Fish in a bucket

It has been a pretty chill day, spending a bit of it having a picnic by the lake and I was even able to catch some tiny fish in a bucket, which made my daughter really happy. We let them go again of course and we put them back with their school of tiny pupils too.

I also spent some time on the backside curation activities, which has been really interesting and I have learned a few things. Since starting on Hive, I have often run personal experiments of various kinds, as I am interested in seeing what I can glean from the changes.

This week is going to be interesting on many ways, as is next, as so many people have smashed their voting power. Mine is at about 20%, which I believe is the lowest it has ever been, but I have voted on something like 500 posts in the last 24 hours. This brings up some interesting points in itself that some don't know or remember.

When voting power (VP) is at 100%, a full 100% vote will take 2% of the power, the mana. 2% takes 2.4 hours to return, which is where the "10 full votes a day" comes from, as it takes 24 hours for 20% of voting power to return.

However, this 2% is on a scale and the vote value doesn't actually lessen the more one votes, although the maximum value of each vote does as the mana depletes. Why this is, is while 2% drops from a 100% vote when VP is full, when voting power is 50%, a 100% vote will drop the power only 1%. And if voting power is say 25%, a 100% vote will drop it 0.5%. This means a $2 100% vote at full power, is a $1 100% vote at half power. The lower the VP goes, the harder it is to use.

Currently, my normally almost 5 dollar vote is 1 dollar, because my voting power is just over 20%.

I have voted a lot and I have learned a few things through doing so. I was trying to vote on accounts that had already been voted quite heavily, so that there is more balance in the distribution of the curation, rather than just a handful of accounts getting it all.

Things I have learned:

• there are a lot of individual authors earning a fair amount. I was voting on quite highly rewarded posts.

• there are quite a few authors consistently earning. I saw many unfamiliar names multiple times.

• there are an inordinate amount of makeup posts earning a lot. Dozens and dozens of them.

• there is by glance, some effort going into many of these posts.

• there is still a lot of crap posts, but not that much at 20+

• there are a lot of Spanish language posts earning high amounts.

• less familiar names than I thought there'd be earning. The vast majority of names I had never seen before.

It was really interesting to go through this exercise and while I don't really call it curation, due to the speed I was moving, I did try to take note of what I was looking at with a glance at least.

The other thing that has come up in quite a few conversations in the last days, is how excited people are to have "old posts" curated. While these really aren't old as they are just six days or so, normally on Hive there isn't much voting past a day or two. It would be brilliant in the future to have voting remain open on posts indefinitely, as that would give rise to far more incentive to create "evergreen" content that can provide audience value at anytime.

Evergreen content also gives rise to true account building as well as valuable stuff like DIY content, memes, stories, infographics and all kinds of collateral that can be used and shared indefinitely. Having a week for earning only, increases the need for immediate attention grabbing, lower quality and topical content. People are less likely to put as much effort in if they know that they only have a few days on which to earn and past that, it is unlikely to ever even be seen again. Evergreen means Hive links can be referenced all over the Internet years after they were first posted.

As said, it is going to be interesting what happens in the next week past this too, as while voting power is likely to be low with many people, there are still going to be HIVE in the pool and all of these things affect distribution. I am also looking forward to some numbers coming out on different aspects of the ongoing activity.

One other thing that is interesting to note is that while this is strange and unexpected, it is mostly beneficial to the people who have been active. Essentially, the only people who are going to be curating older posts are active users, whether they are doing it manually or have set up automation for it. The set-and-forget curators are not paying attention. Also, the pre-fork open posts that are getting curated, are essentially getting curated twice, as there is incentive to do so currently. This means it is the content creators who posted in the week prior to the fork who will be getting additional curation attention on their posts from accounts that aren't regulars. For example, there are 500+ posts that I have voted on where most wouldn't have seen my vote at all.

At precisely 7 days past the hardfork, things will settle into the new code normal of Equilibrium and we will be able to see how it performs, but until then, relax and have a little fun with the short-term conditions and see what you might learn from it.

For me, the disruption has been a welcome distraction from many things and I have enjoyed the chance to hold my own experiments. I am looking forward to when this ends though, as I would like to find out more how the hf25 curation affects the community behavior, but there are months to observe that, this is just a short week.

Take it easy. Roll with it.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]