Evaluating Ecency Interface and Point System

There are a number of different User Interfaces to choose from when it comes to Posting and interacting on the HIVE blockchain. Personally I’d migrated from Hive.Blog to Peakd.com last year and have flirted with LeoFinance.io on occasion too, but in the course of my travels recently I decided to check out Ecency.com because they were doing something a bit different. They’ve implemented an internal Point System for users of their Interface and I wanted to see how it worked.

The first thing I came across was this Tutorial which explains how you can earn points on Ecency by Posting, Commenting and Voting using their UI but I didn’t quite understand what the Points were really about until I came across the Boost feature which is where you can spend your points to get an upvote from the @ecency account on HIVE. It’s an account with over 1 million HIVE delegated to it so there are some potentially pretty fat upvotes on offer. I was intrigued….

So I looked at the Delegations and saw that 100% of the Curation earnings from the @ecency account is distributed to its Delegators in the form of daily transfers of Liquid HIVE, but Delegators ALSO earn approximately 100 Ecency Points daily per 1000 HIVE Power Delegated. That looked like decent value so I delegated 1000 HIVE Power and started using the Ecency UI to Post and Comment to see how it all stacked up. The minimum upvote you can get from Ecency costs 150 Points so with 100 Points daily from delegating and a few extra points from Posting, Commenting and Voting I can get a Daily Upvote worth about $1 USD (at time of writing this post). Not bad. On top of that today I earned 0.257 HIVE from the Curation Share of my 1000 HP delegation – which is an APR of about 9%. That’s about how much I’ve been earning from manually curating my own stake so I’m not really losing out by delegating it to Ecency at all.

It’s not a perfect User Interface by any means. I’d still prefer Peakd.com from a usability perspective but a lot of the features I use are there on Ecency and it’s interface is pretty intuitive. There have been a few times when I’ve Commented or Voted but not been credited with Points so I’m not sure if it’s skipping some actions or whether it’s a processing or delay issue. Still, I think it’s worth persisting with it for a bit and giving it a proper workout because the concept seems innovative and the economics make sense. If you’re up for some experimentation then give it a try. If you’ve already given it a try then please let me know what you think in the Comments below because I'm still learning the ropes and maybe I've missed something important.