Spamming, shilling, secret identities and tag milking
Spam is one of the most annoying and most common occurrences in our virtual lives, even the creator of pop-up is sorry for that, then why it's so prevalent?
Recently I started working as a curator for the @oneup-cartel and because of that the amount of posts and topics I read on hive increased tenfold, but so did the amount of low effort, spam, shilling and dubious content I see daily.
Is the (null) amount of effort needed for that versus the minimum amount of positive response you get worth it?
I can't be a hypocrite, I too shilled sometimes and arrived on hive through shilling (and I'm really grateful for that!). I prefer to assume that folks who practice it come from a place of ignorance and not bad faith, so the best way to defeat the lack of knowledge is by educating them!
THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE
With spam also comes shady business opportunities, rug pulls and pyramid schemes.
I lost count of how many times when talking to people from outside the crypto sphere the person had a negative view because someone close to them or even themselves were victims of scam, lost money following "gurus" or due to the environmental impact some crypto currencies have (although this last topic would be better discussed on another post focused on it).
The ignorance and hate towards crypto in some places are so out of proportion that in some fandoms associating your image with crypto equals to social suicide. I know furries and gamers that became persona-non-grata instantly in their midst.
In the case of furries, artists who accept crypto saw their clientele vanish overnight and posts of "beware" mentioning their @ flooded their feeds. Having a secret account to protect their public identity ends up being a necessity, which is sad, for those communities had a lot to gain from crypto spaces.
There are many reasons why furries and gamers hate NFTs. Furries are really supportive of their content creators and after the success of Bored Ape many artists and community members had their arts stolen and turned into NFT. Gamers are still traumatized from loot boxes and are now overprotective against changes and price related topics.
The outside groups already have some bad baggage which in turn makes healing harder and shilling more damaging. Their concerns are real issues that must be solved, we need to reclaim this technology from the hands of those abusing the system like Hive did reclaiming Steem from Justin Sun.
They are missing out but how to change that? First we must change our approach
Why am I explaining all this in a post about spam and shilling? Because if you want to make Hive grow you will need to bring people from outside this space.
If your methods are already ineffective with folks that have a positive view towards Blockchains, how do you expect to have success with outsiders?
Be honest, if the Hive system was different and the voters didn't receive half the rewards, how do you think most posts would fare?
Luckily that's not the case and with a minimum of 10 votes per day to keep your voting mana at bay, even low quality posts with the right tags can be useful. But why not try your best with them?
Everyday when curating I find dozens of daily quest posts on SPT, lots of weekly progress of tokens on Leo, the Oneup is the land of giveaways and CTP, similarly to LEO, that what used to be weekly reports is now mostly a shilling fanfare for listnerds. That's the face folks will meet when clicking to search on recent and it's not an interesting view.
The sad part? All those projects are amazing! Listnerds is a revolution in mailmarketing, the Blockchain games on hive are some of the best p2e available, the Oneup cartel is a metaguild giving power to its members and so on!
I'm not saying you shouldn't do posts like that, after all it is your blog and you can use it as you please and I know writing isn't easy so many are here for the money first and foremost, but good content will always achieve better results.
There are a lot of content to be created and even the giveaways and shilling can be great if made with effort and creativity. It is just not it when you make a 200 words post saying how you tripled your money with one email, for example.
Marketing my way into your heart
Here in Brazil there is a saying that goes "publicity is the soul of business" and that's true, you have to publicize your business to get clients. Before it becomes organic mouth-to-mouth, you need to spread it actively.
Marketing is a form of art, the best commercials are designed to get stuck in your mind. In the television era some of them were even more entertaining than the shows they were interrupting.
Old Spice with their absurdism campaigns bordering surrealist art was responsible for taking the Mind share of the public in the body cleansing products segment. Dumb Ways to Die took what would be a boring PSA and turned it into one of the biggest marketing success of the last decade.
So the problem is not what is being promoted but the approach. You can say that what you post is giving is the possibility to earn money by upvoting it but that's the bare minimum, not a differential.
There are folks trying to educate the community; LeoFinance gives great financial advice teaching about the ins-and-outs of trading and crypto; the Cartel rewards above average posts and create guides like this to help those new to writing and editing have a better base in how to do it; the Brofund does a weekly newspaper sharing the last news and important events happening in Hive.
I believe all this hard work makes a difference and I hope it will help change the stigma about crypto so as no one will have to hide themselves in order to be part of this community.
Tag! You are it
Tags are a vital part of blogging in hive, not only by helping folks find your posts but they also allow you to earn layer 2 tokens.
Earning more is enticing but there are rules for using them, some have specific topics they require and using tags off-topic is a sure way to get down-voted and/or even blacklisted!
Using many tags for the same post can be difficult, so much that the user @dynamicrypto created the challenge of using ten tags correctly in one post. There are no rewards for that other than what your post will receive but it's fun nonetheless. Good luck and do your best trying it!
Tags can also be a problem when upvoting. You have a limited amount of votes per day and there are many tokens to upvote with, so to solve this problem the cartel came up with the curation program.
There are several curation accounts under the cartel to upvote the biggest tokens. Thanks to that, the money you have delegated is always used in upvoting the right posts and awarding good content.
We have strict guidelines for quality control, our curators are also writers for the cartel so they are really engaged with the community and the bots responsible for voting are being upgraded to keep voting power in the 95-99% window, maximizing the returns.
The cartel has a 5% operation fee which is small considering the job done and that this money is used to make the cartel grow. Here is a list of the tags we currently curate:
While we are still in this topic, what are your thoughts on people using more than
ten tags thanks to some front ends? Is it fair game or an unfair advantage? Should we curate overtagged posts? Let us know in the comments!
This post is a shilling for the cartel and an attempt at the 10 tags challenge. I did that to show you can do it while also bringing something else of value to the table.
If you want to know about the newest Blockchain games, invest in many projects while only spending a little and/or be part of an amazing community, join the Oneup Cartel and buy some cartel tokens! They are on sale at 11 HBD until mid February.
Also, check the communities mentioned here like LeoFinance, Alive, CineTV and CTPTalk. They are great!
Thanks for reading, do your best when posting and see you next time!
