Been a while since I've had the time to write so figured I'd write on what I've been busy with lately. Aside from the usual voting on posts in niche communities and the odd ones here and there, which takes quite a bit of my daily time and surprisingly was something many seemed to not believe that I do myself, a lot of the plans have been going towards growing the usage of poshtoken, the way it works, getting it into a real token and also more plans for OCD.
Let's begin with POSH.
Proof of sharing was initially started to help the suffering Steemit platform get adrevenue so they'd be back on their feet, as we all know how things went down there, I'm glad POSH turned into something even more valuable and useful for our new home. We've seen the activity of sharing your posts grow over time quite a lot, they can easily be tracked on @themarkymark's @poshbot and with some restrictions also on @poshtoken. Now before you get all in arms about the rewards @poshtoken is earning, as someone dropped me a link to a recent Anonramblings about me upvoting those posts, tl;dr is, it's being rewarded for the development work. It seemed fair since the amount asked was not a lot and the way poshtokens are mined started from scratch, meaning there was no early ninjamine or unfair advantage to anyone. Next developments on it I believe will require more work thus we'll be considering a proposal for it, which gets me to my next part.
I wanted to talk about some ideas on things we could add to it more and to finetune it more, as of right now I'll be listing how it works and what the idea behind it is and after that I'll add some future ideas I've had for it but I'd be more than happy to hear your thoughts about them and if you have any more additions you think would improve it.
Right now, you copy a link of one of the most popular front-ends on Hive, add it to a tweet, add the $/#hive tag to it and some other relevant ones and tweet. Based on it's performance after 24h @poshtoken will pick it up and give it some tokens based on the daily amount that gets printed and how well everyone else did that followed the same rules and requirements. As you can see on our website created by @fbslo, the majority of them have gone to @null, this is because people who've been sharing hive links and using the tags would've been getting tokens if they had been registered to it (registration exists on the website too and I had a post about it recently that shows how).
So what's the idea behind it? The idea is mainly to get new users on Twitter to find out about your content, like them and consider creating a Hive account. On websites like @leofinance for instance they'll also get some adrevenue this way which helps their token, hopefully we will see something similar with @peakd at some point. Talking about @peakd, when sharing links you cna now also share your referral links from peakd meaning that newcomers will get you a memo that they signed up through your link and on their first posts they'll also share some beneficiary rewards with you which I think is pretty cool and more about that in our onboarding intiative later in this post.
The other idea, which one doesn't really think about at first glance, is that once poshtoken has some utility and exists as a real token on one of our 2nd layer sidechains, is that it will gain some value in one way or another and demand. Once that happens it means that anyone receiving newly printed poshtokens can exchange them for Hive, but what it also means is that anyone, whether or not their an author or just curator or just have an inactive Hive account, can earn poshtokens just by sharing other people's content and based on how well they do on their twitter they'll earn rewards. Yes, this also means that you can share older posts, remember @dan's post on Hive's* evil plan for world dominance, I could share this one now, get some likes and retweets and turn those poshtokens into Hive. I think this is going to be something that influencers are going to like down the line, but we're still very early on in the process and the token not existing and having any value yet is better for distribution until we finetune and add everything we want to it to make sure it's not being earned in an abusive/hacky way.
Utility, for utility, this could be a token that people could use to advertise their posts, maybe together with burning Hive, it will depend on which front-ends would want to use it but having a token you've earned to advertise your posts and Hive to also be used to further advertise your content within Hive would make sense and there's already some front-ends interested in using it for that.
Alright, now we're getting to the more plans for POSH part, here's some ideas, let me know what you think.
Sending people comments based on when they earned poshtokens and links to which tweets, so they can know how much they earned exactly and for which performance to improve over time on their Twitter activity. Some people say that Hiver's just being on twitter and liketrading their own stuff has no value, but I think us just being there and having a healthy presence can do wonders when it matters. If poshtoken incentivizes people to just spam like each other's stuff then I don't see it as a big negative because at the end of the day, impressions and performance matter on that platform, as you can tell by the stats that lunarcrush.com chases.
