Attention

Noticed a post today from a, let's say, pro-AI person who had their posts filled with potentially AI generated comments. Now I'm not sure if they all belong to the same person pretending to fake consumption of their posts and at the same time rewarding all of the comments with votes but either way it made me think.

Now I'm someone who's spent a lot of time on Hive, I have something over 30,000 comments and I don't generally go around throwing them left and right like "nice post", etc, although some times as a curator there's not always much to say so you kinda wanna throw something in there rather than leaving the comment section of a post empty. What I'm getting to however, is that a lot of people follow me, partially because of my activity but partially also because I like to reward them with a vote whenever they leave what I perceive to be genuine comments on my posts. Not all deserve a reward, however. I have quite a few users muted that always leave comments I deem to be indistinguishable from spam/bloat and some of them continue to do so to my surprise. There's also many bot comments that verify someone tipping random hive tokens to the author or another comment that I don't really like all the space they take in the comment section so I'm happy authors are able to mute accounts so they're one click away from being visible and taking up that much space to others.

Since a lot of people follow me and I've been quite active in engagement, curation and building tools and projects on the platform, it makes sense that when I some times make some posts like my last one where I ask simple things a lot of real genuine comments appear on the posts. It's not because the post gets to trending always or because my vote rewards are that big in the comment section but most likely because a lot of the current active users like to engage with my posts (I hope). Whereas they may not spend as much time on an author that doesn't engage back with them or curate them because they just autovote or they go afk often to lose that certain connection from time to time.

I don't really wanna name the user in this example, but let's just say about half of the comments on that post seemed very "fake" whereas most of the comments on my previous post seemed real. And you can verify this because most of those users are active with other things on Hive. They post themselves, they comment on other people's posts, they reply to comments on their own posts, interact with dapps in our ecosystem, do a lot of different things whereas those "fake" accounts on that users posts had quite literally not done anything in two weeks until that user started posting again. This is kind of what I talked about in one of my posts where the transparency that our blockchain brings to us makes it often easy to track and figure out which accounts are real and which may not be. On top of being able to determine that these set of fake accounts were only doing one thing and poorly at that, faking activity on only this one users account.

Now I'm not going to go too deep into the future and people who are going to try harder to fake this kind of activity as it's hard to predict what that's going to look like and how hard it is going to be to figure that out even with our transparent actions on here.

A lot of people say things like "these users are just commenting on your posts for a vote" and honestly it's kind of a dumb statement in my opinion because it's a feature, not a negative thing. If you're rewarding and welcoming any and all comments then it's kind of on you as an author that you're enabling this which may make the consumption of your comment section on posts quite a bad user experience for the real users trying to consume more. Being able to reward your followers and engagements with some rewards is one of Hive's biggest advantage. I'm sure other YouTubers, Twitch Streamers, etc, would love this feature, especially when it comes at no cost to themselves other than the dilution of stake they hold much like everyone else.

There's been many unique accounts over the years of this platforms existence who've had a lot of stake but not everyone has used it well. I could go into long rants about this and the often misuses of their stake or delegations, but very few did it "the right way" so that even if that stake or delegation went away they came out on top as of having gained something from the time they had it in terms of social connections and activities. Maybe they didn't really care about that and were just focused on that short-term monetary gain and I guess over time it showed as people quickly stopped consuming their posts and engaging with them.

Now I'm not going to lie and tell you all the engagement I get is just because I'm such an active and wonderful person, I'm sure there's people who hope for more things than a small comment upvote when interacting with myself such as a follow or checkup on their account but I think it's fine that it works that way and that they try to do so, especially if they're newer accounts being overlooked and trying to do hive the right way.

There are also cases where a lot of newcomers and authors with no stake receive a lot of engagement because of their posts or their activity. Even if they don't have anything to offer the consumers in terms of monetary value they may know that if they've put in the work to grow an audience, recurring consumers and an active presence that the rewards may come sooner or later. That's kind of the beauty of hive and I'm glad to see more and more projects and stakeholders pay attention to mainly reward those people who seem to get genuine interactions and consumption over those just trading votes and creating general whatever content.

Anyway, not sure what this post was about exactly, I kinda sidetracked a bit here and there but generally pretty happy with the way hive and the community here is shaping up and seeing more people "understand" what makes things valuable and what's right and wrong to be doing. Very excited for the future of web3 social so cheers for that and thank you to whoever still keeps reading my posts and following me and ourselves along in this unique journey we can hopefully share with many others soon.