The HoboDAO's Adjustment To #NewSteem
The HoboDAO's Adjustment To #NewSteem
The atmosphere after #NewSteem has changed the experience for many users and community projects, and it is forcing the HoboDAO to make changes as well.
The aim of the HoboDAO has always been to foster high quality content on Steem and enhance the incentives for curators to actively curate authors of high caliber.
The motives of many of the users on Steem that are liberally using downvotes to discourage behavior and programs they dislike is understandable. They hope to get down to true Proof of Brain reward distribution. However, that initiative is also driving multiple programs to shut down entirely.
Photo by Thaís Silva from Pexels
Is it really a good riddance situation?
One of the most active and engaging communities is the Steem Basic Income program and it has recently become a target of this free downvote #NewSteem movement. The HoboDAO has been involved in leveraging the SBI system to reward our contestants and now both our contestants and the DAO's primary account are being targeted for doing so.
What will be our response?
If you can't beat them, power down... The HoboDAO is going to function as a decentralized curation community, but we're going to do it exclusively with our partnership token programs. We will be rewarding winners of our contests in Natural tokens, Lotus tokens, Build tokens, Foodie tokens and Intrepreneur tokens.
When voted against with Steem Power, vote back with STEEM.
We will keep only enough SP powered up to cover RC needs for our @hobo.ntrl, @hobo.lotus, @hobo.build, @hobo.int, @hobo.foodie and our @hobo.media accounts and no more. We will not be giving out any more SBI, we will not be utilizing DLease.io's services anymore and we're not going to use Steem Power voting for rewards.
Do you feel this is an extreme action?
The HoboDAO from its beginning aimed to reward quality content in a 100% positive manner and that's what we will continue to do. It is not the HoboDAO's role to enforce its principles on others, however, the foundation of the HoboDAO is positive reinforcement and downvoting is an action that has the potential to create negative energy and to discourage free expression.
In our contests we encourage our Casters (contest judges) to highlight the good and not underline the bad in a post, because we want to encourage content producers to try again and to incorporate the successful traits of the works of winning authors. Steem seems to have become a battleground, and the HoboDAO will not be taking part in that battle.
We will focus on our partnered communities and working with them to improve the quality of content that exists within their communities rather than the wide community of Steem.
In the future, if Steem voting becomes less political perhaps the HoboDAO will return to using SP for rewarding quality content producers, but until that happens we have to adapt and change strategy and that means moving on to rewarding from alternative reward pools.
HoboDAO Delegation Mining
This policy change does have an impact on our delegation system. If we're not going to be rewarding in SP-based upvotes then it does not make a lot of sense to continue this program.
The benefit of ending this program is that it tightens up the circulation of the Hobo token, which could be a good thing since circulating supply is quite a bit more than the current demand.
We will continue rewarding delegators up to 12/31/2019 and after that point any remaining delegations will not be rewarded with tokens. If you have been delegating to the HoboDAO please adjust your delegations accordingly and thank you for your support and participation!
Thank you for your support on my posts folks, it has been appreciated.
I must say that after the first couple of weeks of HF21, I was using the reward distribution tool (aka upvotes and downvotes) because you need to treat both equally and there were a LOT of over rewarded posts. I think anyone would agree with that.
But the retaliation is not what they are for and unfortunately, when dealing with emotional beings such as humans, it was inevitable that this would happen. So I always wanted to give feedback on what I downvoted to help that person write better content in future. Of course I got some push back, wrote a post explaining all there is to know about the rewards pool and the role of upvotes and downvotes which DO have an important role to play and how they are fundamentally different to the emotion reaction buttons on fb, twitter etc.
Anyway, I moved on, put it behind me and focused on what I like doing which is creating content and trying to make someone smile in the process.
Now, with SBI, I can see both sides of the story here. I did have 630 shares but did start getting downvotes as I suspected I would.
The good side of sbi - supporting new joiners, great for contests and initiatives and getting people to stick around.
The bad side of sbi - it is still a form of vote buying, just spread out over a long period of time as when you buy an sbi share for someone, you are also buying a vote for them AND you. And these auto votes continue for the lifetime of your posting content. This is what we wanted to get away from when HF 21 came about.
So I can see why the downvotes are coming despite them being ironically from a former/current bid bot owner.
That's my thoughts on it. I should probably write a post about SBI trying to be balanced.
Anyway, thanks again for your support and good luck with the future projects!
People can believe what they want about downvotes, a bunch of people on Steem really believe in them, but I never have and I believe it is what will keep Steem low ranked as a social network and blockchain. You can't train the global community of the internet to "get use to them" because that is an undertaking of monumental proportions.
Additionally, its forcing one's ideals onto others, downvotes discourage expression of unpopular opinions and give power and influence to the wealthy few over the many. I prefer social atmospheres where every voice is equalized and good ideas rise to the top due to community recognition rather than the appeasement of a wealthy individual.
Well, let's just say, we see things differently about downvotes :)
Thanks for commenting!