Some cool things you can do with your author rewards in a proven and decentralized manner

Now this may be quite niche for most of you and it is also not necessary for anyone to know or properly understand them, but I kind of wanted to go through the use-cases of them and the ideas behind them. These are also projects of my own just for transparencies sake. One of them @reward.app is partially owned by myself, with @cardboard being the builder and is "for-profit", it has a 1% fee. @commentrewarder is also partially mine, built by @hivetrending, this one has no fee, although we've voted up some of its posts when things got tight with liquidity recently due to the increase in usage.

Alright, now let's dive into their planned usecases and how the community decided to use them mostly instead.

@reward.app

The idea with this was a lot more than "liquidating rewards", although that's kind of what people use it for mostly. After the bid bot wars and move to Hive, there was one thing that kind of was lacking, a way to promote your posts. This is something that's unfortunately been brought up often, people DM me and ask if I can help with visibility to promote something they're working on but my hands are usually tied unless it's something that directly benefits "all of Hive". I often recommend them to forfeit author rewards but this still makes it hard for them to get access to bigger votes to get to trending for the attention they may seek since they'd need to be able to contact bigger stakeholders and have them agree to vote the post up.

The idea behind @reward.app was that a user could forfeit part of their author rewards through beneficiaries to give the rewards back to curators.

Let's say I made this post 100% going to @reward.app and at the same time I would send @reward.app a memo with the number "100" in it indicating I want all of the author rewards to go to curators. This would mean that if you voted the post up, you would receive double the rewards back at payout, effectively 17% APR on your Hive Power if you constantly voted on such posts.

The difficulty here is that front-ends would need to be able to track when a user has set their author rewards to go to curators which may not be so easy. Other than adding the icon that reward.app was used which front-ends like @peakd do, voters would have to go track their recent memo to the service to know how much of the rewards they are getting back, it's a bit "hacky".

Now, to prevent abuse, this also means that people overusing this service would be open to downvotes. If someone is promoting something malicious we would need downvoters to then downvote these posts which may have attracted a lot of voters because there's double rewards. This generates extra curation work, especially manual, which we often find the lack of these days.

Thus it kind of became unused and we never experimented with it much to see how it would evolve.

PS. The default setting is to send curators an extra 4% of the author rewards, that's why you may some times see some @reward.app returns hit your account as people using it to liquidate their author rewards may unknowingly forfeit 4% of their rewards because they haven't sent the service a memo with the number "0".

@commentrewarder was meant to help smaller accounts save voting mana but still be able to reward their comments with some small tips by forfeiting part of their author rewards.

Instead of small accounts spending 100% votes on comments and often still not getting past the dust threshold of $0.02, we made it possible for them to only spend 1% votes for instance to equally share some tips to users in their comments. Then they could instead spend their voting power on posts already past the dust threshold to still receive 0.001 curation rewards or more.

While some accounts are using it properly (commentrewarder follows authors who've recently used it so you can track them through @commentrewarder/feed), most of its usecase we've seen recently has been through promotion and marketing efforts such as @hive-echo and @coldbeetrootsoup which is great to see. They generate posts and send all the author rewards to @commentrewarder and then use their votes to direct them to the comments, sort of like a mini reward pool of that post itself.

I'm happy its evolved and people are giving it a proper try and the good effects it may have on Hive promotion and marketing.

I kinda wish @reward.app would've seen some more usage of its initial idea but maybe the time's not right as there may not be a big need for trending attention at these times.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the services and if you've experienced any of them yourself!