RANT Post - Auto Curation sucks - Hot Take
Acidyo has gotten to me. I see him posting with his thoughts and ideas around Hive ecosystem and after this week I have my own thoughts that I needed to get out!
Cue the ranting post!
What Started This
Look I am not going to lie. When I got back into Hive and learned about posting here and rewards and all of that I found a website that let's you basically autovote whenever a curator votes on a post. I immediately signed up and did the things. I figured it was a no brainer to put my HP to work passively and earn curation rewards.
I kept it up for roughly 3 months until last week. I posted a article that honestly I specifically wrote because of conversations between me and acidyo and wanted to show them how to buy pokemon cards with crypto without KYC. It was something I have used for years and love the service. Here is the article in question.
And I know what you are thinking.. 51.79 in rewards is insane.. and you are right I was BLOWN AWAY by the response to this post. But once I posted it I was watching it and watching my notifications. It was slow going for like the first hour or so.
Then... Acidyo voted on the post..
And within a mere 10 seconds my votes on that post went from like 10 to over 200. It was insane. Now granted most of those posts were super small and didn't meet the threshold to send a notification but there were some which did. And it got me thinking...
The actual point of this
Again as someone who is trying to get more involved in HIVE blockchain and ecosystem I am trying to think big picture here and long term goals. And the more I thought about it.. the more I really didn't like the autovote system. And it's for a few reasons.
This is MY personal opinion and what I will do and not do. No shame towards other who have a different opinion though.
Cons to AutoVote System
- Autovoting takes away from the personal aspect to interacting with the blockchain. You are just grinding for the HP and not truly interacting with your fellow Hivers. It gives a false sense of accomplishment to the author
- If I write a article about Frogs and then 1 person who curates votes it and so hundreds of other upvote as well. I would assume that hundreds of people like articles about Frogs so I should keep posting about my pet frogs and shit. But in fact maybe that 1 curator was just upvoting because of a catchy title and thumbnail. Or maybe just because of the work put into the article and nothing about Frogs at all.
- You waste your Voting Mana.
- If you autovote even if it is set to say 70% of your Voting Mana.. then you come across a article that you like and want to vote on it. Your vote Strength will not be as much as it would if you were at 100% but instead you are at 70%. So you are lessening the amount you vote to authors that YOU enjoy or want to reward.
- It feels like it's just a way to passively interact with the blockchain and try to milk out as much as you can from the blockchain with minimal effort.
- Now I am not saying that is the case for everyone but why not just manually vote for the articles you find. You can search up curators and find what they post on to discover new authors or topics without autovote.
Pros to the Autovote System Redesign
- I could see the benefit to a Autovote System though. I am not just grumpy completely.
- Let's say someone (me for example) is going on a vacation for 2 weeks. My HivePower will just sit there and not be benefitting the people I like and want to support.
- So I would LOVE a system that we could call "Vacation Mode" which would act similar but a little different then AutoVote. This is how I see it working (for smarter people than me to code it though).
- Vacation Mode when checked, you set a time frame with a minimum of 5 days and a maximum of 14 days.
- You set which accounts you want to autovote or which curator you want to follow their votes
- You would use your HP and Voting Strength to upvote those articles BUT you would not earn Curation reward for it.
- So you could still support people you want to support passively but without any rewards for yourself..
Put my Money Where My Mouth Is
To prove I am putting my money where my mouth is. Here are the screenshots of me removing access to autovoting. And if you REALLY don't believe me.. you can track my votes onchain and see for yourself.
So now that I am not wasting part of my Voting Strength on random posts I never read.. I can actually upvote the articles that I LIKE and have those votes worth something.. hopefully 😁
I relate, buuuut I'm keeping auto vote on folks I like partly cause it makes it easier to find them back. Buuut you have convinced me to not do curation trails.
True I should have worded it differently between "curation trails" and auto votes. I meant Curation Trails in the post where people just vote on whatever someone else votes on sort of thing. It takes no effort and give nothing. The only reason is to passively earn pennies (if that). And here I go ranting again lol
The vacation mode is a good suggestion though I don't see why one should turn down rewards for it. If one is really concerned, perhaps there could be an option to burn rewards for vacation mode.
Fyi, there's a Rant, Complain and Talk community for future reference
https://peakd.com/c/hive-196233/created
oh DANG IT, I didn't see that community will post there next time now though thanks!
yeah turning down rewards would be only is the auto curation trail upvoting thing went away then a Vacation Mode sort of thing but again. no idea how feasible it is or even worth it.
Honestly I don't care for the burn idea since it takes rewards from people that make decent content and are smaller creators. The majority of the "BURN" posts are just whales taking rewards for curation while giving nothing to others than preserving their current stake. If it was burning the curation rewards and not the post rewards that would be a bit different. Then who gets paid for the burn shit post? Maybe send it to one of the onboarding projects.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
I agree, but let's also be honest. If burn posts would burn curation rewards as well then would that bring votes to smaller creators and people that make decent content? I don't think so. It would just create a circlejerk where whales just vote each other's content and this is their right since it is their stake.
