POSH changes effective soonly

While the initial idea was solid and has served us well for a long time; that being what we doing with our upvote mana of @poshtoken which has been going towards whitelisted authors who have earned POSH, it's time to switch it up a bit.

For anyone not aware, people can delegate to @poshtoken in exchange for half of the POSH issuance and soon also GOSH. In turn we use the curation rewards to further fund the project and its many initiatives, most of the funds have so far gone towards development, i.e. dev pay, maintenance i.e. servers, some contests and towards buying up POSH tokens from the market to maintain a good value of the token for further and future incentives of sharing. This required us to put the voting mana to good use and we came up with voting up posts of authors who have earned POSH, not bought, as the latter could open up leeway for abuse and "buying votes". This allowed POSH earners to apply for autovotes and over time we moved towards a more closed whitelisting method where we'd move people into the whitelist at our own discretion. The autovote list consisted of around 150 authors.

I hope you've enjoyed the value POSH has brought to you and in turn we thank you for utilizing POSH to share Hive links over the years and being early adopters of the project. The time has now come to put the same voting power to a different kind of use which I'll be talking about next.

There's a post of mine where I go through the @poshtoken comment voting activity and some thoughts behind it if you wanna take a quick look at the video:

Basically we're going to be forming a team of curators to go through all comments i.e. hive link shares to curate them. This may sound like a lot, and it is, and it is growing, but I think the outcome will be a big net positive for both Hive and POSH (and GOSH).

If you're not aware of what these comments are, they basically notify the author of a post when their post was shared on Twitter (if done correctly with a hive-front end link and the #hive tag), or when they're shared on Reddit or when they're shared on Leo's threads/dbuzz/liketu for the GOSH token. The comments will accept rewards in the form of upvotes to potentially get the sharer some Hive rewards as well, now also LEO rewards for GOSH. Not going to go further into that as I'd be repeating myself quite a lot from previous posts.

This curation will do a few things much better.

1. It'll help cover more good shares to be rewarded in Hive/LEO/potentially also other l2 tokens as we've set up our own instance of @reward.app to help liquidate rewards with no fee
2. It'll give us a better overview and detection of potential abuse/spamming/farming ongoing with POSH shares and possible twitter likes/retweets, whenever there's leeway for abuse/farming, some people will farm/abuse
3. It'll help with incentivizing even more people to more often share posts on Twitter/Reddit and retent new users participating in the activity who may not have a big following on Twitter thus don't earn any if much POSH but can still get some Hive rewards here and there

In general I think it will make the project more robust, make POSH harder to farm/abuse and incentivize the sharing we want to see more of that brings value to our front-ends.

The downside to this is of course time and a lot of effort. As you can see from the video above going through the close to thousands of daily comments is surely going to take a lot of effort but we can't have the team be too big as abuse detection will be harder when spread towards too many users. (I know this may sound weird, but a few people going through comments daily will give a better overview of who might be farming, who might be trying some abuse, etc, in the form of remember usernames that may appear too often/are earning too much POSH/Hive rewards, etc).

While it would make sense to at this stage start a proposal to fund the project and curators we think we can make due with curation and post rewards the way we've been doing so far. It being a project that is meant to help the hive ecosystem as a whole and normalize sharing of content on #web2 we believe that taking a piece of the post reward pool for it is acceptable, especially given the fair airdrop nature of the token. If stakeholders disagree with this method and think post rewards could be better used in different ways, we're open to discussion and to instead create a proposal to fund the necessary work and costs involved with the project.

For now this is just a post announcing or new curation initiative, I'll be checking with curators who've been involved with POSH activities in the past to see if they're interested in participating first, if there isn't enough interest I'll be looking for people outside of the project if there's any eligible contenders.

Anyway, let us know what you think about this, will it be good, will it suck, will it be worth it? etc

Thanks for reading! Have a #posh day. xD

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