I've been spending quite a few months curating redditposh shares as of late, it's one of those things that takes quite a bit of time and at times can get a bit overwhelming, but I believe spending voting power on such activities is quite important for our ecosystem because there's still so many who don't know about us. Naturally this isn't just coming from an altruistic point of view, sure a lot of people would be way better off if they shared their content on hive because as has been proven for many years now, we do value people with layer 1 rewards so they can earn some value here no matter how influential or big they are outside of hive. So it'd be dumb to pretend that if we didn't have more users, our token would naturally appreciate in value and demand, not from those same users buying it, but investors and speculators wanting to get in on the action, but that's just a side-effect that's occurred quite a few times in our lifetime if you count both the chain's market history.
Hive is quite unique in that sense, I saw a tweet the other day of a giant web3 gaming company shutting down again and someone was talking about how they were paying influencers to promote their thing. It's all so web2 in my eyes. They're paying people with a lot of followers and a lot of likes and retweets on twitter for shilling their games, getting paid in said token so they are incentivized to talk well about it to cause the token to pump so they can profit off of their own followers. It's all quite icky to me but can't say I don't see similar activities on Hive from time to time as well.
and hey, I'm not completely innocent in that regard either, I do speak well about my own tokens like zing for instance when I find it appropriate. I try to share how it had a fair launch token-wise, how team and founders didn't get rewarded in the token just for having created it - i.e. how they had to buy into it themselves or invest like everyone else did when it launched and throughout. But it's not like I go around asking people to constantly consider buying it, helping crowdfund it, etc, etc, even at times where I worry I may be "centralizing" the token by being one of the few still buying it, I don't think that's necessarily an issue since it's the free markets and anyone has the chance to do the same as me, now if it was a governance token and I'd use my big stake to make drastic/unpopular/selfish changes, then sure it'd be an actual worry.
The thing with POSH however, and to get back on track of what I wanted to discuss today, is that I'm kind of "whatever" about it. I do hold some tokens and have plans to purchase more in the future, but different from Zing I don't earn anything from running and having created it. I haven't "paid" myself with hive for all the hours and hours that have gone into it, same can't be said about the devs who've spent time fine-tuning it and making it work on different platforms, but that's fine because they could've spent that time on other things, they didn't ask for too much - often nothing, and it is after all a project that benefits all hive stakeholders - not just a few. The "whatever" mentality behind it is that if the community/hive stakeholders deem it not as valuable as the amount it is receiving from the reward pool to use for it, adjustment of rewards and downvotes wouldn't affect me personally. Sure it would feel like a waste having spent all this time developing it but it wouldn't mean the end of the project, a lot of people still do certain activities on hive even if it doesn't instantly get them rewards.
Either way, I wanted to talk about some things I've noticed that have felt a bit weird seeing some reactions behind the sharing activity.
There's been a few instances where an author had their post shared by someone and they requested the sharer to delete the share and not share their content outside of Hive again. This I do find kind of strange. Why would you not want your content shared outside of Hive?
Because to me, and I think something that was even written in the original whitepaper of the chain, rewards are meant to bring traffic to the ecosystem, i.e. the rewards pool. Sure it has great usecases for many other things but the way it has been going for a long time, a lot of authors have gotten way overrewarded compared to web2 metrics. Can you imagine a post with 5 views, 0 comments receiving $10 in rewards on web2? Here this is quite a common thing. Although I don't agree with it we all know that using your downvotes would cause an avalanche of drama, negativity, etc, so most of the time we don't question or act upon such "curation".
It's kind of wild to then also be against the posts getting shared, however, since that's like one of the few ways you could justify the rewards if the content can be popular on websites like reddit where there's potetnailly 10,000x more consumers than here. You're saying your content posted publically on an immutable open source blockchain, visible to anyone who happens to stumble upon it, without adrevenue on most front-ends, without the blockchain in any way being able to differentiate between your text and anyone else's, that you don't want others to potentially earn a little value for having spent time sharing your post in the right place in front of hundreds if not thousands of consumers that may bring some value to this platform through views or potential new signups. Signups that could become new followers of yours, new consumers and engagement which we often lack.
Luckily this has only been a minority of people against content being shared, but just the other day I saw someone else asking someone to delete the share and they were someone involved with redditposh themselves. I.e. they actively share other people's posts too and they asked someone to not share theirs. Wild. Naturally if you wanna be the one to share your own post, you have the advantage to do so because for other sharers to find your post and share it, it takes time, whereas you know when you're about to hit "post", you can do it before anyone else, lol.
There was also a case of a community just straight up having muted the redditposh account so teh comments wouldn't be "visible" in the comment section, but after a quick discussion with one of the leaders recently they agreed that it wasn't just like any other "comment bot spam" and decided to unmute it which I was happy about.
Anyway, I don't wanna shoo off any potential new sharers with my title and these few examples I've written about here, I'd welcome more people to participate but may have to warn you that reddit can be quite strict at times and require a bit of a learning curve to get used to using it properly. We do have some assistance through @x-rain's contest posts, the pinned post on @poshtoken with tested subreddit's that don't mine hive links being shared on there. So there's room for more sharers and hopefully also a higher percentage of the reward pool going towards this activity that I feel has been lacking for a long time in this ecosystem and many don't care much if it exists or happens as long as they get their piece of the pie.
Something many also may take for granted or not realize is that POSH may be one of the main reasons we are quite active on twitter still, even though our rewarding mechanism there got shut down by their API cost requirements, we have lingered on and continued to show strength there when it comes to our ecosystem and everything involved within.
Anyway, that's it for today, just a bit of a random post with some thoughts. No borders and a lot of freedom leaves room for a lot of different reactions and opinions which is great, but some times it can leave you a bit baffled and confused as well, I'm sure this has happened to many of you on different occasions about different hive things. Thanks for reading.