A Summary Behind How I Manage HivePH

I’m going to give you a fair warning that this post will be full of words and more words. So if you’re easily bored about complex matters and long paragraphs, this post isn’t worth your time. Respect your time and be entertained somewhere else. I’ll be talking about how HivePH community is being run.

Like my other posts that lacks aesthetics, I just prioritize substance over form. It’s not part of my objective to make this post fun, the important matters don’t necessarily have to be fun, in fact, this post is anti-fun because it will talk about details that are overlooked when running a community on Hive.

I’m talking about how I run the community since I got the lead role more than 2 years ago.

Incentivizing community involvement and improving reward distribution.

When I designed the community’s infrastructure, I had the above sentence serve as my prompts in determining which objectives will matter the most in the long term. There was a time when I paid a lot of attention to the community account’s voting patterns, APR, and everything related to its functions. I still do but not as intense as before. I needed a baseline of what the status quo I am changing and who I’m going to run in conflict with for these changes.

Being in a bear market, there wasn’t any opposition. Most of the people that said they gave a fuck about the community and love Hive left with their motivations to blog. So all that talk about this place being a hobby, loving the platform and people in it was just a lip service. But this wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the effects of the bear market work. Every season has their own set of community members, HivePH just happens to be in the bad times.

Great, so now I don’t have any problems booting out some inactive people in the server. What else can I do to improve systems that currently work? The community account was sitting at 100% most of the time, there wasn’t a lot of curation activity going and there was a need to sign up more curators in the team.

Though there was a template for the curation compilations, it was still inefficient relative to the time it takes to edit. The problem with volunteering to make this community work is the bulk of one’s time is spent over something that doesn’t generate them enough value compared to the thing that they’re putting out. Sure, the community account gets curated but the curators don’t get any compensation, so setting curators as beneficiaries for the posts worked.

This method of reward distribution for curators isn’t new and it’s being done by other communities but it wasn’t implemented on HivePH for some reason. When I looked at the community’s infrastructure, there were a lot of improvements that could be done but weren’t because it was a ghost town. There weren’t enough people motivated to run it and it’s doing the bare minimum of curation compilations just to tell people out there that we still existed. I think the lowest number of active users recorded was around 14 users on the community page from peakd back in those days?

So how does a community with a 150+ users subscribed and 200 users on Discord exist like it’s less than 15 people present? It doesn’t. I just removed a lot of users on our Discord server, no point in tagging everyone that never gave a fuck, I don’t want to bother people that moved on from the community, and it was best to leave them at peace somewhere else. I still trim some member list on the server when I have the time.

If you participate in the system, you get a chance to be rewarded by the system. Give the community nothing, and you get nothing. Everyone will be recognized by their merits and through those merits they are able to earn those social rewards. While the vision is to support HivePH members is still on the table, I don’t subscribe to the idea that they can freely be rewarded just because they exist. Everyone has to do their share, find a niche where they be useful for everyone else or leave.

When people new to the community join in the server, there’s a rite of passage where everyone is set as a guest (bisita). Through peer review by existing members, they can get voted on to earn that membership. The member role (hayahay) sets them up for other privileges such as access to community stake. Members can trigger a bot to vote on their posts once a daily. It’s the same bot used for the curation efforts (kem-bot) across different Hive based servers. The value of the upvotes are based on tiers separated by “Angkan/Clan”.

We have a side community account called @hivephilippines to do the voting. We don’t mandate anyone who wants to be part of this community to delegate. If they want to support other members, they can lend the account their HP and see how it affects other members. The prerequisite was being friendly enough for others to give you those privileges and you weren’t required to pay anything. This peer review system is in place to screen out those that just want to be in the community for the sake of votes. And delegating to the hivephilippines account isn’t going to buy anyone their membership. Be friends with everyone and everyone will vouch that you’re worth it.

How the community’s stake is being used can be evaluated using “/profile hiveph” or “/profile hivephilippines” you’ll see who the account has been voting on and how much for the past 30 days.

There’s no need to spend any mental space for those that don’t show up. We do it for those that stay. There are no promises of riches. This is pure voluntary work which makes those people that bother stand out even more.

