Some thoughts on Hive Power

I had a discussion with someone recently about the way we launched @holozing, not much about the fair launch where founder & team didn't get any tokens or about other tokenomics, but more about the way tokens were issued for close to a year - through delegations solely.

If you weren't here then, this meant that from a certain date after the announcement of the game, anyone and everyone who delegated to @zingtoken started earning Zing proportionally to the amount they delegated to the project. If 100k HP was delegated and my share was half of it, it'd meant that I was getting 50% of the hourly distributed zing tokens. This means that anyone, friend or foe, could participate in it.

Naturally, for many this was just a way to use the hype or speculation to get some extra hive their way - which is fine and working as intended. Delegating to @zingtoken still offers a higher APR than from the average curation rewards one would get by just holding hive power. Over time as the APR decreased you saw these people who weren't actually interested in holding Zing or speculating on the project withdraw their delegations and look for other projects that potentially offered a higher APR - some are only interested in Hive and that's fine!

The cool thing about this is that as long as there is some buy pressure on Zing itself, as long as some delegating are holding Zing and as long as the sell pressure doesn't outweigh the buy pressure, it leaves room for people to delegate to it for a profit in Hive but their delegation at the same time gives us extra Hive to pay development and other contributions to the project.

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Either way, when it comes to Hive Power, some people have over time mentioned that they regretted not starting off this way as well or at least having token issuance be part delegated hive power from the beginning.

Why? Well, Hive Power is a great tool to keep the community engaged and rewarded toward a specific project. We've seen Splinterlands actively rewarding their community for years now, they of course don't issue out tokens in exchange as they have their own Hive Power and are a large project - but it's pretty much the same idea there - the social impact.

Thus other projects would've liked being able to direct some of the Hive inflation towards users discussing their project, creating fan art, fan lore, fan DIY, and potentially even marketing efforts.

Hive curation is quite flexible as we've seen it evolve over the years and while it gives people a ton of freedom there's also some some times unspoken aspects of it people shouldn't cross.

This has kind of been one of my concerns lately with some new projects that include delegation as their reward/token issuance but may skip on some fundamentals when it comes to curation.

For instance, let's look at the @holozing community. You can notice that author rewards there range from a wide variety from close to $0 pending rewards to over $50. Some votes may be from random stakeholders, autovoters of certain authors, some completely random voters, voters active in that community often and lastly the @zingtoken account that is voting with stake delegated to it by people interested in earning stake in the project in return as mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Now a big difference from zing curation compared to other projects may be that we take it somewhat serious. I'm sure Splinterlands curators could also weigh in here that they spend quite a lot of time checking and making sure deserving posts are curated. It helps that I run a curation project so I can some times weigh in if I see certain posts or authors rewarded that go out of our scope, but here's generally what we look after.

Quality of the content
Effort of the content
Social activity of the user
Consumption/Engagement of the content

These are usually quite common for curation projects and I'm sure many readers are aware of the importance of these aspects when it comes to curation, but what I wanted to bring up here is some other differences that I think other projects don't care much about.

Now @holozing is an outlier here so I don't want people to compare it to Splinterlands because that game has been out and running for long while ours is not yet launched. Meaning that some days there are not a lot of posts about our project and that is normal, most of the time it is also mainly focused towards fanart as we have a lot of artists on our blockchain who spend time creating and sharing. My point however is, that when there isn't much posts we don't overreward the few that do get posted. I.e. we're not in a "rush" to give out massive rewards to those few users that posted today compared to say trying to "keep them happy" or "bribe" them with upvotes so they continue posting and focusing on our community. We have a ton of artists who for instance create fanart for both holozing and splinterlands and that's great to see that they're being taken care of curation-wise by different stakeholders. On slower days we spend a lot of voting mana on things like @hbd.funder, @poshtoken or other projects that don't directly benefit just one person/entity/group of people but the ecosystem as a whole.

This can easily be checked when looking at @zingtoken's voting:

Now why am I bringing this up?

Because these other projects would look at this and think "are you crazy?", "why are you wasting so much voting mana when you could be voting on people delegating your way?", etc.

Another thing to mention about our curation is that we don't upvote those delegating solely for delegating. We vote those posting in the community based on the metrics listed above and not based on how "supportive" they are of our project. We don't look at things like "how much are they delegating to us" or "how much zing are they holding/buying", etc.

I'm sure Splinterlands curators don't look at those aspects either.

There are however a lot of other projects that only care about that, because if they can reward delegators extra in terms of author rewards they think/hope that they'll stay delegated or increase their delegations towards the project which will increase the pull they have on the Hive rewards pool to give them more curation returns over time.

They may mute certain authors but most of the time it looks like people delegating to them are mainly set up in an automated way to receive votes not based on quality of the content or effort that went behind it, or if anyone is consuming it or if that author cares about the rest of the community to be active in other ways than just posting. This activity often never steps outside of voting for users who don't delegate to them and that's kind of what I wanted to bring up today when I said that some things shouldn't get crossed as it undermines curation and makes it about the self-interest of the project to keep their "costumers".

So while creating delegation projects in exchange for tokens or straight up hive is amazing and should definitely be used more, people ought to also continue to respect curation. Your project shouldn't grow bigger in terms of how much delegation you're getting because you're making sure to keep your delegators happy with upvotes no matter what they post - but because your project is better at what it does or plans to do than others (or you know, other factors based on merit, reputation, trust, etc).