Adding some complexity to the algorithms based on things that matter on Hive and Twitter. Do you remember busy.org's upvote system? It used to vote you up based on the stake your followers had but still on average so that they're voting power wouldn't deplete based on how many were using it on a daily basis. This is an interesting metric in my opinion, cause similar to followers, likes, retweets on twitter upvotes, followers from inactive farm/socks can easily be had here on Hive due to our feeless transactions, but having followers who not only have stake but are also active is a lot harder. Which brings me to the next addition, activity of followers, have your followers commented/reblogged in the last month and have stake? Then you could be receiving a bit more POSH for it compared to others. Before you think, what does this have with Twitter to do? Well, it would be in addition to Twitter, there one could also have an algo calculate who was liking your posts, how many followers they have, etc, but as I said that one may be a bit harder and harder to make sure it's legit cause there everything is free and spammy, no one has stake.
These are all still theoretical as I'm not even sure how feasible it is to have bots calculate all that, maybe we need to build a miner for it at the same time. I'm sure you catch my drift by now, though, ideas like that that would improve the distribution of Posh and make the tokens have more value, which in turn means it would get more people wanting to participate, more traffic onto our front-ends and ultimately more accounts.
Alright, enough Posh for today, this post is already getting pretty long so I'll try to keep it shorter with the OCD plans.
A last thing about the posh website, though, which is connected to what we want to do with our onboarding initiative is that for communities they'll be able to check there whoever has signed up with posh if they are verified with a linked Twitter account. They can easily check there what they're twitter handle is and decide upon that if they want to give the user another role in their community which will make it easier for curators and harder for sockpuppets/plagiarists to leech rewards from unsure curators or those who don't really seem to care what they vote on, cough traf cough.
As you all know our focus for the past 6 months or so has been on niche communities and giving them more power to grow. Communities are still very underrated in my opinion, something not many seem to understand is that if most of us would be posting within communities for things that fit in there, a lot of the work to find plagiarism, theft, etc, would be made a lot easier by curators and moderators of said communities because that's their interest and specialty. They will have a much easier time finding out if content is real but not only that, knowing what is of exceptional content to reward it more. Once we start seeing more users join in the quality will surely not just match the one of Reddit but even surpass it considering people are also rewarded for their effort and content on here than just karma, views and "good job" comments.
We would now like to move on to onboarding initiatives.
We have recently connected our account creation tokens to be used through hiveonboard, starting with a trial run, we will be looking for users who are interested in inviting other users and content creators big or small to Hive and we believe we have the right incentives and guidance to do so. Here also though, we would love to hear if you have more ideas on how to improve this process, so far this is what we've been planning.
Hiveonboard & peakd referral links are not going to be mandatory but people can use them, we all know that referral links can push some people away cause they're not aware how exactly they work on Hive and the internet has in general given them a bad rep. Especially bigger content creators may not want to click on a referral link so it's your own decision if you use one or not. As an onboarder, you'll be assigned a role in our discord, this role will allow you to drop links of the onboarded users posts in a channel for curation. Here reputation is important because we all know how easy it can be for people to just refer their sockpuppets and get themselves easy rewards. With reputation we of course don't mean the number next to your name but your activity and history on Hive in general, so we'll be having a screening process for applicants to make sure they aren't the ones to risk their Hive rep in order to earn an upvote on a new account they themselves created. Needless to say trust can only get you that far, so eventually if the invited content creators have settled in we're also going to ask them if they can verify their account on one of their other socials or register for poshtoken which will make it close to impossible for the new users to not be socks.
Enough about socks now, though, on our Discord we will also be providing guidance to newcomers. I was recently in talks with the owner of an esport team and he mentioned that he'd love to have each gamer have their own hive account but the learning curve is what concerned him. Here our plan would be to have dedicated onboarders + curators to be present to assist them, but as you all know it is something that takes time which brings me to my next point.
After the trial run, if this seems worthwhile and successful, we'd want to scale it up through a proposal for everyone's involvement of moving this along and bringing in more users and content creators. As for the trial run, we're thinking of doing something like writing compilation posts of the invited users and highlighting them for people to follow, while the post rewards are collected and sent out to onboarders, guidance and other workers that spent time on everything. We did have a test run of this last year but interest wasn't high. We do believe things are different this time with censorship being as high as ever and other cryptocurrencies bringing more attention to blockchain to the masses. So we're looking forward to see how this plays out.
With communities doing well now and taking care of the users posting in them, we think focusing on new users and guiding them straight into the communities of their interests and hobbies will increase retention by a lot, at the same time them being able to refer and invite others themselves and us guiding them along the way it can have a nice snowball effect.
PS! Sorry to the ones that read all of this as it was quite the wall, I'll try and dish out bigger comment votes for those who did. Thanks for your time and reading!
Feel free to comment on anything and if you have any ideas we like it would be awesome!
