Sometimes, a well-written article with a carefully chosen title, shared at the perfect time, is worth a thousand bad posts.
783,000 views and 542 comments on Reddit, and 17,000 views on PeakD:
This is the top achievement of our wonderful HivePosh contest this week, and I am sharing it to begin another talk about content quality.
I started this conversation 2 weeks ago when posted Untidy Hive Content Doesn't Help Us on Reddit. And this week, @uwelang shared his thoughts in his Hive Onboarding – Does Our Content Really Attract New Users? Not a coincidence, probably - active HivePosh users have practically seen how much more effective qualitative content is: If you share a high-quality article, you get views, comments, and respect from the mods. If you have only a nice title, your share might be deleted even if it has generated a lot of views and engagement, and the mods can start hating you personally.
It is also obvious that people who visit Hive through our links get different impressions of Hive: superficial posts with zero expertise behind don't make good publicity for Hive front-ends.
AI-generated posts often belong to this category, too.
AI content
In fact, it doesn't matter how exactly a post has been written, it matters how it looks and sounds.
If people notice that the post is written by AI, it means that it sounds generic and emotionally flat (or too cheerful), lacks opinion and personality, and demonstrates shallow logic.
You don't need AI to write such articles. Before AI, there were special technical writers who wrote quick articles for SEO - they were the same - smooth but shallow and soulless - cheap but sufficient for feeding Google bots.
Thus, people hate low-effort, low-expertise articles over-polished by AI or fully generated by AI.
Other Types of Unsharable Content
As @uwelang noted, 90% of Hive content isn't interesting to anyone outside of Hive (and actually inside Hive too).
And that's fine - many people share their personal things as people do on Facebook. They are often related to Hive - powerups, Actifit, etc.
Other people monotonously publish bad posts just to get rewards.
The third group creates cool content, but without a focus on a certain topic. It's when some person posts great opinions about several things in one post with the title "This is what I like" or "I thought about this today" - you can't share that even if every word in the post is pure gold.
As a result, we, HivePoshers have a ridiculously narrow list of authors, some of whom over-polish their articles with AI (like some on LeoFinance).
What to Do
The answer is simple: a share should be rewarded
- in proportion to its success on Reddit (this is what we already have)
- in proportion to the quality of the shared post because a low-quality post has low onboarding potential.
If a shared post
- is ugly from the point of formatting,
- consists of 2-3 paragraphs,
- is a low-effort generated AI post,
- has low expertise and no opinion in it...
...if so, the share of this post should be less rewarded. A list of criteria for assessing the quality of a post can be developed. That might be the next move for the HivePosh reward system... What do you think?..