Should we be concerned with upvoting circles?

I read an article from @acesontop and his post was inspired by a post by @bozz, links to both posts are below.

Each author was discussing when upvotes are limited by bloggers to a closed circle. I can't bring myself to use the same circular analogy but pretty much it is about mutual pleasure like you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. Is this a gaming of the upvote system and is it bad for content creation? Both authors have excellent posts.

I won't restate their posts, but it made me thank of a different idea about @peakd and communities in general. When I first started blogging, all of two and half months ago, I thought that bigger must be better, all the time. If I wanted exposure then I should match my content to big communities, like @leofinance.

However, today I realized that we should consider the untapped market of highly local and niche communities. I think about my local classic car club. We love our cars. We formed a club for people in a three county area. We meet a few times a year and we plan a couple of car shows. What we lack is an effective way to share ideas, photos and plans.

Currently, we use a Facebook group, but the fact is, I am a pretty private person. And Facebook profits from our content. A local car club community on Peakd is a better solution in my mind.

And then I think of the crypto investing group that I joined. We are setting up to meet face to face. I don't know these people outside of the group. I would like to keep my engagement pretty much in a silo, maybe with some anonymity. Peakd offers that ability.

This is a rather long way to get to my point - small, but active communities that have a local interest are a benefit for Peakd. However, those communities are likely to look like circular upvoting. I'm pretty sure my crypto club will love the idea of Hive and Peakd. Will everyone in the group upvote everyone else in the group? Yep, but the reason isn't for financial gain. It's because we share a common interest and we discuss that interest online and in person.

Feel free to comment. Here are the links to the two posts that promoted me to write this blog Speaking of new communities that are being built, check out what we are doing at Hive Five

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