Beware, there's going to be mspaint infographics in this post that may make your eyes bleed.

Ah, the everso-abused feature of proof of brain - vote-trading. Where to begin?

No, like seriously, where do I even begin, it's been something that I think has been possibly since most hardforks, maybe the first one which had this weird quadratic equation where it didn't make much sense to trade votes with. I can't even recall how exactly that one worked, or could be I never really understood it, I just remember that after a certain amount of vote weight had landed on posts shit started going exponential shortly after. Was during the time we'd see posts hitting $30-60k, of course the price being at an ATH and supply at an all time low were a big factor there too, along with sell pressure being low as well with powerdowns lasting 2 years and only giving you half a percent per week. Powerdowns would quite literally not give you more liquids than you'd earn that week from curation/inflation.

Okay, so much for staying on topic, anyway, ever since the curve got quite a lot more linear vote-trading became popular. It wasn't always just about trails and autovoting either, you could see people partake in it manually as well. I remember going through my rounds of curating posts in my feed and some of them would notice it and a few hours later throw me a vote back. Ehm, hello, while I appreciate it that's not what I voted you for. Then a few days later they'd go "fishing" with their votes, cast another one on me to give me a reminder "you forgetting something?", no not this time, sir. They'd magically stop voting my posts after that, so yeah, people can vote-trade manually too and it's not like I am completely against it, it's part of the whole building connections we know on Hive, it's just that my focus has been elsewhere.

Before I get to the concrete issues with this, I think it needs to be said that you can't judge people based on a small sample of this activity. We all have friends, we all may vote for some kind of motives at times, it's not like the community is trying to enforce utopia in stake distribution and fair curation, there'll always be some kind of "backscratching" going on, the issue is when people do it at alarming rates and then the content and engagement has nothing to show for it, it's like the sole purpose of the posts they may create daily is primarily just to get that extra APR they feel they deserve which is not always easy to distinguish but some times it is.

Let me begin with showing you some visuals that most people are aware of
but newbies and those who've never delved deeper into how hive actually works might learn a thing or two.

Here's a simple fact about how post and curation rewards are split up on hive, currently it's 50% of rewards go to curators while the remaining 50% go to authors:

As I talked in my previous post, curation rewards are usually somewhere around 8.5% if you vote in the first day of the post and the posts don't get downvoted a lot you'll see yourself earn about 8.5% in a year from your stake. This may of course be a bit higher since you collect rewards weekly which affect your next votes that week so it's not APY which may be a bit higher. Other than that you can of course also earn post rewards alongside your curation so the yearly return can be a lot higher depending on your post rewards and if you're staying staked.

Now this is what vote-traders like to do instead:

Now there are a lot of other factors involved, things such as autovote/trails, other random curators that may land on your posts, etc. The thing with vote-trading is that people use it in a way where they try to avoid making it look like that's what's going on, maybe cause they know it's against proof of brain or some may just fall into the trap and stay there. There are services out there, because frankly they cannot be stopped, even if hive.vote for instance were to disable such a vote trail someone could create his own instance, these services hide the excessive self-voting in some simple ways.

Here's an example:

Let's say for simplicities sake; there's 10 users on this vote-trading-trail, all of them have 10k HP. Without the trail if they wanted to maximize their own voting power towards themselves, they'd have to generate 10 posts per day and vote them up one by one. This is something people would quickly notice and downvotes would most likely occur. It's not common that people put in effort into writing 10 posts per day. Instead they do this:

(Eye warning)

Not sure if this visual was even necessary or helped anything, but you get the gist, they place their 10 daily votes on each post of the person in the trail. This means that everyone only has to post once per day to effectively get their 10 daily votes of 10k HP back to them in the form of 10x 10kHP (1x 100k HP) upvote on their post.

So why is this wrong?

So there's many reasons.

Similar to autovotes as discussed in my previous post, they now know that whatever they post they will get those 10 votes guaranteed on it. This often results in them not caring about what they post, quality not being great, effort not being great, etc. At this point they're kind of farming those rewards, if they don't post that they they'll miss out on their daily upvotes.

Knowing that this is working, no one is intervening, they become content with it, they may see some random votes flock to their post, often also blind/auto/trail votes which is just a bonus. They're getting their high APR with very little effort so they don't make an effort to get more unique voters. Some don't attempt to engage/socialize with others because what's the point, they're already doing rather well and it's not worth it. It may even back-fire cause they may get attention from someone who notices what they're doing so they rather sit in hiding and farm their daily votes.

Now let's think about this from another perspective.

Let's compare two accounts of the same sizes who use Hive differently:

Account A is the vote-trader and Account B is the one putting in effort on their content, as you can see post rewards are a lot less reliable for account B, but if he's putting in the effort, gets engagement cause he's actively building an audience of like-minded accounts, people are going to notice him now and then and genuinely curate his content. Meanwhile Account A has opted for not caring, not putting in any effort, not trying to be seen, his content will always get the same rewards, the same lack of engagement yet still get decent returns.

This weakens proof of brain, it weakens the value behind Hive because you now don't need to put in any effort/sweat equity to attain those rewards. People think that just because they've put in some sort of investment into their stake they're entitled to this kind of APR.

Now lastly, let's look at two different curators and their returns, Curatar A is involved in vote-trading and posts daily while curator B isn't and doesn't post daily:

Now Curator B could easily do what Curator A is, after all Curator A isn't putting in much effort into his daily posts, just a couple minutes of his time sharing a youtube link, including a footer automatically and letting the trail do the rest of the job. Curator B decides not to because he understands why proof of brain and curation is valuable to be used correctly. He understands why that's what makes Hive work, what distributes stake to newcomers and others, why people are welcomed to join this #web3 platform and can receive some value for their input and effort. Curator A is ignoring all that to maximize the returns of his stake.

So in a way those actively vote-trading are making those who don't weaker as they're earning more stake than them over time while those who aren't are the ones that are making Hive a better place and possibly increasing the value of everyone. This is important to keep in mind because we all share the same ecosystem and currency, the same reward pool, etc. If you don't put a stop to those unfairly earning more than you are, you're just making your own effort and everyone else's worth less in a way.

Let's compare a few real accounts, this first screenshot is from one on a vote-trading service called "backscratcher", I admit I cherry-picked the section in the screenshot as the account does have some engagement in some posts, albeit drama about the contents of the post or the votetrading later on:

Notice how rewards, vote amount and engagement is often pretty similar?

Let's check with someone else, picked first person I saw on my feed:

Oh a lot more volatile but also more rewarding in many aspects!

Sure the second user does have a lot more stake but at quick glance you can see they also put in effort into content, socializing, using dapps, etc.

If everyone only thought about maximizing APR based on their holdings, curation would be garbage. New users would close to never receive curation, their content wouldn't improve, their retention would be close to non-existent, etc. If all the focus is on maximizing then everyone would just take care of themselves and ignore everyone else. Trending would be filled with whoever has the most stake:

Rather than more diverse and based on other factors:

Anyway, that's it for today, need to get back to curating and replying to some comments from my last post as I've been a bit swamped lately, but looking forward to see what comes out of this one too!

Thanks for reading, I just think it's important that we all share the same values and vision of curation and when we see excessive abuse of this we all step in or drive attention to it to mitigate it for everyone's sake.