Is this okay?

An activity that's been popping up lately has had some users come to me asking if this is using "hive" the way it's meant to, especially the rewards pool.

Now we all probably know by now that there's gray areas there and I'm sure many projects have crossed the line a long time ago but are being ignored because there's either bigger things to focus on or people actively trying to put a stop to it are then seen as evil downvoters who want to "destroy" this place, etc, etc, which I've had a fair deal of drama of that I no longer have the energy or time to endulge in. So I thought I'd rather just write a post about it and let you think it through.

Also I'm kind of busy with other things lately, such as developing apps while keeping up my curation of post shares which I think is more important currently than only curating users/content.

Anyway, let's start from the beginning, sort of. There used to be hive.blog (condenser) and people used it, eventually some people created @peakd which offered a more modern UX and they were actively listening to feedback and implementing it promptly which grew in success and got a lot of traffic compared to hive.blog (even though this was happening on the predecessor chain, I'm not going to make it too confusing for this simple idea). Then, or before peakd, i don't remember, ecency came along and eventually also inleo got a big share of the userpool. Either way. For me personally, I stuck with peakd, I had gotten used to peakd and like a lot of the things it offered that others didn't. It may be part being used to and changing being too difficult, it may be part because I didn't like the UI's of others and/or partly how the creators of them acted and came off to me.

Now here's where things start to get weird, I don't wanna point fingers, so let's just say these are all examples for the sake of the argument I'm trying to present.

Let's say that inleo only curated users who posted through inleo. People didn't need to like the frontend to use it, they just wanted that upvote so they posted through it.

The blockchain allows for metadata behind posts so it can mark if a post was submitted through a certain front-end, so one could say whoever was curating for that front-end with its stake was actively looking for this mark or simply filtering out all other posts to only upvote people posting through this front-end.

These were the big 4 front-ends for a long time.

Now that creating front-ends is a 1 day's job kind of deal. Even I created an experimental one where I wanted curation to work differently Video and explanation about it here:

The thing that people are wondering now is, is curating based off of which front-end you're using good for hive? And furthermore, is it good if we keep "bribing" people to use other front-ends/dapps over existing copies as it may splinter off the already small community even more further diminishing the numbers of our "big front-ends" web-wise. I.e. if someone were to check traffic stats of ecency, it may seem very weak if they're not aware that there's an equal amount of unique users on hive.blog, peakd and inleo.

I personally am of the opinion that if you truly bring something innovative and unique, then it's fine if you upvote people using your platforms as long as curation isn't fully auto/blind and you're keeping in check with blacklists and such. However, if you've just created copies of existing platforms and you're using your stake to bribe people to use those exact same front-ends/dapps/services out of pure greed, at times someone stopping to use an existing good front-end over your vibecoded copy just because you're guaranteeing votes to them - the question becomes why and what's your end goal?

Either way, I'm working on a couple front-ends directed at a few communities myself so was mostly just wondering what people think of it. I'm personally going to make damn sure that if a need to use another front-end exists, it better offer something the others don't and upvotes isn't part of that equation.