When the ideas are flowing, it's hard to stop them.
After more discussions with @hivetrending regarding @commentrewarder and other cool things that could make hive even more fun to use, I brought up an old idea I've been meaning to dive deeper into and maybe even bring to light at some point.
This one's quite a bit more complex, though as there are some abuse-factors to try and avoid. If those are covered it could very well make the action of reblogging a post quite different from the current mostly altruistic reason to do so.
What does a reblog do?
It's quite frankly sharing a post to your followers. When you reblog a post, it will show up on the feed of people following you who are browsing their follower feed. This is a great way to bring attention to a post from an account who may have been overlooked.
The problem and abuse factor is that it is free and limitless.
Anyone can reblog, it only costs a little RC and there's no limit to how many posts you can reblog. Some accounts automatically reblog all of my posts in the first second they are posted for instance. That is one of the abuse vectors we have to eliminate if we want to add rewards of any kind to reblogs.
Stake-based following.
Having followers is also easy to fake, one could create many accounts that belong to yourself and follow your main account you'd attempt to "boost". This inflates numbers and doesn't improve things like engagement, upvote rewards on your posts or anything real of value. What isn't easy to fake, though, is having followers who also have stake in Hive.
A proposed addition to the equation of reward distribution of @reblogrewarder would be to take into account the combined stake of a participating account's following.
Exhibit A.
Account Alice has 500 followers, out of the 500 who follow her, their combined HP is 100,000.
Account Bob has 1000 followers and out of them their combined HP is 50,000.
When Alice and Bob reblog a post they compete for the reblogrewards up for the taking. If no other parameters are included yet, this means that Alice should receive 66.66% of the reblog rewards while Bob receives the remaining 33.33%.
Gamification.
Remember when we used to change how curation used to work? Reward those voting early more than those voting late at the cost of late voters. Same but add a 5min penalty window. Add quadratic increase to rewards when voting early, etc, etc, until we landed back to what we currently have, linear rewards based on post age.
The good news for reblog rewards is that it wouldn't require a hardfork to be changed and tested. Since the rewards are handled by a party who has control of them before sending them out, they could also be fine-tuned in different ways to remove or blacklist accounts attempting to cheat their way into effortless rewards.
We could experiment with reward curves when it comes to reblogs, take snapshots of rewards at the time of a reblog, exclude same following accounts of rebloggers after you, etc. Let's look into some examples.
Example 1:
Alice posts about her beekeeping and places a 20% beneficiary to @reblogrewarder, her post sits at $5 pending rewards when Bob notices it and wants it to be seen by other hivers more. He decides to reblog it and after some time has passed more votes have landed on Alice's post which is now standing at $20. 80% of the rewards generated after the reblog were from Bob's following, those same voters did not follow Alice before the fact. The post pays out at $20 and Bob receives 80 of the 20% beneficiary bounty with the rest going back to Alice or being sent to @null.promote
Example 2:
Alice posts about her beekeeping and places a 20% beneficiary to @reblogrewarder, her post sits at $5 pending rewards when Bob notices it and reblogs it. The post gets to $10 when Charlie notices it and reblogs it as well. Bob gets an early reblogger advantage compared to Charlie. At the same time half of Charlie's following is the same as Bob so 50% of his following's HP is void in the equation. The post ends up at $15, Bob gets 10% boost cause he reblogged it first, Charlie gets a -50% decrease due to the similar followers they share. Bob reblogged it at $5 and it ended up at $15, he's entitled to 100% of reblog-rewards from $5 to $10, 66.66% for the rewards from $10 to $20 and an additional 10% from Charlie for having reblogged it before him. Bob receives (my math can only get me this far this late at night) ~most of the reblog rewards while Charlie receives some.
There's still a lot to consider here and to check if it is feasible in terms of API requests and other aspects to determine the share of reblog rewards to each reblogger. For instance if someone following Charlie but not Bob was the main upvoter that got the post from $10 to $15, Charlie should then get the lion's share of those rewards.
Point is there's a lot of cool gamification possible here to make good reblogging worth it.
Reblogging has been quite unevolved over the years, we still don't have a way to reblog posts we deem fitting to a certain community rather than to our feeds. (@howo, when?) Experimenting with different ways to avoid rewarding bots and abusers while placing more value on people to reblog well could make the platform better in terms of assisting curators and at the same time even promoting your content better and even placing more weight having followers with stake.
Rebloggers could also receive different scores to set them apart even more from farmers/bots over time that could be included in the equation.
There could be limits of daily reblogs, your first few being the more important ones that'll get you most of the reblog rewards while the next ones would have diminishing returns on your returns forcing you to stop reblogging more than x times if you're only doing it for the rewards, for instance.
We're posting this proto-type idea in hopes of getting feedback from the community and potentially even more ideas and solutions to improve it before we'd start working on it to bring it to reality.
So please, reblog this post (no I'm not sending beneficiaries to @reblogrewarder yet :P) and let us know your thoughts!