I'm looking forward to when we grow bigger to see studies being made around some of the events unfolding around this place lately, cause I can't make much sense of it. One thing that could explain it is that some people just wanna quit their hive presence and are looking for something or someone to shift the blame to.
There's also this weird psychological thing when it comes to downvotes, not just when you're personally affected but when you witness it happen to others that it's hard to get involved and voice your opinion on the matter because there's nothing to gain from it. Similar to how there's nothing to gain from casting downvotes, either, but you just gotta do it when the actions call for it. Another thing is the reaction to them. I've been on the receiving end many times during this chains lifetime, from your random bernie mood swings to retaliation downvotes to some hive maxi's deeming some projects I run illegitimate use of the reward's pool even though it's clear as day that it is helping user retention, acquisition and traffic generation to our front-ends.
One thing is for sure, there will always be people who don't agree with you. I've come to understand that, it'd be weird if you didn't. The bad part is that some don't want to understand at all cost, that's where you usually waste the most time on because you're there arguing with them even though it is something that should be quite common sense of misuse of the rewards pool, but they don't wanna understand it.
The other thing is that they instantly become loud about what is happening, doesn't matter where you're coming from, what else you do on the blockchain that far outweighs this action that's perceived as "bad" by a few. They start doing their rounds in discord servers, hive comments, and I even saw some tend to twitter "Acid is destroying hive with his downvotes".
The last thing is that people hold grudges here, they're usually the first to side with the disagreeing party just because you're involved so they like throwing some shit your way even though they may disagree with the account they're defending, there's more value to be had for their agenda to side with them and make you out to be what you're not. This one is quite disappointing considering we're all living under one ecosystem and sharing the same currency, but again, all kinds of people from all over the world - you can't agree and be on the same level with everyone.
I'm not going to go into the specifics of what I talked about above again, I mentioned some of it in a post a few days ago and there were more comments than I'd like to admit I bothered engaging in trying to make them understand. In this post I wanted to quickly bring up a new example I witnessed today, not really new, but a good reminder of some stuff we may see here that some times really boggles my mind how we can be not just gullible to allow to happen but even participating in it.
There was one account doing daily giveaway posts - yep, those kinds. The kinds where it's 80% copy pasted post going over the rules with some unique cards or nfts being showcased that day along with a new contest where you can win some hive/hsbi/upvote for 1st/2nd and 3rd price.
Total of the rewards being given away: slightly above 1 hive and 1 upvote by the author.
Average author rewards being generated by the posts: ~$5 (after curation cut)= 30 hive.
That's over 30x profit margin.
Low effort posts, where you announce new winners, show some cards you opened from a pack, rest of post is footers/intro from previous ones: check
Low effort participation, where you have readers guess a random number, so you can get many to participate without them having to do much: check
High automated votes, 80%+ were SBI, ecency and some autovotes/trails and let's be generous here and say 20% from the participants: check
This user was angry because his posts were being downvoted. (not by me this time), but it was interesting to read the exchange anyway as there were people defending him and talking about bad about the downvoter - which I've become very familiar with lately.
Personally it was hard to defend that author as I'm fairly certain I know what he's doing, they all do. They wouldn't be doing these posts if it didn't net them a profit, they probably wouldn't have bought all those SBI shares if they didn't think they could farm them out to get all that money back and instead of creating unique and original posts with some effort behind them and growing a genuine audiance that wants to read them, they turn to these activities instead.
Now I understand that a lot of people may not understand how Hive works, even older users who never bothered to dig deeper, but it's kind of hard to ignore those defending these actions that are quite literally taking rewards from everyone else and earning them for doing close to nothing of value to this blockchain.
Getting a lot of participants in this is probably quite easy, people like the chance to win something for "free" (even though they don't realize what the cost is), and if it only takes a few seconds to participate it's even better.
How do you reckon giveaways work on web2? We could ignore the big boys like Mr Beast who've made a career out of it in a way. For regular content creators they do them in moderation because they have to actually give away a lot of value when they host them. The cost is high, they can't make that back from ad revenue in one video, but they do it either way because they get more followers/subscribers, comments, etc, they stand out for a short time basically. If those followers are worth it is another question, but my point is. Giveaways aren't meant to make you money.
What kind of fantasy world are we living in where people are literally farming these giveaway posts daily, making 30x more than what they give out and we're supposed to let them.
I had a nice comparison I told someone I was discussing the reasons why that's not sustainable for hive nor feasible as @hivegc did a contest recently.
First of all, it's one of few, they haven't done many.
Secondly, they gave away 95 hbd to 3 winners, that's more than both of their posts earned even with my votes.
Thirdly, to participate you had to write a unique and original post about a certain moment/memory that's happened to you in gaming.
I.e. the intention wasn't to profit off of the contest. The intention wasn't to make it a regular thing where they'll start giving away less hbd now and hope the autovotes surpass what they give away. The intention wasn't to just get a ton of participants easily by random people by just asking them to write their username in a comment.
Yes, it's nice that on Hive these contests can earn some of the rewards they give away back, but that should not be taken for granted nor should it be made your primary business model because at the end of the day that's inflation coming from all of us staying staked here or having converted fiat/other crypto into hive and powered up. It's called proof of brain for a reason, you gotta use your brain to create rewards, else we can just remove the rewards pool altogether and switch to proof of stake and advertise our feeless tipping, let's see how much your giveaway posts will make then.
Anyway, it's 6 am and I couldn't sleep so thought I'd shit out this post real quick.