First up, an overview of what POSH is and how it was distributed. This is to give you an idea on why a project like this may be treated differently from other automated reports as one of its main funding drives.
If you already know enough about POSH, move down to ### main point
POSH was running on X, formerly Twitter, for a year until a token was created. What it did was scan and look for tweets with the #hive tag and a link to our most used front-ends, upon finding such it would alert the author of the post that their tweet was shared. Once the token was created, it would airdrop everyone their POSH earnings based on shares in retrospect and after that daily POSH would be distributed to the sharers.
The author, if not the sharer, could then upvote the comment which would give the sharer additional 100% of the hive rewards in liquid form. The share would then also be included in the daily distribution of POSH, competing against other shares and how well they do in terms of engagement.
Okay, so what gives POSH the right to participate in Hive author rewards?
Let's look at some of the ways it was created.
- it required the idea to be presented and finding willing devs to work on it
- it required development work from people experienced with it @rishi556 which involved a lot of customization of how posh operated and decided on sharing rewards
- it required maintenance and upkeep, @rishi556 + server costs (still does)
- it required a lot of time, thoughts, ideas, solutions and work to avoid bad gamification (cheating) and allow good ones, the latter was cut short due to:
X updated their API access to make POSH impossible to pay for its usage needs. Now it only works on Reddit (@redditposh/comments)
Before I go any further, it needs to be said that POSH did not, give founders or devs or anyone else additional tokens for the idea, work and maintenance. The airdrop was purely based on almost a year of sharing activity that anyone and everyone could participate in as long as you didn't try to cheat it. The people with the idea and dev didn't even get much rewards out of it to begin with from its only funding system at the time: delegations.
Why did POSH not get funded more?
If everyone is profiting from it equally (all front-ends, hive in general), no one wants to spend inflation by delegating to it or buy up POSH that earners want to convert to Hive. We didn't block which front-ends can earn from POSH and accepted most as long as they had active users (leofinance, ecency, peakd, hive.blog, etc)
This resulted in us having to rely on other funding means than just delegations, the other was post rewards and explains @poshtoken's high reputation number. The idea was that if POSH is valuable it'll drive more usage, higher competition on web2 to share successfully, potential onboarding of influencers to share their posts on their influential web2 accounts after starting to use hive, etc.
Some downsides occurred when people started manipulating web2 activity, asking friends to like and retweet all their posh-shares, using bots, etc, that was hard for us to combat as it wasn't happening on hive.
Over time we started funding POSH additionally with upvotes, letting the community know that it is done in a manner of supporting sharing and not to enrich the owners of the accounts for posting low-effort automated posts or low effort giveaways that barely give away rewards worth more than the author rewards they collect.
While we were buying up POSH to give the token more demand to be earned and we saw a huge increase in activity on X we were faced with something we couldn't overcome, X demanding $42,000 per month in API costs for our usage. The lower tier cost only $100 but our activity was too high to cover it, we were basically doing too well for our own good. Along with many other "good" bot operators on X that had to call it quits, we were one of them.
We then had a lot of HP by that time and had to pivot in what we'd do with it since X became unavailable and impossible to keep running while knowing Reddit and their difficult rules for each subreddit.
We now had some funding (approximately 40k HP) and wanted to do more for our front-ends and dapps. We started doing giveaways of hive gaming assets that were popular by encouraging sharing on X and Reddit with manual oversight. We'd buy @splinterlands packs and give them away, dcrops assets, woo and other games like Muterra that existed at the time to promote our inner activity with the outside.
What we lacked then was the reason to continuously buy POSH as the project had hit a wall with Twitter's API restrictions. Why should we continue to buy POSH if people can't earn it by sharing anymore? All the while there's been sharers and potential buyers of POSH who have done good work to attempt to bring traffic to our front-ends or try to support the value of the token so sharers could earn Hive from it.
We looked for other projects at the time we could support but the requirements were that it was done in a manner similar to POSH, no founders share, no team allocation, etc. This excluded a lot of projects with the only one being @ragnarok created by @theycallmedan at the time. Knowing he's a "whale" if you will and active in many different projects we didn't think to contact him and offer our Hive in an effort to help his idea come to life as we assumed they're doing well on their own. Prices of Hive were a lot better than they are now, etc.
In an effort to give POSH holders and buyers some value, we decided to help kickstart a new project: @holozing. A gaming project that's been in the works for some time before the announcement and ticked off our requirement boxes; no founder's share, no team allocation, no unfair business with token distribution basically.
At this point, @poshtoken.wallet had bought back over 50% of the distributed POSH supply from the markets using delegation and author rewards. The idea here was that once POSH hits its max supply cap of 1 million POSH, it would resume sharer rewards of POSH with the bought back POSH tokens but in a lesser amount. To give value to the earners and buyers of POSH, we decided to help kickstart the @holozing project in exchange for its token to match with the amount "invested" in a claimdrop format.
In hindsight, with the way zing was distributed and the team there stopping the POSH claimdrop "too early" after calculating median price of zing/hive over the few months, @poshtoken got kind of screwed. Not only was it sharing the zing it received back with the other 50% who held POSH thus received claimdrops from it, but the price of zing continued to drop where it wasn't matching the 40k Hive that helped kickstart it.
POSH didn't mind too much about it, though, it did what it was set out to do and we now have another game on Hive in the works that will hopefully make up for the Hive spent on kickstarting it while giving POSH holders additional value for their effort and speculative/altruistic buyers.