How the community uses its income is mentioned on our monthly reports. I was pushy when I started this trend of making the monthly reports but I needed a baseline to know where the community was at and where it is now. It’s also a means to communicate to those that want to bother with the community how funds are being used. The community has been occasionally engaging in community work even outside within and for projects outside itself. Call it a way of giving back to the general Hive ecosystem for supporting its growth.

Members that take initiative to help other members, members that facilitate community events, members that become a community resource for a variety of things, these are the members that I want to build with within the community. Because the long term benefit here isn’t for the internet points, it’s for the people that are here and people that will be onboarded on the Hive ecosystem. Good user experience starts when people find themselves involved with an active community that is out to look after them.

What problems are being solved by bothering? Well, if you got a community of Filipinos that got their shit together, onboarding users would be easy, the new users get to hear what works and doesn’t on the platform and these opens up to more opportunities than getting onboarded and left to figure it out for yourself how Hive works.

Going a little controversial when it comes to the use of Hive as an ATM for some, I don’t really care how one uses their funds earned from the platform as long as they are putting in the work to make this place better than when they found it. We all have our reasons to be here and it’s naïve to think money isn’t a motivator when shitposting. Because HivePH is using the stake that was accumulated from the previous Filipinos since the legacy chain existed, there is no absolute owner to this stake.

I’m sure I made some enemies in pursuing some changes but fuck it, it’s not like I operate for validation or care about the negative sentiments of people that don’t even give a fuck about me. I have a goal, and that goal is to improve this community’s status, create an environment where everyone wins while doing it for the common good. And as bullshit as this goal sounds, it’s exactly what I’m pursuing. In a space where people often be skeptic about noble goals made by random people that are too good to be true, I could understand the need to be skeptic. That’s why I don’t start with the best foot forward, I step on your foot and tell you what I want to happen or so help me I’ll do it myself so get out of my way.

I repeat it again: That’s why I don’t start with the best foot forward, I step on your foot and tell you what I want to happen or so help me I’ll do it myself so get out of my way. This line of thinking got me in conflict with other Filipinos since the legacy chain for calling our BS about financial literacy, blockchain literacy, and trying to win over support for ideas they don’t really believe in. And for what? For votes? Nice to have met them at some point but I hope I never see them active here again.

Hive as an ecosystem is one of the best places to create a win-win situation for everyone that gives it value. In reference to what Acidyo wrote on this post, if the system requires you to vote on other people’s post and you 50% kickback as a curator for bothering, it’s only greed that dictates why you’d want to vote on yourself. If you’re out to play a team game, it’s in your best interest to uplift the people around you because making them capable to support others can synergistically bring out opportunities that weren’t available to you in the first place.

It’s not the poor folks that brings about social change, it’s the middle class that can be an intermediary because the poor folks would be more concerned about survival than think about long term growth and status quo, the rich will have their way. And I applied the same thinking for the common folks on Hive that have accumulated some stake that makes them capable enough to redistribute Hive to other users.

The featured posts on curation compilations aren’t automated. These were handpicked by curators and peer reviewed. We copied the system from the old c-squared community curation where a post gets dropped and after achieving enough number of thumbs up emojis will the post get listed for the compilation (but the post has already been upvoted, it’s just handpicking which ones get on the compilation).

The @hiveph account is a community stake and the staff that runs it are acting as stewards. There’s a community promise that it’s never meant to powerdown its stake and will be available for future users on the platform. So what we’re doing here is to keep that stake growing and improve its reward distribution functions so everyone can be incentivized to get involved with the community on Hive.

There’s no room for entitlement in this community because anyone that shows any signs of demanding support or votes gets put on the hot seat for examination. People will be judge based on their merits. The community’s current resources aren’t enough to mount to big votes. There’s no loss if some member here decides to leave and just focus running their own blogs to earn big votes for their time, they’re actually being efficient if they do so. I just hope they don’t expect anything from a community that they never gave a fuck about in the first place.

None of these plans will ever come to fruition if it’s going to implemented half-baked and run by the people that aren’t even remotely interested in the community. The strongest asset any community will ever have is its human resource, and it’s also a community’s human resource that is its weakest link.

I do not claim full credit to whatever this community accomplished and it will accomplish in the future. It is where it is now due to the people that make it up.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.