It could go to projects that are building stuff on hive pretty easily by just using the rewards beneficiaries and comment rewarder tools that already exist and burn curation rewards or keep them depending how how selfless you want to be. Yes I know the same people run these things, but it would at least look better from the outside.
Yes, but that is a choice. I am talking about why would they choose to do this when they are already not choosing to do this.
And there are people that take advantage of these services too, so in the end I believe it balances itself out.
Fair enough !PIZZA
all we can really do is bring problems to the light and figure out a better way.
EDIT: Thanks for the follow
!INDEED manual is best but I suppose it all comes down to how much time someone has
True, but as I start to get more ingrained in the entire blockchain ecosystem.. I want to reward those who are active and think those who are active should be rewarded more then those who are not. Not punishing non active people but rewarding more active people. sort of thing. at least it makes sense in my head lol
I am also not a big fan of autovoting. Sometimes I can’t really explain, why some of my blogs get a good audience and sometimes not.
Cause 1 person votes and then 4 million others autovote on the curation trail.
Don't get me wrong. I love it when it happens but also hate it too lol
I still have mixed feelings on the subject, and set my auto vote to 95% mana threshold so it almost never votes on anything. Another thing that I have recently done is look at who I had set to follow and add some more people that I know manually vote. I still need to look through the list again and remove some of the other trails or reduce the % of vote on them.
Would starting over now that I have a better idea of who is who on chain be the easiest method? Well maybe, but that just means more work down the road.
The questions I still have is how much of the votes on hive now are 2nd or 3rd hand curation trails. I use Ecency to look at upvotes so the minnows like me show up, but I see a ton of very inactive accounts. To be fair I was one of those for about 2-4 years when I had some ID10T errors, and a dead PSU.
A smarter curation service would be ideal, but how do we make it work and not be abused.
There are some really neat projects working on this like PIMP and Top Comment. The way they work is someone has to call the service to upvote so it solves the was this 100% autovote?
As for the Acidyo trail, I think it is so big because he is very public on his vote and abuse stance that he should be able to be trusted to curate disserving people.
Conclusion: Mad props to you for relying on nothing but your self to manage vote power and curation/curation rewards.
Yeah there is no 100% correct/perfect way.
But I do feel a sense of satisfaction that I wrote a post about everyone on acidyo's curation trail and how I don't like it and the he votes on that post and so do all those people... hehehe
LMAO I did not catch that!
The vacation mode sounds interesting and it feels like hive.vote should have an option where only if your voting power is getting close to 100% will it follow one or many trails or automatically vote on some posts/comments that are always there and active, think like hbd.funder comments that benefit us all and don't go to a central entity that personally benefits from the rewards.
I don't know however how possible it is to create such an option as it may be costly in terms of API calls for the service to know when you hit 100% or even 99.9% to start casting trail/autovotes to save you from "wasting" mana and in tern curation rewards. This would however let you curate manually more efficiently as you stated, you would find yourself more often at 98-100% vp so your manual vote then would be worth as much as it can and you wouldn't have to worry about having to vote 10+ posts every day if you're fully manual.
Maybe @mahdiyari who's behind hive.vote could weigh in on the idea.
ohh I do like that too. Yeah I mean I get Curation is a MASSIVE part of Hive blogging and such but I don't know. A part of me is just wanting more real use interaction and comments/replies and not just the auto upvotes.
Which is weird cause autovotes mean more HP/HBD for me and the voters but.. yeah idk
I think autovoters trailing ocdb are mostly afk so better that than letting it sit idly, best would of course be delegations as it would just be one account voting and not confuse newcomers that x amount of people saw the post like they're used to with likes and upvotes in 1 account 1 vote systems.
TRUE.. that would be much better
Maybe I got it wrong, but you can already do something similar by setting an "Upvote Mana threshold":
In this example above - which is taken from my dashboard on hive.vote - I set a threshold of 95%, so my account follows the curation trails I chose only when my upvoting power is more than 95%, and pause when it's below that value.
I have activated a few curation trails (with a small voting weight, between 5% and 15%, for each one), so my voting power never touches 100%, but also never goes below 94.xx%.
@cherokee4life I'm afraid that something like that would stop a lot of people from activating an option like the one you described: if you are managing your voting power so well and responsibly, almost always voting manually, maybe there's no need to decline the curation rewards you earn while on vacation!
I thought the threshold worked the other way, if you drop under it it will stop voting after your trail. Isn't that why your many is 96.xx% in your screenshot when you have the threshold at 95%?
Yep, but this isn't what you were looking for?