Since then, POSH has continued to receive a small amount of delegation and author rewards which have gone towards buying up POSH, providing liquidity in POSH-SWAP.HIVE pool and paying for servers and maintenance (mainly the former, sorry @rishi556, tough times)
I recently made a post asking if there's some experienced Redditors wanting to help build a list to make it easier to not just share but know where to share Hive links on smaller to medium sized subreddits that aren't against links of lesser known websites to be shared to. I'm glad it got some attention and we're happy to be able to fund this work using the author reward pool but at the same time I did receive quite a lot of comments like "why is ocd upvoting this? isn't this abuse? stop that! why not just use the DHF proposal?" etc. They're all valid but I'd like to think the reward pool is much more than just a way to direct rewards to content, comments and curators.
Getting funding through the DHF is difficult and for smaller funding activities/experiments like these doesn't seem worth the process. Furthermore if we look at everything that gets rewarded through posts one could argue if that's really bringing/maintaining a lot of value for the content itself. This was one of the reasons I created POSH to begin with. If you post something and 3 people comment on it who are already here and it gets 10+ views then is it really worth $20 in rewards from stakeholders? Would spending 10% of those rewards on making sure people go out and share that post around to drive traffic to the content and our ecosystem hurt the author? That's effectively what POSH does but in a much smaller scale than mentioned in the example above and without directly taking rewards from the author, just a small share of the author reward pool. You may then argue all the other things that gets rewarded here, I'm sure a big percentage of the author rewards goes towards quite a lot of content that may not even get 1 consumer let alone a few. You may then start to question why that content doesn't get downvoted or why downvotes aren't normalized, etc, but I don't wanna get into all that here.
My point is that there should be room for other experiments using the author rewards pool. Hive is quite flexible and can reward contributors in many different forms. As long as those contributions are met with fair rewards I don't want to be all black and white about it that authors should get exactly 50% and curators the other 50% of the rewards pool. I think that could stifle innovation and our ecosystem and we're not really doing that great out there to begin with. I can't imagine how small our web2 presence would be without activities such as POSH incentivizing people to go out there and share, connect and boost the voice of our stakeholders, whether it creates echochambers or not, we're still there available to be found rather than just tending to our hive posts and hoping someone does something to eventually bring people here.
Okay, now to the
main point
of this post.
If you know and can rely on @poshtoken doing things transparently while providing proof of traffic coming onto our ecosystem in one way or another. Would you be against it using the author rewards pool to experiment and fund such activities?
The reason I say experiment is because we're not asking people to give us 10 to 20% of the author rewards pool, if even 1%. Just enough funding to see what works and what doesn't. It would all be documented and rewards shared among contributors in transparent ways.
The main difference between these activities and something like @valueplan is that we wouldn't shy away from giving contributors rewards for their time. It won't be much for starters but it would be equal no matter your geolocation and mainly based on your contributions along with feedback from the community.
Let's take an example of some of my traffic & onboarding activity I did when launching the Gods Unchaned community and hosting a big giveaway.
Time spent setting up the giveaway and posts: 3-5h
Time spent getting in touch with people from the GU community for this event: 1h
Time spent sharing the post on web2 and GU: 10mins
Time spent giving unique 1-time use links to a free hive account and teaching them why they should save the keys, directing them to the community, letting them know to post, comment, vote, etc, in discord and reddit dm's because we still 2 years after this event have an unstable signup process: 3 days to catch up to all interest, 10 days to be done with laggers still wanting to participate.
Now I didn't "pay myself" anything for that amount of time spent and the giveaway cost me ~$2000 in GU assets at the time along with some funding from @lordbutterfly and @guiltyparties, but we can't just rely on people working for the sake of the ecosystem and Hive doing well because of it.
I'd like to try a different method where people are not only transparent about the time and effort they put behind things but can also prove it with onboarding and activity stats. Will this get gamed early on? Sure, most of this technology has. Will people try to get hive for doing close to nothing? Sure, but we can improve and decide if the returns are worth the spends as a community together.
I don't want to jump on the valueplan hating train, I'm sure the few people in charge of organizing and payments must be in constant hell trying to make it all work for no rewards while trying to get other volunteers to do things for no rewards as well, just costs. But it leaves the question that if there's no rewards then maybe someone's being taken advantage of because that's usually the nature of people, if they're not getting rewarded for something they're most likely not going to do it or do it properly. Furthermore there's plenty of other proposals where we are paying devs for both their time and skillset to maintain and continue development on projects they've built, why should contributions that take time and can come in different skillsets not be rewarded? That's why I liked Hive in the beginning, it incentivizes activities in many different ways with rewards so we all work towards the betterment of the ecosystem and win from it together. My main issue with valueplan is that it should reward contributions for their time as well as it reminds me of some other projects where when the contributions aren't rewarded they will find other ways to get those rewards at the cost of fairness.
Furthermore, we now have active polls on Hive. We could leverage that in smart ways to decide on which funded activities are worth further spending and a potential proposal and scaling or not. We could even leverage it to remove certain contributors if we believe they're not doing as good of a job as someone else could. It doesn't always have to be just me making the decisions on what @poshtoken is spending money on for the betterment of Hive, I know I have way too many different projects going on so my being spread too thin issue could affect how I run certain onboarding or promotional activities and I'd be fine for someone else taking over if the wisdom of the crowd believes I'm no longer the best candidate for the job. Those options are not existing in other proposals aside from potentially @splinterland's inner DAO workings I have little experience with.
Lastly, would you support this funding mechanism using the Hive author rewards pool to experiment with new ways to bring in traffic and attention to our ecosystem? Or do you think we should just go directly to the DHF even for smaller "testing" amounts?
I'd appreciate your feedback.