Rethinking Hive author rewards: How can we improve the distribution of rewards?

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friendlymoose7 Klast monthPeakD13 min read

Disclaimer!

I'm going to mention a bunch of people in my blog. The people I mention have recently been involved in discussions that, in some way, relate to improving the distribution of rewards on Hive.
I’m mentioning these people this because I want to spark a discussion about this subject.
This unsolicited mention is a one-time thing.
I do appreciate it if you would like to join the discussion on this subject because I think together we can make this better!

If you know other hivers that aren't mentioned in this blog, but can contribute to the discussion, feel free to inform them. Reblogging this blog might also help.

I don't want the potential rewards of this post to get in the way of the discussion, so I decided to burn all rewards of this posts.

(I got the banner image from the #hive-assets channel in the Hive Discord)

What's wrong with the distribution of author rewards?

And now to the subject of this blog; How can we improve the distribution of author rewards?
But why would we want to improve the distribution of author rewards? I say we, but I have to relate this to myself. I think there are a couple of things that aren't going well right now.

I am of the opinion that there are quite some posts that are 'overrewarded'. Whether a blog is overrewarded is very subjective. My main argument is that some Hivers get rewards regardless of the content they post, where others Hivers that put a lot of effort in their posts, but hardly get any rewards at all. Comparing two posts is always Comparing apples and oranges, but the rewards just go wrong too often, I think.

I think there are many reasons for this which. I will sum up a couple of them below:

Autovotes

I think autovotes are bad for Hive. Luckily I hear from a lot of people that they vote manually, but I know there are a lot of people that are using the hive.vote service. And I'm no saint myself. I've used autovoting in the past to maximize my results too.
But with autovoting, a group of users automatically gets your vote. Autovoting is beneficial for both the author as the curator since they get rewards regardless of the content.
Yes, there surely are curators that regularly check the post of the people they vote on, but there are also certainly a lot that don't. In fact, I assume that there are quite some Hivers that aren't even active anymore on Hive and still have an autovote running.
Yes, it is nice to get autovotes (I'm receiving a few myself), but I don't think it's good for Hive.

Blind upvotes

I don't know if this is the correct terminology, but with blind upvotes I mean votes that are
casted without reading the blogs. I must admit that I do this too sometimes when my voting mana is close to 100% and I don't have a lot of time to curate. I then go to my following or communities feed and upvote some posts from Hivers that I know post quality content.
But blindly casting all your votes to the people you know isn't good for a fair distribution of rewards too.
If you are new to Hive, you haven't built up a network and probably won't get any blind votes. Or at least way less than the oldbies on Hive.

Explore algorithms

The algorithms also are not in favour of the new and/or smaller users. The trending page on Hive.blog, PeakD and Ecency show posts that already have a lot of rewards. By showcasing these you make it easier for people to vote on them.
There are alternative views in the font-ends like "hot". I don't exactly know how the posts are selected on that page, but the blogs Hive.blog shows in that view don't have very high rewards (yet), but they are from Hivers that regularly get high rewards.

Votes for delegations

The vote for delegations is something I recently learned from a post by @acidyo recently came up with. https://peakd.com/curation/@acidyo/hive-curation-are-things-starting-to-go-too-far
Some initiatives are voting posts of users that have delegated hive to their curation account. This way these users are assured of upvotes. They are actually buying their votes this way. If you delegate to a couple of these initiatives you can get quite nice post rewards even when the quality of the blogs isn't that high.

Possible solutions

Ok, I've come up with a couple of problems (at least I think it are problems), but are there any solutions to combat them?
I've been thinking quite a lot about it and it isn't easy. There have been multiple discussions about possible solutions and they all have their pros and cons.
I didn't came up with all these ideas, so I'm trying to give people that came up with it the credits where I can.

Combat autovoting

I think it would be wonderful if we could disable autovoting. This would mean that nobody would get votes automatically anymore and curators are forced to vote manual. And manual voting would surely result in a better distribution of rewards. I only think this is technically not possible (maybe one the Hive devs could confirm this).
And for the people that don't have time to curate; I'd suggest to delegate your stake to one or more curation services that do manually upvote for you.

Provide better feeds/filters

As I mentioned above; the explore pages of the different Hive front end (@peakd , @ecency, hive.blog ) are showing hot and high rewarded posts which which makes it easier for users to give these posts even more votes.
I think there should be a feed with posts of a couple of hours old, from a certain length that have low or no rewards at all. You could also weigh some other figures as reputation level (more about that later) and engagement (does this hiver engage a lot in comment sections).
Another option would be the possibility to apply filters instead of making a new feed. This way you could for instance filter out posts that have more than a certain amount of rewards.
This might be something for the developers of these frontends (@asgarth, @good-karma) to think about.

Rethink reputation

This is something I've been seeing more often recently. @meno made a blog about rethinking reputation on Hive.
Right now every Hive account has a reputation number, but this doesn't tell a thing. It's just a number that shows that the account received a lot of upvotes from users with a higher reputation level. The longer you are on Hive, the higher your number is. But it doesn't show you are a good hiver (whatever that may be).
In his blog, @nemo mentions a couple of other factors that are useful to indicate the trushworthyness like their upvoting habits, engagement, initiatives and staking/withdrawing habits.
In a comment on the post @blocktrades revealed that they are working on redesigning the reputation score, which is good to hear!

