Ever since I started on here, or rather on that blockchain that shall not be named, I've been trying to cipher out a rhyme or reason to upvotes. What makes a post do well? What makes a post do poorly? What is 'doing well'?
In a lot of ways it's like when I used to wait tables. Sometimes you do good work and put lots of effort in for minimal reward, other times you barely do anything and are richly rewarded. In the long run it averages out so there's no sense getting excited about either but it still leaves you wondering why?
With everything going on here on hive, cause and effect can get a little cloudy. Even after years of trying to identify common threads, the best I've been able to come up with is a few sneaking suspicions.
Got a notification yesterday that my last post was the post with the most upvotes of the day. How the hell did that happen? I'd hit publish more out of frustration than satisfaction, that was the last thing I was expecting.
Trying to make sense of why that post brought me back around to pondering voting on here in general but things were still clear as mud. Guess there's nothing to do but ask the hive. Anyone got thoughts/theories/observations/bad advice on what gets the votes (or doesn't)?
In a way hive incentivizes positive content, or at the very least divisive/controversial/negative stuff is going to have a much smaller pool of potential votes. As a cynic and a pessimist, I have trouble being positive for more than brief periods but some of those have been quite rewarding. It's a trap!
Everybody loves to travel. Even if it is vicariously through ones and zeros. When I was getting started it seemed like my travel related posts were about the only ones that went anywhere. Now that we have communities and no bidbots the dynamic is a bit different, but it's still not a bad way to rack up rewards.
On some level it seems almost distasteful to do things specifically/solely for the rewards, like it cheapens your output somehow. At the same time, who can honestly say potential rewards weren't a big part of why you joined up in the first place?
Noticed a pattern (voting or otherwise) here on hive? Drop me a comment and let me know. And as they say on election day here in Kentucky, vote early and often!
Well, it seems in the current ecosystem, if your post catches the eye of the right curator, the trail of followers gives one heck of a boost without much rhyme or reason. I actually read the post, and I may have seen it before the Great Bot Parade. Alas, automation kills organic viewership and support. At least people aren't buying this kind of recognition now, though. I don't miss that clusterfuck.
Yeah, the overwhelming majority of votes I get are from curation trails, although it's more the right 4-5 curators. Lol, I'm stealing the Great Bot Parade.
Kinda like what government does to social/personal responsibility?
Yeah, I'm quite glad that clusterfuck is now just a thing for us old timers to reminisce about, do not miss that in the least.
I post what I want and hope people like it rather than trying to cater to the curators or whatnot but the seeming randomness of it still leaves me a bit puzzled. I know if I do a post on say abortion or BLM, or even politics generally it's not going to do as well as one on the Rockies or the desert. C'este la vie. I intentionally made the photos in this a mix of all that just to see what'd happen.
When I was first starting out I viewed posting as something of a business proposition, I was on there to make money and whatever maximized that was the way to go. The longer I stick around the less inclined I am to do that, although I'm not sure exactly why that is.
😂
Congrats on the new badge, bout'fa king time. You deserve it dude. And earned it. Hive wouldn't be the same without Jethros images and front line updates.
Thank ya! Lol, I think all the curation trails come together for that one.
I have no idea, can't really say much because I've written posts that I thought would do well that did abysmally and others that I posted and wasn't entirely happy with that did better so I really don't know. I think you just need to write for the love of writing and hope for the best. Kinda like the lottery 🤣
Yeah, I'm sure part of it is just differences in people's tastes/interests but that still doesn't explain all the seeming randomness to it sometimes. My relationship with writing is more of a love/hate one. Still, I write what pleases me and hope others like it rather than the other way round. Pretty sure it'd be enough to drive one mad if you tried to do it any other way.
Indeed 🤣
Yeah... as @jacobtothe said. Looks like rightnow is about catching the eye of a whale...
For me it's better this way, sure there's room for improvement, but i think the best way is to post what makes you feel good or fine, and interact with the community the best you can...
Less about whales than curation trails these days but yeah, it's a matter of getting your stuff seen by the right people.
Oh yeah, it's definitely better than it was. I probably should have included a disclaimer that this wasn't intended as criticism (this is the internet after all), more of a voicing of observations to see how they compared to what others had noticed.
Yeah, anything else just seems to take the fun out of it. Or at least for me it does.
Great photography right here. However, no matter how fascinating I find people, nature always wins my heart.
