Alright, let me delve deeper into what I mean by that now that I got your attention.
Some of you who were here at the time may remember how much they sucked, it made the platform what Steemit is today pretty much, only those willing to enrich stakeholders by getting 5-10% profit on their posts through bidding for votes got rewards while many authors who wouldn't stoop down to that level got ignored as most staked got focused towards selling votes.
This meant that stakeholders were getting 80-90% returns, if not more in some cases and dumb blind votes and autovoters would vote on people who bought votes to give them an edge and a reason to continue doing so. It was disastrous.
Some of you may remember that 
Now, back to my title. You may also remember that back during the bid bot era, there were no free downvotes. So technically, we haven't experienced what bid bots would be like today where we have 25% downvote mana to attempt to combat it. It's safe to say that many wouldn't even dare to experiment with it again just cause of the trauma back then, which is fine. My point is just that there could at times be a usecase for wanting to promote your posts on trending (in moderation) and when you have something important to announce. We may do this instead through beneficiaries by burning author rewards, but even then it is difficult to alert stakeholders that you're burning rewards for the sake of promotion. Instead we have platforms like peakd offering promotion slots by burning half of the rewards and giving the other half to peakd.
Okay, so what I wanted to talk about is a new idea I've been experimenting with during this time.
Curator activity is probably at an all time low, author activity, especially from newer ones, is probably also very low. Yet people complain that curators are often not doing a good job at finding these deserving posts that could use curation. So my idea is kind of trying to kill two birds with one stone, so let me get into it.
Instead of creating an AI curator which was one of my first ideas, I thought, why not let more people become curators but have AI judge their nominations?
It's not even AI really, it's mostly a ton of different parameters stacked to give our curators the right tools to judge posts without having to do deep dives into each account constantly and relying on discord bots we've created over the years that are barely scraping by anymore with their devs having gone afk.
The idea is quite simple enough. Here's an example of a nominated post in our curation queue:
The score itself is what's important here, behind it there's many different parameters I'd rather not get into here publicly, but on mouseover for our curators it'll tell them a lot of different information they ought to know before giving it a vote.
other things you see in the screenshot are: KE which I'm sure we've all become familiar with by now. Their average post payouts the past week/month, how often they comment on their own posts vs others, how often they vote.
Hive needs more healthy users who show that they're not just in it for themselves or for the rewards, we need more of these that do spend time, attention and effort on the community as that makes our tokens we earn worth more.
Hive also needs more healthy curators who don't just pick their friends/neighbors but go out and look for truly underrewarded posts/overlooked authors and have a smart scoring system that shows how good they are at it and are rewarded for exactly that.
Now to get back to my clickbaity title, we may also allow self-nominations through our new tools once they're launched, it will have its limits, for instance only 3x/week but more importantly compared to the bid bot era, it will have a cost to nominate your own posts. When you send out the nomination, you'll be forced to burn 1 hive to do so.
This is both to prevent people from spamming us with their own posts that aren't deserving of our votes while at the same time making sure that curators don't become biased if that hive went to them. I.e. if a curator knew they're getting a share of those hive and there's few authors nominating themselves, they may be softer towards accepting the posts due to self-interest. Burning the Hive however helps out the whole platform and those who use it well are sure to make the hive back in no time.
Anyway, would appreciate your thoughts on this and if you have any feedback/ideas on how to further improve it.
We are also working on a new system for POSH alongside this so a lot of things to come!
Thanks for reading.
