What And Why Boost In Ecency

Hello everyone!

I was going to write about this some time ago but I didn't manage to do it. But there is an opportunity now, especially since @mypathtofire in #edtopic for this week publish a call to write something in relation to Boosting, Promoting and Tipping with Ecency Points.

So, some of my thoughts on this from the curator's perspective, and let me say from the outset that these are my personal opinions and not the official views of the team developing and behind the Ecency web, desktop, and mobile apps.

Let's start the story.

As we all know, there are many, indeed more and more, front-ends that draw their data from the Hive Blockchain. I would mention just three of the biggest ones, which are mainly aimed at general blogging, and these are -- Hive.blog, Peakd, and Ecency.
I invite you to vote for your favorite front-end in LeoThreads.

Each front end has its own specifics, but what they all have in common is that you can access the same data in the Hive blockchain from any interface.
And what is it about the Ecency front-end that the others don't have?
In a nutshell, users of Ecency apps get Points for every activity done in the Ecency front end.
These activities include posting, voting, commenting, sharing (reblog), log-in, delegating, and a few others.

screenshot from Ecency Webb App Wallet/Points

By the way, in case you didn't know, the Ecency mobile app even has a "Spin And Win" game where you can get FREE Points! 😎

More details about Points, and how to use them, can be found in How to Use your Ecency POINTS by @melinda010100, or How to Make Someone Happy with Ecency Points. I think the how, what, who, and why are pretty well explained in these posts.

I will focus on the boost, namely, we can use the Ecency Points for this function. How to do boost is well explained in How To Use Ecency Boost for Someone by @mypathtofire.

And now to the point of what I wanted to say - what happens after someone decides to boost?

Each such post goes on the Boost list in chronological order. And now it's the curators' turn to review and approve each post, or not!

Because, you won't believe it 😁, curators are living people, they are not bots! And of course, they have their own rules.
Speaking of rules, they are not exact, curators are independent in their judgment of posts, there are some general rules that we all follow, and then there are individual rules that depend on each curator (who are flesh and blood, come from different cultural backgrounds and have their own criteria for the content that is on the boost list).
In this way, Ecency ensures that there is a decentralized approach to deciding what is and what is not approved.

First, here are some general guidelines for anyone who decides to boost their own or some other's publication. Read carefully!

1. Boost is not a given. Don't expect every post you make to be approved for a boost. By opting for a boost, you are only indicating that there is a post on the Boost list that has some effort put into it and that the curators are aware of it.

2. There are minimum standards for appropriate boost:

• At least one photo and 50 words. Any posts that are less than this will be ignored.
• Don't expect a post with little effort (one photo, 50+ words) to be approved for a boost of 300-500 Points. The more points for boost, the more the curators pay attention to the post and if there isn't some effort put into the post, it will be ignored.
• In principle, a post should be no more than one day old, older posts are mostly ignored. If a post is more than a day old, it must be something really special to be approved by a curator.

1. Why my post isn't approved for boost? That's the most common question on the Ecency Discord Curating-Boost-Questions, link never expires, btw.

There are many answers here, I will start with this:

• If Ecency VP (Voting Power) is low, below 70%, curators start to selectively curate, first only posts from Ecency apps and posts with fewer (< 200) points.
• Sometimes there are so many posts on the list that the curators simply can't go through them all, and a post that might be worthy gets overlooked. Did I mention that curators are living people, that they curate voluntarily, and that they can be wrong?😎

Notwithstanding the above, if no boost is made, all Points will be refunded back to the owner within 24 hours and the same post cannot be boosted again.

As for individual rules, I can only write about my own rules that I try to follow, I cannot speak for other curators or the official Ecency team. And it is not even necessary that anyone agrees with me.
I would mention here in particular the posts about games.
Gaming communities are very important in the Hive blockchain, after all, they generate about 2/3 of the transactions or traffic if I'm not mistaken. Source.

• Don't expect to get a 500 Points boost if you just write a short post about your achievements and paste two or three print screens from the game. There has to be something more. Either the gameplay or a detailed description of the game, some secrets and tricks, and so on.
• Giveaways. I think that such posts, where you personally give away some prizes to other players or users, do not belong on the boost list, but rather in the Promotions, because you are advertising your giveaway. It seems absurd to me that you earn more from that than from what you give.
• I avoid posts with religious content. And I won't even comment on that.
• AI content. Yes or no? On the boost list, we have a special tool that tells you how likely it is that a post is generated by AI tools.

I have nothing against such posts in principle, as long as they're either opinions or comparisons and have some meaningful use, and that AI is mentioned with the source, especially of the generated images.
However, if someone is a Ph.D. in every subject in the world, from psychology to programming, and the posts are written in perfect English, and have a Fake label of more than 50%, then I read the post carefully. (Even HiveWatchers point out that the posts must be at least 2/3 original to avoid downvoting). It's important to remember that it's possible that this tool can also be wrong, because Deepl, as the most used translator, has AI for translations, so it's necessary to read the post carefully and only after that form an opinion.

Again: these are my personal opinions and do not reflect the official opinion of Ecency.

Thank you for your attention!😎

Logo image created in Photoshop, Ecency 3D can by @doze, background generated in Night Cafe Creator.