![Screenshot 2022-08-22 23.14.11.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/friendlymoose/EpLmkjc4JDDPzDD5uVFqxSapS3Lf3P95PcFvG4NM3MGi9WPgTekngjENGfoSt11P8SE.png)
(Image from Pixabay)

I may be throwing the cat among the pigeons, but a recent post of @edicted got me thinking...
I'm talking about this post:
https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@edicted/downvotes-oh-noes

The most interesting part of this post is a screenshot of a comment from @azircon 
![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/friendlymoose/Eo45n5MhnU1siStqMZcr6uLVfJcNkPkY3x2PpaPSxhiKXc5EySGxpsb5b4TpxYT6ynR.png)

He touches an interesting point about a blogpost that receives more that $100. 
The post of @edicted was being downvoted because the rewards were getting too high.

And I totally agree about the height of the rewards. Not about this specific post, but posts in general. Does any post deserve an author reward of $100+ dollar?
And who decides if a post is getting too much rewards? 
I've seen many more posts that received more than $100 author rewards. 
But setting a max reward doesn't really solve the problem I think. Because there are also shitposts that shouldn't be getting any reward in my opinion. 
But when these posts don't get noticed and manually downvoted, these authors will get these rewards. And when a post gets downvoted it often leads to lots of discussions.

# Auto voting & trails
Who decides which posts get the most rewards? You would say that we do that as a community, but I guess that 99% of the votes is done automatically with auto voting or following voting trails.

Auto voting and voting trails are great. I'm using them myself too. I have a few accounts that create quality content and therefor automatically get my vote with everything they post. 
This way I make the most out of my curation rewards since I don't have the time to manually read  all their blogs every day of the week.
But the downside of checking all these posts manually is that the quality of the blogs may change. Not every post from these authors is a quality post.

Apart from that I'm also receiving some auto votes from a couple of people. For me this results in a default reward of $2/$3 regardless of what I blog. Which is nice, but in my eyes isn't fair. 

# Oldbies & whales
As I mentioned before; my account receives a $2/$3 author reward regardless of what I post. But I've seen many other accounts that automatically receive a tenfold of that for everything they post.
And these people probably have invested a lot of time (and maybe money) to grow their accounts, but does that make it fair that they automatically get rewarded for everything they post? 
If you have the luck to receive auto votes from a Hive whale, you'll get a nice share of the reward pool.
I also see accounts where the only activity is automatic upvotes to other users. 
(Side note; there will surely be a lot of whales and other users that do check the blogs they are auto voting on and remove people from the list when they don't create quality blogs anymore).

So the current structure rewards people with the most 'connections'.
The more connections you have (from the past) the more rewards you will get regardless of what you post. 

This made me think about solutions how we could we make a more fair distribution of the Hive reward pool.


# Possible solutions
*"How can we make a more fair distribution of the Hive reward pool?"*
I've been thinking about this question for a while and I came up with a couple of things. 
A small disclaimer; I don't have the slightest idea whether these ideas are technically possible. 


## Limit the author rewards
An idea is to set a max to the rewards a blog post can get. This way you limit the excessive posts that receive over hundreds of dollars of rewards. But then again; what is an excessive reward? Who will decide the value of that?
And shit post that are auto voted on will still receive rewards that might be too high.

## Manual downvotes
We could, as @azircon mentioned do manual downvotes on posts. This does require commitment from the community and a change in mindset about downvotes. 
I wouldn't downvote a posts of a whale myself since it could backfire if he or she sees it as an attack (which often is the case for most people I think). 

## Only allow manual voting
When we could get rid of the auto votes everyone is forced to do manual voting. This everyone really needs to check all the posts they are voting on. 
This way the curators also may diversify their votes to other accounts and change the amount they vote on the posts based on the quality.
Of course you could still login and randomly cast your 10 100% votes if you like, but even then I think most shitposts will be filtered out. 
And it would also eliminate auto-upvotes from 'ghost accounts' with large amounts of Hive that have been going on certain account for ages.

If technically possible, I think it would really give a much more fair distribution of rewards. 

# Curation vs delegation
Many people, including myself don't have the time to distribute manual votes and make the most out of our stake and therefor configure auto voting. As I mentioned before; I also do this myself. 
Some people only use it to vote when their voting power is above a certain percentage. Other only curate automatically. 
It's understandable from a point of view that you want to make the most out of your stake, but it isn't actually curating what we're doing. 
I think it's better to delegate your power (or a part of it) to curators that manually curate posts. There are quite a lot of curator accounts that are controlled by groups of people that really try to find and reward quality posts like Qurator, Curangel or OCDB and also communities often have their own curation accounts.

# Let's prevent auto voting
If it makes the distribution of Hive rewards more fair, why don't we do it? 
First of all, I don't know if this even is technically possible. And if it is, we still need to agree that we want to go that way.   
I hope we can have a discussion about this. What do you think?


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![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/friendlymoose/245HqbtnTy9qB3WBi3WPvsh2ueSV4ujdR4LRoUsyYMpi3vKuhMWPueF9aVir5oxfVZszt.png)
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# FriendlyMoose
Photographing is my passion. Although I like photography in general, nature photography is one of my favourite subjects. I often go out with my camera for a hike to capture the beauty of nature.
I'm sharing my photos on **Hive, [Noise.Cash](https://noise.cash/u/FriendlyMoose) & APPICS**.
I would love to read what you think of my photos in the comments. 

**Discord:** friendlymoose#5717


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### Do you like photography?
Every week I create a post with an overview of all the #photocontests on Hive.
I also host my own #POBPhotocontest
Click the hashtags to check it out!

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### Statistics
I also create daily statistics for the Leofinance and ProofOfBrain communities:
#leofinancestats #proofofbrainstats

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