Decentralized Social Media Platforms’ Reward and Punishment Systems

Steemit & Hive Reward and Punishment System

I started my journey as an online article writer in December of 2017 when I discovered Steemit, a decentralized social media platform while browsing YouTube. When I found out that I could be (potentially) rewarded with STEEM and SBD (steem-based dollar), cryptocurrencies or tokens that could be exchanged for real money for every article that I write, I quickly registered and became one of the platforms’ thousands of prospective writers.

As someone without prior writing experience, the articles that I wrote on my early days in the platform leave much to be desired. Moreover, as I don’t have a particular niche to focus on, I simply write whatever I wanted. To say that my articles back then are “diverse” would be a massive understatement.

However, despite the randomness of my articles in both content and size, I was still able to earn some STEEM thanks to the generous users that would sometimes grace my post. Of course, as one would expect, my post weren’t really earning that much though sometimes I would be lucky and would walk away with several dollars’ worth of upvotes. Such upvotes were very rare though and most of time, my posts would only earn a few cents.

Still, compared to centralized social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. where my posts didn’t earn me anything besides some likes and dislikes, posting and blogging on Steemit was more productive and rewarding.

That being said, it’s not all sunshine and roses in Steemit or other decentralized social media platforms for that matter. If upvotes exists, so does downvotes. Steemit use the upvote and downvote system to reward or punish the authors in the platform. 

Every account on Steemit has voting power that they could use to upvote and downvote the articles of their fellow users. What this mean was that, one’s posts were in the mercy of those that graces your articles. If they liked your articles, they might reward it with upvotes but if they don’t like it, they might give those articles downvotes instead.

Not all upvotes and downvotes are the same though. Some votes have more weight than others due to the existence of SP or Steem Power. Those that have more Steem Power on their account can use their votes to give other users huge rewards (and increase one’s reputation) or punish them (and greatly reduce their reputation).

In short, rewards and punishments were decided by other users as one would expect from a decentralized platform.

Personally, I have experienced both sides of the spectrum. That is to say, I didn’t only received upvotes but downvotes as well. Thankfully, I have received more upvotes than downvotes so my experience on the platform had been relatively positive.

When Tron Foundation CEO Justin Sun purchased Steemit, a lot of users migrated to Hive.io, myself included. Being an offshoot of Steemit, the Hive platform was very similar to Steemit including how the platform deals with the rewards and punishments of its users. One could even say that Hive is just Steemit 2.0 with a different name and tokens.

Instead of STEEM, SBD, and SP, the platform have HIVE, HBD (Hive-based Dollar), and HP (Hive Power) but beyond that, everything was almost the same. However, despite the similarities between the two platforms, Hive could be said to be the better of the two, a sentiment shared by most of its users.

The reason why Hive was considered better than Steemit was because the Hive.io has more active users than its predecessor. Moreover, the reward and punishment system of Hive is actually being implemented properly unlike Steemit where downvoting almost became non-existence which leads to its users abusing and milking the platform for all its worth.

Read.cash Reward and Punishment System

The latest decentralized social media platform that I’ve joined was Read.cash. Like Steemit and Hive; Read.cash also has its own system to reward or punish its authors. But unlike the aforementioned two platforms, Read.cash’s system is less complicated and less punishing due to only having an upvote button and no downvote button that could affect or reduce an article’s potential rewards.

Read.cash has a like and dislike button similar to Facebook, the only difference being is that only the number of “likes” is shown while clicking the “dislike” button would reduce the number of likes by one point. The number of likes in a post decides how popular a post is and also increases the chance of other users upvoting it.

Speaking of upvotes, Read.cash has a bot that rewards posts randomly with BCH – the more popular and well-written the post was, the bigger the reward. This alone already makes Read.cash a much better platform than Steemit and Hive as authors are no longer at the whim of other users in the platform. The bot also seemed to follow certain algorithm on how to reward its users that cannot easily be abused so those who only want to milk the platform would fail most of the time.

The platform also has ways to punish those who try to game the system. The most obvious one being the like and dislike buttons. As mentioned previously, the like and dislike button can decide how popular a post is. A post with a lot of like would usually attract more users to read the article and make them more likely to give upvotes. Moreover, based on my experience, popular post are most likely to receive bigger reward from the randome rewarder bot with some exceptions.

Besides the like and dislike buttons, users could also report or outright block authors that they believed are gaming the platform. However, this system of punishing bad actors is not perfect and is also prone to abuse. From time to time there would authors that use the system to punish other authors due to conflict or other personal reasons. I have actually seen this happened multiple times in the platform and it wasn’t a pleasant sight.

Thankfully, such incidents are rare and most of the time, the punishment system was used as it was intended to be used.

Conclusion

Steemit, Hive, and Read.cash’s reward and punishment systems have their pros and cons. However, if I were to choose which system I prefer more, I would, without a doubt pick Read.cash’s system for two reasons – the random rewarder bot and the fact that it has no downvote button that could reduce a post’s rewards like that of the other two platforms.

Having a bot that rewards articles is great as authors would still be rewarded even if other users didn’t upvote their posts. Of course, the caveat is that the posts must fulfill some requirement to be upvoted like for example, not being a shit post. Still, compared to Steemit and Hive where one could write a long and compelling article only to be rewarded with few cents by other users or at worse, nothing at all, the random rewarder bot makes sure that authors get the reward that they deserved.

Now as for why I consider not having the downvote button a good thing was due to the fact that in Steemit and Hive, accounts with huge SP and HP stakes could easily destroy accounts with smaller stakes. Being on the aforementioned platforms for years, I’ve seen smaller accounts with negative reputations and zero reward in their post simply because some whales didn’t like the author/s in question, disagreed with the post’s reward, different political views, or just want to power trip.

Even if this misuse of authority doesn't occur frequently, it nonetheless happens frequently enough to warrant concern.

Anyway, I’ll end the article here. Thanks again for reading.

Lead Image Source: https://pixabay.com/de/illustrations/schild-weg-reise-philosophie-108065/

Disclaimer: This article was checked for plagiarism using the online tool; plagiarism detector, and was proven to be 100% original.

My other articles: https://read.cash/@beastion