Because with the threshold hive.vote (in my case) only casts a vote and follows the curation trails I chose when my voting power is getting close to 100% (i.e. is above 95%).
But I may be missing what you are saying, so sorry if this doesn't make sense 😅
I don't know what it does exactly, I thought the threshold was a stop limit such as when your voting power gets to it (95% in your example) will it stop voting, not the other way - start voting if vp gets above 95%. But I may be wrong, don't use hive.vote much other than trailing ocd with ocdb and ocd-witness.
Isn't this the same thing?
So if I set a threshold of 99%, hive.vote only casts votes when my vp is close to 100%.
And if I vote manually and, let's say, bring my voting power down to 89%, hive.vote stops and wait for it to recharge to 99% (which might never happen if I keep curating manually, but may come in handy if I'm on vacation, like in the example made by @cherokee4life).
You know.. to be honest now that I read your reply. I am not sure I even knew how hive.vote worked cause I thought it was that it would vote with a set weight until your Voting Power got down to a certain % but now I am not sure lol
At this point I'm more confused than you and @acidyo 🤣
This is right! Let's say you activate a curation trail following @acidyo's votes and you set a threshold of 97%.
You just signed on Hive and have some HP, so your voting power is at 100%.
@acidyo casts a vote.
hive.vote detects this vote, checks if your voting power is above the threshold (it is, because you are at 100%) and then casts a vote with your account.
Now your voting power is, let's say, 98%.
@acidyo votes again and hive.vote repeats the same procedure (detects the vote, checks your voting power, sees that it's above 97%, casts a vote).
Your voting power is 96% now.
@acidyo casts again a vote.
And this time things go a little different: hive.vote detects the vote, checks your voting power, sees that is below 97% (you are at 96%), so it doesn't cast a vote. The curation trail is paused.
To me it looks like we are all saying the same thing, so I'm clearly not understanding what you both are saying... sorry about that! There's surely something I'm missing 😅
lol honestly it is my biggest pet peeve with Hive in general though where there is not as much Concrete information readily available to the new user. Things change and there is no 1 central location for ALL up to date info.
But yeah maybe we all are saying the same thing? idk anymore its been a busy morning haha
yeah, it's one of our major issues: on Hive you can do thousands of things, but there's little to no explanations on how to do them. Most of the time you have to try or hope to find that random post talking about something you had no idea you could do... Having a site with clear and updated instructions and tutorials would be great! Maybe this is something we should do, one day or the other (unless it already exists and I'm not aware of it!).
Rather than autovotes, delegate to a project who gives daily HP back for curation, at least your HP vote for stuff it's worth
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STOPI've never set my votes to curation trails/autovoting, but I know I've benefitted from others doing it, too. I do agree I would love a "vacation mode" option though!!
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BEER.What would stop me from just being on Vacation mode every 14 days?
Also, it wouldn't be used if you didn't earn curation from it.
Also, many more people would properly just switch to delegating out their entire stake and get liquid Hive instead :D
But still a good idea :D
I do have autovote on my account here, following @hivepakistan. Simple because I don't have the time or energy to sit down and read enough posts daily to make a fair support system. But I don't want my hp to be idle.
I do also manual vote on stuff, regardless of what my VP is from autovotes xD
I mean true a Vacation Mode could be abused. BUT if you can only use Vacation mode once every 3 months and only for a max of 14 days each time. That would reduce it and the way I suggested where Vacation mode doesn't give you any curation only adds to the Reward Pool (like if you voted on a post minutes before the 7 day cutoff kind of thing) then I would love everyone to use it lol
But yeah people would switch to Delegating out HP to earn a little kickback and then we would run into the issue of a few main centralized accounts with MASSIVE HP doing the voting and people trying to write posts to get seen by those massive accounts.
So yeah no good answer really haha
Also, I just remembered. People would maybe also just powerdown everything and put it into HBD savings xD
ah shit... good point. Dang it lol there goes my genius plan
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@txracer(4/15) tipped @mrtats
Come get MOONed!
It's an imperfect system, but it does say least get more voting power in play. Most of my voting is manual, but I help out some small trails. I'm not sure it's so good to have these massive ones that may just vote up the same people. I do make more use of it when I'm traveling. What I want to see more of is real engagement.
We agree—the current auto-voting system on Hive is fundamentally flawed. It’s become a playground for circle voting, where the same groups repeatedly vote for the same accounts, creating a hollow numbers game. Posts with 100, 500, even 1,000+ votes but only a handful of comments (or none) are a glaring red flag. This isn’t engagement—it’s manipulation.
When users see these inflated stats, it erodes trust. Why? Because it’s obvious:
Hive deserves better. A healthy platform thrives on real interaction—comments, discussions, and organic support. Let’s push for reforms:
It’s time to stop rewarding the same authors.