Focused curation

What are your thoughts on projects that solely focus curation based on who uses their platform?

This has been something I've noticed happen a lot lately, and while I do try to spread my own votes not based on self-interest, we're all human and are drawn towards things that do maybe benefit us somewhat in one way or another.

For instance, I have the scrobble keyword tagged on the FRIDAY bot, initially to check if people were reporting bugs, but when I see something interesting like a new user I haven't seen before using it and creating short form content through it I do open it up specifically to give it a vote as a welcome. I'm not purely curating people just cause they use the site however, most of my votes are spread out between my feed, posh shares and then other various things like scrobble.life reviews or hive gaming posts and some other various things here and there. I don't for instance check the snaps feed and only vote on the scrobble snaps.

There are however some that solely focus their votes on whoever uses their services, and some of them for direct financial benefit.

A week or so ago I ran some analysis on voting patterns for a few accounts, one of the projects that stood out was leo which would either vote delegators, token holders or the rest would go towards users posting through the site, which does often ask you to give it a 5% beneficiary. (I heard if you wanna skip it you have to remove it every time you post rather than set it and forget it, which if true, does feel quite predatory) Where those 5% go or what they're used for is unclear. Scrobble.life does have a beneficiary setting as well but I've been open about what it's used for and there's weekly reports and transactions going out for half of it towards an experimental consumer reward system. The more you read/interact/use the site, the more rewards you can earn weekly, sponsored by beneficiary rewards. I earn some hive from there myself but it's not like I'm using the site too much myself at the moment as I'm actively developing and mainly testing things.

Anyway, out of curiosity I did some more digging today, this isn't meant to point fingers or create drama, we all have our quirks and do things differently, but the numbers were quite interesting. Before I get into it, however, let me share some more info on my own activities.

With ocd we have generally used a prefered front-end over many years, @peakd, and that isn't for any selfish reasons, like, peakd doesn't pay me, I'm not a partner or equity holder, etc. It's out of convenience and what they offer, they made account switching easy early on and added features that we found helpful so over time when curators were nominating posts, since most of the people voting on the posts would also use peakd, we'd ask nominators to drop the links in peakd links to save us some time. Other than that we've never really "looked" or cared where posts are posted from and it never changed our decision if we voted the posts or how much. That's your general front-end-neutral outlook I'm sure most users share as they don't care about it. It's also refreshing that peakd has never attempted to "bribe" people with votes in the past that I know of, people have been drawn to it because they wanted to use it, because its features/speed/design/other have won them over.

Then I decided to look at @ecency which is a front-end which does have a delegation program and curators and what I found was something I can't say I'm happy about considering the amount of funds they've received from the DHF to work on their front-end, the inhouse tokens they have as gamification to encourage people to use it, etc, which has at times been a gray area as they can spend them on direct votes, etc.

Looking at their last 1000 votes, 78% have landed on posts being posted through ecency. That number alone isn't staggering, I'd say it even looks okay-ish. Not too focused with still a lot of room for other front-ends with the rest of the 22%.

The weird part is however this, when we look at the vote weight.

It makes you wonder how the curators are instructed to curate. Do they receive alerts on which posts are posted through ecency in order to give them bigger votes? How most other non-ecency posts only get 3% votes?

It's hard to note judge these numbers as some kind of bribery to make users use your front-end in exchange for votes and make the curation more about that than the actual content/user activity/etc.

Now it's not all bad, it's just a first impression when looking at the numbers, ecency maybe created their delegation program for this specifically. OCD started for retention/onboarding of all kinds/apps.

It is a bit "meh" however and worth pointing out I think. While there are similar projects being way more open and in your face about their max milkage, some are a bit less obvious that they focus on their own users rather than curation as a whole. Along with all the "this post got an ecency vote" comments, it makes you wonder if the 3% votes are mainly an advertisement campaign to try win people over from the other front-ends.

Why not just offer something unique that makes users wanna use you over other front-ends?

Now, I'm not completely innocent here, we do vote quite a lot of posts who use the scrobble.life front-end and community, but there's a reason for it. It offers something unique where you also generate a custom json tx to logging the movie/tv show/book/podcast so that data can be cross-referenced, compared, tracked, etc. The beneficiary system could also count as a bribery for people to use the site, although it was mainly meant as an experiment since there's no rewards for consumers nor has anyone ever tried it before that I can think of. The point is it brings a unique reason to using hive and posting through it, whereas posting through peakd, hive.blog, ecency, leo doesn't differ in any major way.

There's also votes going to curators if we have extra voting power, maybe bigger votes to users who've stuck around and not sold all their stake, etc. We all have biases, but these stats seem quite systematic and intentional, like going out of your way to ignore or only vote 3% on other posts while focusing on users posting through your front-end. There's quite a few stakeholders I've noticed doing similar things lately, to the point where they fully automate the "curation" process for their front-ends that don't really offer anything new/fresh.

Again, I'm not trying to be overly negative here, this can technically be a good use-case for hive power, at least if the project has HP of its own and now with vibecoding becoming more popular with everyone having their own front-ends soon.

I'm just curious what people think of such activity.

Another question, what if ocd started voting only on posts posted through scrobble.life for instance? What would that make you think about the project?