Let's Talk About Our Curation Problem

For a long time the community was part of a curation initiative that allowed us to nominate good posts to receive higher rewards, this lasted several years. During this time, we all worked day and night to get people's posts seen and curated. As part of this initiative, the community account @moviesonhive was not allowed to directly profit from the work we did. This was an agreement based on fairness. A result of this, however, was that once the support came to an end, our community account had very little Hive Power to curate people. Since Christmas I have been ensuring that all posts from this account are set to have their rewards to 100% HP, and from time to time I allocate my personal account's rewards to the community account to contribute to its growth. Already there has been quite a nice amount of growth in the HP this account holds, and I'm quite proud of how quickly some of it has developed. There are no intentions to power any of this down, nor are there any intentions to change the current 100% rewards structure alongside the current posting habits, as well as future ones to come. I have quite an aggressive stance on building this community account and improving the community curation all around.

That said, as of late I have been noticing some unfortunate circumstances. This is a community in which many of its posters are doing incredibly well at the lucky support of certain large curators. Now, this is a great thing for many, especially given how little HP we have going around to curate the posts in the community, we do want to see people fairly getting rewarded for the great posts they share. Though, if you look at our stats, you can see that we hold a rather decent amount of active users. And in terms of subscribers, this community is one of the largest on Hive. It's quite astonishing how large this space has managed to grow! But the problem remains in the other numbers: interactions and weekly pending rewards. These two are ridiculously low for the size of the community, and there's only so much we can do. A community is meant to mean community efforts, and I'm not really seeing that in many of the people that post here. As a recent example: it came to my attention the other day that one particular poster manages to make between 30$ - 50$ per post in this community, having accumulated a whopping near 30k HP over their time here on Hive, yet their total curation history came to LESS than 100 HP. That means they almost never curate other people's posts. Their excuse? Their HP is low and their vote is worthless. This isn't true, low accounts can curate even with little rewards distributed per vote. It all adds up, especially over time.

Now, this isn't a complaint that people sell off their rewards. We all have lives and things to deal with. Hive can be a great platform that does contribute to the little expenses we all face in our day-to-day lives, and sure enough we all sell off some of the rewards we've accumulated, especially with market cycles where prices are quite attractive to do so. Instead, this is a complaint that the curation is nearly nonexistent. Another poster in the community has accumulated 25k HP in their time on hive, having ONLY distributed 5 HP. Does that sound reasonable to you? It certainly doesn't to me. Now, I'm not sure what the criteria is for those larger curation accounts is for them to pick and choose certain posters to get those hefty votes, but there's a genuine problem here when many of the larger earners are neither commenting, nor voting on anyone in the community or elsewhere on Hive. The whole point of a platform like Hive is that we shouldn't be relying on specific parties to maintain the platform, it should be decentralised down to the curation aspects. Which means people voting people, not relying entirely on whale accounts to curate. One look at the community shows there is a massive reliance on whales here to do the curation, with most people being lucky if they can break a single dollar in curation rewards on a post without that more centralised support.

With this discovery, I am going to be changing how we curate the posts in the community, with a more laser-eye-focused effort on people's curation efforts, not necessarily within just this community, but on Hive itself. If you happen to be one of the lucky ones that gets constant whale support but can't be bothered to upvote a few other people's posts throughout the week, you will no longer get any support from us. And that includes the future as we scale, if I don't see improvements in the curation efforts. Alongside this, some of you may notice a new implementation: member tags. If I stumble across someone that has insanely large historical rewards compared to totally disproportionate curation rewards, then you win yourself a fresh new member tag that helps us keep an eye on you in the community. This tag basically tells us to avoid you. You'll also get a message from our community account informing you that your curation efforts are abysmal and should be improved. If there are improvements over the months, then the tag is removed and the curation from us will continue. The tag also serves as a reminder to those who aren't curating or perhaps event are: do you want to support those who don't take the time to support you?

Sure, this may seem like a rant and a drastic action, but it's one that's necessary. We need to address this problem as a community, because curation is a community effort, not a single party's obligation.