Why is 'effort' a barometer relating to results?
It takes me 5 minutes to play something on the Piano that 99.9999% of the population could not replicate if they tried for 20 years.
Yet, it takes me very little effort because I've done the work (extreme effort) for 20 years to make it low effort.
These are obvious rhetorical questions. Because the answer, if it wasn't obvious is that what matters is results at the end of the day, and the effort is going to differ from person to person. Sometimes in a very significant way.
But the example above still doesn't capture the issue properly because excellence doesn't necessarily translate to the results which matter.
What are the absolute baseline results we should be rewarding? Well, given that we're a social protocol, given that we have baked in inflationary rewards, does it not pertain to having the goal be expansion of participation?
Expansion of participation can be observed with network topology, or in layman terms, engagement. But even then, the ultimate goal is to to get people to take ownership and want to buy or retain their stake. More people with stake, increases the 'proof of brain' and total productive output of crowd assessment of 'value' and then we have a self sustaining ecosystem that is constantly being reinforced.
At this point, I yawn whenever people talk about 'effort' -- my father is a surface physical chemistry researcher who has contributed in significant ways to the semi-conductor industry, has had papers published in Nature, and been invited to symposiums across the world for his work. If he were to publish original content here, it wouldn't get appreciated because I can name probably 1 person on Hive that I know, who could offer any meaningful engagement to that kind of content.
In that case, should we be rewarding something that has 1000% effort, accumulated not just through the weeks/months of effort to produce the content, but also the decades of research behind it to back the content? My answer is no. Effort =/= merit. Merit in the context of Hive, in the context of how we expand, grow is determined by the downstream effects.
As a classically trained musician, you could argue all day that musicians of this type have spent far more effort, time, to hone their craft in music, and yet you will never see any classical music at the top of the charts.
Results matter. Effort is just one prerequisite to achieve results. But there is no merit in effort alone. Implying that low effort is congruent with poor results is ridiculous.
It's almost as if, people have to pump out 1k+ words of mostly drivel to project the impression of effort.
If people want to talk about 'the value they bring to the table' -- then put some numbers down. Don't be wishy washy about it. How many people viewed your content? How many people engaged? How many referrals have you had with HP retention?
We talk about value all the time, but as someone else in this thread mentioned, would people be posting if there were no rewards?
Well, what is the use of rewards of any number of HIVE if HIVE itself is worth 0?
It therefore matters a lot whether we are optimizing and encouraging people to BUY HIVE. Without that, there is ZERO reward for everybody. We are all losers.
To this end, we've even encouraged IDLE participation amounting to reward pool leeching off productive HP holders via staking HBD. To that end, we're leaking 100k+ a month for nothing more than money which is locked up for 3 days.
Flip burgers 12 hours a day? Is that not a lot of effort? But what are the results?
Farm crops by hand for 18 hours a day, but serve just enough food for your own family? What about people who learned engineering, built machinery to accomplish 10,000x the results?
As far as I'm concerned, we are an attention economy. If you get attention, you are more likely to create the downstream net positive effects which add measurable quantitative value on chain. That's what matters.
Anything else is virtue signalling, and an opportunity for washed up people who can't get attention otherwise, to behave like social justice warriors.
That's exactly the point! I agree 100%. I see a lot of misconception on Hive, not saying is the case here on the original post, where a post needs to have 1000's of words or dozens of photos to be "quality content". Sometimes just a few words can generate lots of engagement, or maybe only a singe photo.
Value on a social network is engagement. But this is also hard to measure here on hive because of all the bots commentating on posts and all the auto votes. If it was possible to give more value on "original engagement" would be awesome.
This can be done on chain, and I'm gradually building something more robust than other efforts on this so far.
Essentially, you need to codify the obvious things a human curator would identify if they dug deep enough. Things like.. people not commenting on other peoples posts, or replying, or reaching beyond their little circles.
At liketu, we've already got a robust way of looking at legitimate interaction circles (check out your home feed for yours)
But essentially a web of trust which takes into account the types of engagement that are valid, and analyses the network propagation effects of this are used to measure the likelihood that it is real or not.
You would expect, someone who is giving/receiving a lot of viable engagement would have a broader network influence, then you just need to attach weights to the different things that matter to you. For example, we have the Hive Engagement League, and they've done quite well with finding out the top engagers. To extend that, you just need to find the recipients / beneficiaries of the most engagement.
Good thing about that, and indeed the work i'm doing, is that it's all based on on-chain activity, and the stats will speak for themselves.
When people make extraordinary claims, they should have extra ordinary proof to back that up. Well, soon they can :)
But this should be done in the blockchain level, not frontend, as we go back to the original concern, that is exploiting the reward pool. How do keep the spammers (real shitpost) from taking advantage of the reward pool?
Spammers will get no reciprocal interaction with respect to the spam they push out. All of this will be pulled from on-chain. There's a lot of things you can learn from on-chain activity if you just frame it the right way, and apply the right kind of analysis.
A web of trust is actually more of a qualitative exercise, because it's difficult to get very far if the accounts which validate you, are also of low quality.
Leaving a comment to remind myself to get back to reading these. :D