Earn.Hive Witness- A Greasy Experiment

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I'm sure many of you have received this little transaction in your wallet- perhaps without even realizing it.... It is pretty unassuming after all:
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It's apparently been going on for a while now- transactions being sent to various wallets across Hive with the above memo promising rewards in exchange for a witness vote. Immediately upon seeing this my first thought was it can't be legit right? Paying people for their witness vote? Seems.... shady?.... sketchy?... scammy?... Something anyway.

I did a little research- I have only cast a couple of witness votes up until this point- mainly for people I've interacted with or the witnesses run by projects I am engaged with. I have witness votes to spare. I made sure votes can be removed easily and I wouldn't just be tossing this vote in the trashcan before I decided to engage in a little experiment. I figured- what the heck- even if it feels shady AF I can drop my vote on this for a bit, see if it actually does follow through with the promise to pay for your vote, and due to my strong feelings about PAYING FOR VOTES I can easily remove my vote after a little while and write up a post about it. This is that post.

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As you can see the earn.hive witness is currently 120/104 and has made a block within the last 2 hours- it also has a fairly recent price feed- much better performance than some of those witnesses higher up the charts. I can't really be mad at it for that!

I placed my witness vote on them 22 days ago and left it until today in order to see if they would indeed payout any Hive. I was surprised to find that in fact they do:

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It's not much. Hardly worth the bad taste left in my mouth by voting in order to get paid. BUT... At least it's proof that this isn't just a scam attempt to get people to drop their vote with the promise of paying Hive. I went in and verified that they are actually paying other individuals as well (I attempted to contact them through bee chat to learn more- unsuccessfully- and wanted to be sure they weren't just paying me after reading my messages lol)

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I'm left with a conundrum. I really do not feel good about being paid for a witness vote. It feels greasy and wrong. But it seems that one thing Hive needs is more engagement in governance and witness votes in order to remove some of the jank witnesses from the top witness lists. So... can I really object to someone taking a next step in order to encourage people to engage in those activities and help them overtake some of those garbage witnesses? I don't know if I can... I've removed my vote though... I didn't like the greasy feeling... gonna shower after this post.

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If there is one thing I have taken from this experiment it's that we all need to get more involved in the witness voting process- it matters! I hadn't realized just how many of the top witnesses haven't updated the price feed in years, or haven't made a block in a month. It's a little crazy! I have since gone through and placed ALL of my witness votes on active and relevant witnesses. I'll be looking to do the same for Hive Engine witnesses shortly as well!

Let's get on it. You can change your vote anytime so why not go drop yours on active witnesses NOW- vote on the ones relevant to your favorite tribe or token or whatever- shake out some of the dead witnesses and Hive as a whole will be better for it!!!!

https://peakd.com/me/witnesses

hive-engine tribaldex leofinance archon proofofbrain neoxian ocd cent palnet ctp hive
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Congratulations @dibblers.dabs! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You distributed more than 28000 upvotes.
Your next target is to reach 29000 upvotes.

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

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The lack of voting and attention to witnesses has long been one of the biggest issues on steem/hive. We got a big boost with the hostile takeover and the get out the vote campaign that followed, but even then the majority of users have never even voted for a witness.

There's been tons of pay-per-vote witnesses too, and they always give up and walk away pretty fast, since they usually don't actually have any desire to actually strengthen and support the chain & community.

People can also use a "proxy" vote, where you set someone else as the proxy for your witness votes, and you don't have to pay attention. I've got something like 100 people that have proxied to me over the years, because they know I'm on top of it, and that they have 0 interest in trying to keep up with witnesses on top of everything else.

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I didn't know about the proxy votes! That's a pretty cool solution but not as good as voting for your own choices. I didn't know there were other examples of pay for vote either. After I wrote this post and cast the rest of my witness votes I actually got a payout for a couple of them but I don't think they are going to be consistent payouts like it was for earn.hive! I'll have to dig into it all a little deeper because I cast some of my votes on very basic information on the peakd witnesses page.

Thanks for the info!
!ALIVE
!PIZZA

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(Edited)

PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA!
PIZZA Holders sent $PIZZA tips in this post's comments:
dibblers.dabs tipped wrestlingdesires (x1)
dibblers.dabs tipped kennysgaminglife (x1)
stickupboys tipped dibblers.dabs (x1)
katerinhernandez tipped dibblers.dabs (x1)
@dibblers.dabs(2/20) tipped @katerinhernandez (x1)
wrestlingdesires tipped dibblers.dabs (x1)
hive.pizza tipped dibblers.dabs (x1)
Learn more at https://hive.pizza.

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The other thing to watch for are links to contests / gifts for voting. Those links are fake, and will empty your wallet. Viruses and keyloggers and phishing...
Did you read my Pizza Baron entry yet???

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I havent gotten round to reading it yet! Never fear though I will of course :P

!PIZZA

!ALIVE

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I know, I just want the next part of the story, lol

!PIZZA !ALIVE

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Interesting I only voted for a few that I know and trust like !PIZZA and stuff! Interesting concept though....but it does sound dirty buying votes....

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This can influence badly to the blockchain...

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Hi @dibbler.dabs, Thanks for this nourishing information when I saw your publication I went directly to verify my list of witnesses and it was really necessary to update the selection. it is something that should be promoted so that witnesses who really do a good job are recognized. !PIZZA

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I'm glad my post helped encourage you to go check up on your votes! If more of us took the time to check up on witness status every once in a while the whole system would be much more efficient. I would love to see some of the dead witnesses out of the top 100 soon! Thanks for the slice of !PIZZA

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