself "if the people participating and putting in effort to come up with funny/good photoshops of the original shared image would also see some monetary rewards for it, I wonder how much better the quality and effort would become". Maybe now would be a good time to restart it and for the time being just have an account manually take care of the reward distribution before an automated one exists that would take care of the labor and distribute it based off of comment curation.
