I've been taking care of POSH voting mostly lately due to the nature of how it works and thought I'd write a post with some thoughts after seeing how it's evolved lately.
First of all, I think it's really nice that many larger stakeholders have understood the value of incentivizing traffic generation to our front-ends and how it has shaped up in a way to have its own "reward pool", without the initial disagreement on reward usage we saw in its early days. People have understood that getting our links out there, directly bringing traffic to our front-ends and the work in does for SEO is quite important if we want our front-ends to do better overall.
Alright so here's a bit more words on the good I've seen:
A lot of new sharers have joined, I believe redditposh registrations hit above 800 accounts recently. Many have started learning the ins and outs of reddit, how every subreddit there has their own rules similar to our communities and how to share original content properly so both platforms benefit from it.
We've seen some shares do extremely well, hitting trending on Reddit and bringing more than tens of thousands of views to our front-ends, at least those that count those views.
Furthermore we know Reddit has quite a battle-hardened system against faking traffic since advertisers and shills must have been trying for years, so the question if people are paying for fake upvotes and views to get a few $ in rewards from POSH dwindles.
We've seen a lot of regular hivers get involved as well to share their own or their friends posts and earn a little extra rewards from sharing and the author getting their posts shared. There's even been instances where a sharer has shared older posts past the 7 day upvote window resulting in someone's old post getting some extra rewards for having been shared which is nice to see.
Now let's talk more about the "bad" that we've had to spend a lot of time combating, unfortunately.
AI posts
Some sharers have noticed that AI written posts do quite well on Reddit for some reason, even tho Reddit hates AI slop, Hive hates AI slop, it still works and brings traffic to our front-ends. While we haven't put a stop to this for now, we've kept an eye and will further be enforcing stricter rules surrounding it to prevent sharers only sharing AI generated content, especially some who are creating accounts on purpose to generate AI content (declining rewards on Hive from day 1) but still earning some through sharing said content. If this activity becomes too large it may risk getting more of our front-ends banned reddit-wide rather than each subreddit one at a time which is not something we want to happen.
Worse than that, there's been some authors plagiarising content on purpose to then share it "from" Hive and see it do well. This has also not been okay and with the help of @hivewatchers we've been able to ban such sharers from our program.
Multi accounts
Some people have started sharing posts with multiple accounts, either understanding that voting power is limited and we can't keep overrewarding the same sharer over and over on a daily basis (even if their shares do well) or that we don't want sharers to over-do it where certain subreddits are overwhelmed with Hive links which may get us bad attention - there's been some users creating new accounts over and over, mostly through Leo account creation which seems to have very little overview/restrictions, if any. This has cost us a lot of time to deal with as we've had to constantly check who these new users registering are, who's posts they're sharing, patterns, signs of who they may belong to/who created them, etc.
Generally what we can say is that reputation and account history matter here a lot. If we for instance see an active Hive user joining Reddit Posh and learning how to share and start doing well there, they have nothing to fear. If it's however constantly brand-new accounts with no history or signs of being a genuine user, you may have a hard time remaining un-banned so we suggest you stop your attempts at earning from Reddit POSH if you're reading this as you're not going to get far if anywhere.
Either way, we're happy to see how evolved POSH has evolved and seeing a lot more genuine users join the initiative.
Some "weird" actions we've noticed: some authors on hive forbidding/asking sharers not to share their posts outside of Hive. Not really sure what the thought process behind that is. Our stance however is to respect the authors ask for not to share their posts but for authors to also understand that this may be hard to enforce and to remember for each and every sharer - you're posting on a public and open blockchain, sharing does not take away any value from you. In fact, not sharing may take away value from Hive itself as that's one of the main ways for the platform to justify all the author rewards it's spending on authors - you wanting to remain in a closed system where your posts shall not be shared is a bit weird given where you're posting them.
Either way, it's not a common thing and most uses have been happy to have their posts shared and potential more outside users getting to consume them and at the same time earning a little extra through our "reward pool" if their posts do well being shared.
Thanks for reading!