Thank you! That's kind of what I was getting at talking about travel stuff, nature has a universal appeal that I've yet to find with another topic.
Some wicked photos here. You know, your cover shot, when looking at the thumbnail has this face or large eye feeling. That shot is particularly cool (my subjective opinion).
I could say something that applies to both waiting tables and posting but I'm really going to shove my foot fingers in my mouth if I do and it's only a tiny fraction of the equation, if there is an equation, of which the only one I can think of is human nature, plus what human nature is teaching autonomic intelligence.
I have one answer for that but it's not the answer to the questions you're asking here. Nonetheless, I'm going to say it anyway since you're probably going to be down with it anyway, as I ramble...
My answer to those three questions is this. I must please myself with what I create, what I say and meet my standards. Beyond that whatever happens is out of my hands.
Thank you. Lol, I'd thought of that first photo as a mountain peeking through the clouds, which fits well with the face/eye thing I think :)
I mean the human element is always going to be a bit of a wildcard, at the same time it's what makes us look for explanations/patterns/trends.
Lol, I was asking questions that I didn't expect to be answered, at least not directly/in full. Yeah, we're pretty well on the same page, I post as I like and hope others like it but even if they don't it's not my problem. It was just a bit puzzling to me, I'd felt that my last post just barely met my standards, so getting the top upvotes thing was a surprise, especially when stuff that I thought was to a higher standard didn't do nearly as well.
You're welcome, lol, well, I guess I interpreted that photo well. I really like that one.
Hmmm, well I can't say I haven't analyzed this at times, but what I find is if I step way back, it's the same patterns that I've seen throughout my life, just a different situation. Although, I've had the puzzled experience as well. Your last post was written really well and punchy in a way I found appealing, but that doesn't answer it since you're consistent in your approach.
I should ignore such questions? I'm not sure I'd want to do that, lol.
Yeah but our brains have an amazing knack for seeing what they want to see. I wanted to find out what others were seeing to tell if/how it differed from what I was seeing.
Nikv's comment below explained at least some of the puzzle, at least for me.
Let me rephrase that, I was asking questions that I didn't think there was a definitive answer to. More interested in seeing how others perceived those things than finding the answer.
Lol, I'd rather you not.
I just plod along doing what I enjoy, communicating with those whose posts aphave continued to catch my eye and with those that communicate with me. The big votes are a bonus but slowly slowly if we stick to what we do we may build up our own community of followers and people we follow. I hear what you’re saying thiugh and have often felt the same. I only do manual voting as it keeps it rewl for me
Yeah, my approach is much the same as yours it seems. I wasn't writing this to criticize the way things are so much as trying to make sense of it. I'm pretty sure there's a connection there somewhere between just plodding along and communicating and the votes, the more you plod along the more likely you are to have a curator for one of the trails find your post. I used to do only manual voting but I have the attention span of a coked out squirrel so I started doing some automatic stuff to cover for the times I've gotten distracted and wandered away from hive for a bit.
I'll explain some of the randomness of one curation project: their philosophy is to spread rewards to as many users as possible so we are allowed to submit any posts we want but there's a caveat: there's an 18hour cool-off period enforced between submissions and a 5-day cool-off period for a particular person per curator. The bot runs the upvotes and the size of the upvote is determined solely by the number of posts in the voting queue at the time of voting. So as much as I may like your post, what happens depends on factors beyond my control. There was talk on making the bot's logic more sophisticated, whereby we could select to give some posts relatively bigger votes but that hasn't happened, the developer is only human and has a day job.
Hence the "it all evens out" approach tends to be best but there are those sorts of rules in place in most projects to avoid things becoming a circle-jerk and those have unintended side-effects.
Other projects do have their own criteria and ways of voting but yeah, I notice that the nature/travel/etc gets favoured by some. You also have lazy whales that vote manually but just open the trending page and vote whatever they see there
Thank you for that explanation, clears things up a good bit. I'd come to suspect there was some sort of cooling off period back when I was still trying to do a post every day but had no clue how that might work.
Good ol unintended consequences 😅
I chalk the nature/travel stuff up to its broad appeal, but it's curious to see how it plays out. Now to see if anything else goes over similiarly. Hmm, now I'm going to have to start checking the trending when I get a whale vote.
Congratulations. Today's #monomad second place is yours.
Thank You very much for participating and for being part of the Black And White Community!
Woot! Thanks so much!
Thank you!