Alright, as many of you know we've been growing the roster of communities we're supporting in the community incubation program. The time has come where we have to start becoming a bit more strict with how the communities adapt and set some baseline expectations to them so they're not just being abused as a placeholder for the owners to receive rewards out of them. Not saying that this is something that's actively happening, but voting power is quite restricted and considering the penalty curve to try and get posts to a certain amount so neither the authors nor all the curators on the trail lose out on being under it we'll just have so much voting power to continue supporting a set amount of them. Since there's many others who also want a chance to enter the incubation and see what it does for their community we'll have to be more strict with those that have joined/have been invited but have shown no motivation to really make the most out of the program or use all the tools available to have their community blossom.
This is why we're going to be a bit more strict with the base guidelines and if some don't adapt over time and growth then we're just going to have to replace them either with new communities or with similar ones that we have so far denied but may be more motivated to make the most out of the communities features.
One idea we had recently that we'd like more communities to actively implement is the "beating the curve" tipping funds idea. As we all know engagement is very low and even with the !ENGAGE token giveaway to many community curators and moderators it hasn't been used that much. Partly it's understandable and can be confusing to newcomers to also have to figure out what these sidechain tokens are, etc, but partly it's also just been laziness or forgetfulness not to use them. We'd want to also make more use of the tipping feature that is made so simple with either the @peakd front-end or the !tipu comment tipping functionality (which also automatically adds your tips to the @peakd front-end for those who didn't know).
Other than that once certain communities grow to a certain amount of activity and subscriber amount we'd want the leaders to adapt to it by inviting more curators and moderators to keep them clean, active and not miss out on great submissions to them. We don't want single people to just have started a community but then start slacking off midway and our efforts to help get them going go to waste because they're not scaling. Not many can alone take care of both curation, engagement and something we'd want them to do more in the future is set tags for verified members through our @poshtoken Twitter verification database (more on that soon). For them to continue to try and do it alone is going to seem a bit selfish unless it shows that they really can and do put in the time for it, else they're just hogging a good community niche and spot in the incubation program but at the same time bottlenecking its growth and engagement themselves (even if they don't want to).
With this we're also going to check within our Discord everyone that's already there if some are interested on working on several communities and if the leaders are okay with them joining to help out.
We're of course also determined that such activity and curation should be incentivized with rewards similar to how we do with the @ocd compilation posts where the editors of each and curators that submitted nominations receive the beneficiary rewards. Now we're not going to enforce that all the rewards go to the editor's and curators, the owners of the community can keep part of them but over time they should be okay with the delegation OCD is providing to their accounts and only receive beneficiary rewards for the work they put in like some others already do through the curation reports.
To make it more clear what I recently meant with the @reward.app beneficiary setting for some tipping funds I drew up this rounded rectangle real quick. Read below how it will be used.
So the rectangle is basically the post rewards of the curation reports. Whoever is in charge of adding all the nominations onto it and post it receives part in editor rewards, rest should go to the curators who found the posts, checked them for plagiarism and submitted them for a boost through OCD. Of course they can also add other posts they curated that day/week even if they felt like they weren't great enough to be sumbitted to us, the main point is that community leaders scale their communities with more moderators and curators and through these posts reward them.
Over time we're going to stop supporting some of the curation reports that only have one curator or the leader doing it all by themselves, unless they're really putting in the time and effort and their community just isn't big and active enough yet.
Alright so now about the tipping funds. We'd want people to add an extra part of the post rewards set to @reward.app, for example 30% of the post rewards would go to @reward.app. This means that when the post is paid out, 20% would go to the editor, 50% to the curators/moderators and 30% to @reward.app which is returned as liquid hive & hbd. People might think they're missing out on rewards by doing this but when we see that there is a 20-30% beneficiary set to @reward.app we understand that this is set aside to be used as tips for comments and engagement of users in their community - we will add a bigger vote to the post than we initially would have. So the leader and curators wouldn't lose out on this, we'd make up for the cut by voting bigger and this way they'll have funded extra tipping funds while beating the curve penalty and can share the tipping funds within their community moderators so everyone can use them in their daily rounds of curating and engaging with comments.
This only requires the community leader or whoever is in charge of the account that posts the curation reports to send out the liquid tipping funds to their curators/moderators without compromising/sharing their active keys. Then it's up to the curators/moderators to make use of these funds and up to them to see that if one week they didn't get that much engagement to reward they would just set the next curation report beneficiary cut of @reward.app lower than 30% as the example above.
If you have some questions about this as a community leader/curator feel free to ask here or in the discord.
For those wondering "why?", there's a curation penalty (not the 0-5min one) but one that taxes posts and comments depending on the amount they've earned in rewards. I'm not 100% sure where exactly it ends but I believe it's somewhere around 20 Hive in post rewards (not sure if this means post rewards + curation rewards or only the former) and I'm also not sure if this counts HBD somehow, i.e. if it will continue being that high when Hive goes up in value. Either way, this is also why many curators would either refrain from voting on posts they don't think will make it close past that threshold (the tax deteriorates gradually as it gets closer to the 20 hive similar to how the early voter penalty gradually goes down the closer posts get to 5min age). This tax function was implemented to avoid farming from small accounts in big amount of numbers that would be difficult to detect which I'm sure it has mitigated a lot of it and those who've been trying have probably not even realized why they're not getting as much out of it as they had imagined but at the same time it has made the single votes of smaller stakeholders less significant if not many more minnows/dolphins add theirs on top of the same post to get it past the tax threshold - and particularly comment voting. People voting on comments realize that they're losing out on curation returns.
So for all of that, adding another layer on the curation reports and us just throwing a bigger vote to help funding the tipping we'll avoid the tax curve altogether and generate funds to be used for tipping comments and engagement or posts that are good but not big enough or effort enough to get them nominated through our program. We'd like to see more communities make use of this as there's no real drawback for them.
We'd like to still hear your opinions on this, though, if there's something we haven't considered that would not be good about this idea before we move forward with enforcing it a bit more.
Thanks for reading, look forward to a few new communities added to our program that you can read about in the next @ocd community incubation update!
