It might seem that way, but as I said, we havent really got the math down to prove if it is an exploit or actually just a different way of spending your Hive.
As usual, it only really starts turning heads when someone DOES do something exploitive with it.
Consider this:
I have myself, my wife and my three kids on Hive. My wife and I both contribute content, a variety. We aren't bringing massive money from outside Hive, we bring content and we bring other people. We make the platform busy and worthwhile and social. We teach our kids.
As time goes by, I sponsor a little HBI here and there to my wife and kids and my own HBI stacks up. In a matter of years I might have a couple of hundred or a thousand.
I have been posting regularly on Hive for years by this point, earning crypto for my time. The SBI votes will have increased but will be insignificant compared to all the other votes I have built up by then. Look at your average votes on a post as an example.
I don't consider this exploitive behavior.
Now imagine an exploitive behavior by someone who has no altruism at heart and wishes only to profit.
They come to Hive with $1,000,000 and build 2 or more accounts with fairly chunky bits of HP. Then they buy thousands of HBI tokens, sponsoring their alt account. Now both have HBI.
Now this person starts posting with both accounts. They don't break any rules such as plagiarizing, spamming or posting in the wrong community, but what they post is garbage.
They do not engage with others and do not follow or vote for other people's stuff. Just the two(or more) alt accounts. Each will earn from votes on HBI(SBI) and their own votes. Their content is just enough to not get into trouble but adds nothing to the platform or to our little society.
THAT would be exploiting the rewards pool. they will start pulling their $1mil back and go beyond, draining Hive of value in exchange for nothing.
These are interesting scenarios to consider. The first case is our intended audience. You build some up, you build up your wife, your kids, value accrues and you get rewards whenever you post, but you don't have to post everyday because you keep accruing value even when you don't post.
The second is something that we would consider to be an 'attack vector' that we think about a lot. There are some ameliorating factors.
In the few cases where your second scenario has played out, we had some conversations with the user, skip-listed their account temporarily, and then coordinated with them to transfer units to respected community accounts when they decided to move on.
Thank you very much @steembasicincome. I really like those answers!
I agree that it would take forever to get your money back but it is nice and positive growth. I like the fact that you can reward someone else like a gift with HBI and also get some yourself. Building up my family accounts helps the kids with low payouts as they arent expected to be Hive rockstars. It takes little to motivate them and it helps.
I was not aware that HBI was transferrable? How does one manage it? All I have done up till now is buy it on peakd.
I learn new things every day!
There is also an option "sbi skip" I forget how to use it. You can skip your upvotes while the price of hive is low, so you can save you SBI votes for when the price of hive is high.
Ooooooh! That's interesting! Let me know if you figure it out again!
But I suppose with 24 HBI it does not matter too much?
#sbi-skip
has to be in the body of the post, and it skips out your vote.
I don't really know how much difference it makes, its just a tidbit I read about on a post the other day. Someone only posts when hive price is "high" so they can save up their SBI upvotes. Its easy enough to do a similar thing by skipping the payout.
Indeed. I guess it is a valid enough a strategy as long as you have significant quantities os HBI store up.
It is not exploiting, it is investing.
The 1,000,000 is locked up forever - that helps the eco-system.
And, who gets to decide what "garbage" is. An account which posts short content and gets great payouts is a massive marketing (for the blockchain) opportunity.
I don't think a short post is garbage at all. But there IS some actual garbage out there. lol
Luckily, we choose on hive who to follow and usually we will not be exposed to that kind of content since we follow people with similar interests as ourselves within communities.
You WONT see the garbage posts supported by massive amounts of HBI. They could remain completely hidden, posted on obscure communities or personal blogs with a single, non-trending tag.
However, as @steembasicincome has stated, if someone really is milking the system with rubbish (real exploitive rubbish) then they can skip-list someone.
We are not talking about a short post here. We are talking about arbitrary posts with no meaning or value that you would NOT want to showcase. I have seen stuff like that. I am not going to link an example. I don't need enemies! lol
That's a great example. And yeah I never thought of SBI as an exploit, I loved the project. Heck I did like 3000 SBI sponsored shares or something lol
I believe it was mentioned in another comment, the culture was much different back then. And we were just ending our 'bid bot' relationships lol
Indeed. I think that we all want to see a sustainable model for earning on the blockchain. A place where today's effort itself has the financial interest capability to make a difference in our lives in the future and not just go hand to mouth.
Anything that threatens this will be targeted by the many members of the community.
Back in the day when I played a lot of Warhammer 40,000 I was often called the Loop-hole Master. 🤣🤣🤣
It's a GOOD thing to explore weaknesses in a system if your objective is sustainability.