Krampus Co-efficient

The Krampus Co-efficient (KE) is also something I've seen in a couple of posts recently. The KE was introduced by @azircon and shows how much rewards you retracted from the Hive blockchain compared to how much you aerned in Author and Curation rewards (link).

KE > 1.0, you hold less than you earned
KE < 1.0, you hold more than you earned

This number shows if Hivers are extracting value from Hive.
If you believe in the Hive blockchain you might want to send your upvotes to the Hivers that don't withdraw much Hive from the blockchain because that could have a negative impact on the price of Hive.

On the other hand there are people that really need the money they earn on Hive to provide themselves with daily necessities.

As I discussed with @steveguereschi in the comments in his blog about this subject; a large stakeholder extracting 1000 Hive a month might not have the same negative impact on his or her KE as the extraction of 100 hive might have for a small user.

Although we have to be careful to punish people that need their Hive income to make a living, I also think it could help us determine the Hivers that use Hive as a cash cow and we should be made aware of that so we can stop upvoting these users.

Another blog that relates to this subject is one from @gungunkrishu who made a a blog where he listed the top 50 users that have withdrawn the most Hive in the past week.

It would be useful if these things could be taken into account in the reputation score.

The reward cap

This is an idea I came up with myself. I also don't know if it is possible to implement this (maybe a Hive dev could tell me), but I'll share it anyway.
It would be nice if we could set a maximum of rewards a post can receive by upvotes.
When a post reached its max rewards, It's locked and you can't vote on it anymore. You then have to choose other posts to vote on. I think this will cause a better distribution of rewards.
And if you think the author does deserve more rewards, you can send him/her a tip.

One of the issues with this idea (apart from whether it is technically possible) is that we as a community have to agree on the maximum reward of a post. And does it have to change with the value of the Hive token too?
To decide the maximum of the cap could be difficult since, as I mentioned earlier; value is a subjective matter.
I know that rewards back in the time of Steem were even crazier, but when I see blogs that receive $100 or even over $200 rewards, that is still a crazy amount for a bunch of words and pictures in a blog. Personally I would sugget to set it around $50 to remove the (to me) excessive rewards.

Downvotes

When it isn't possible to configure a reward cap, downvoting could be a solution.
With downvotes the overrewarded posts could be cut back in rewards.
@smooth is one of the Hivers that actively downvotes posts that he (assuming you are a he) finds overrewarded.
Downvotes are often discussed. Like recently during a Hive thrive podcast featuring @acidyo

Downvoting isn't very popular on Hive. People often see it as a personal attack, especially when the downvoter doesn't explain why he/she downvotes the post. It is sometimes seen as stealing of rewards, which is actually not true because until the 7th day, you don't have any rewards at all.

Aside from that, you really are sticking your head above the parapet. Downvoting users may result in retalliation, and could result in people downvoting all your posts.
And finally; downvoting a post with a very high amount of rewards is hard to combat for users with a small stake.

A solution to this might be that existing curation services will use their hive power to reduce rewards on posts. They have the stake and won't get hurt too much by retalliation actions. But this does result in extra work for those services without any benefit for them.
We have to be aware too that the increase of downvotes also increases the risk of downvote wars.

Orca's unite!

A reply on one of my comments by @alex-rourke has got me thinking as well.
We often look at the whales on Hive because they have the most power, but there are even more orca's on Hive. Together they might could have the same or even more impact as the whales when they work together.

https://peakd.com/hive-114929/@alex-rourke/the-power-in-numbers-how-hive-blockchain-empowers-the-community-3ru

In his Fellow Orca's Unite blog he recently published, he stated that Orca's should take their responibility. One of the thinks that Orca's should look out for according to Alex is content that is undermining the ecosystem.
I think he has a really good point there

Let's create a think tank!

As you might have noticed in this blog, a lot of people care about Hive. Some of them have come up with ideas for improvement, but somehow these idea's never really take off.
I've been following quite some Hive podcasts lately where there are also good discussions about improvement.
If we really want to make Hive a better place, we really need to turn some of these ideas into actions.

Maybe we could set up a think tank with users that are interested in this,
so we could work out some of the ideas I mention in this blog or even brainstorm about some other ideas for improvement.
I don't know in what form this think tank should be. For the ease of communication we could use Discord for this.
If you managed to reach this part of my longest blog ever, you are probably interested in this subject 😀
If so, please let me know if you are interested in joining a think tank about this in the comments.

Some final words

This blog is a collection of information I've gathered throughout the past months supplemented with my own ideas.
I think it is important that people that really add value to Hive should be rewarded for that, independent of how long they have been around on this blockchain or how many friends they have made!
This doesn't necessarily need to be by blogging, but people could also have other initiatives.
Onboarding is a hot topic on Hive too, but I think onboarding is useless if we don't look at the retention of new users.
Money should not be a motive to stay on Hive, but unequal treatment could be a huge turnoff for new users.

There are quite a lot of things that could be improved, but I believe that when people that have the best interest for Hive work together, we could really make a change!

It would be nice to hear your ideas about the points I addressed in this blog or maybe some other ideas as well.

Feel free to tag other users that you might think could be interested in this subject.
And a reblog to make this blog more visible would be appreciated.

Now let's have some good discussions in the comments!