Yesterday, the official noise.cash account made a lengthy post providing a lot of detail on where the platform is standing right now, what issues they are facing and how they want to move forward from there. If you haven't read it yet, you want to check that post first as I'm not going to rephrase the whole article and instead mostly focus on one aspect. First and foremost, they are obviously still having a lot of issues with Spam on their platform. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody even remotely active on the site, but the numbers they provided are pretty drastic nevertheless.

Source

Without giving an exact definition, they consider 96% of all posts as either spammy or low quality! 96%! That means that only 1 in 25 posts is of at least acceptable quality. Again, this was to be expected. Whenever there's free money on the line, people will come and try to abuse the system. For Noise.cash growth was probably always more important than quality. It seems like this is finally going to change, though. Moving forward, only users providing quality content will receive free tips while everybody else is still free to use the platform but won't receive any tips to give out in the process. To do that, they will constantly monitor the content created by users and classify them as either eligible or not eligible for free tips. New users won't receive any free tips until they have been reviewed, so you can't just create a new account every time you don't receive any more tips.

Here's the extensive list of content they consider to be low quality:

• All kinds of giveaways (if like to give away money, sure, but give your own)
• Subscription/tip exchanges
• Replies like "done", "wow", "nice", "great", "thank you for the information"
• Image posts with a smiley,
• Image posts with a short phrase "London" or "Tree" (or slightly longer "A woman standing near a tree")
• Quotes
• Anything that has been copied from the Internet,
• "Good evening", "hello" posts and replies,
• "Time for a dinner", "here is my dinner", "I just ate dinner", "did you eat your dinner?", "what did you eat for dinner?"
• "My click" (random photo that you took with a phone without anything interesting about it, like a story or something)
• "Thank you XX for tipping me"
  ... and more ...

Taking these measures was long overdue in my opinion and it certainly is a step in the right direction. I agree with all the points given above, although I don't mind stuff like people sharing their dinner. I mean I'm not too interested in that kind of content, but it's something a lot of people seem to do on Twitter or Instagram as well, so I wouldn't consider it an issue. Nevertheless, these changes should reduce the amount of people that still receive free tips dramatically. Assuming that the total amount of tips given out will not be reduced, this is great news for all users actively engaging with the platform. Sadly, there's that "...and more..." at the end. There's one change I don't really get and that is directed at the very platform you are reading this on right now:

There is one more thing that we will probably stop sponsoring in the future - that is promotion of competing sites (Leo, Hive, Peakd, Steem, etc...) and competing cryptocurrencies (i.e. anything except for Bitcoin Cash).

Now I'm not a fan of that decision and I honestly think it's a huge mistake to do so. There are several reasons for that:

Hive/Leo aren't competing sites!

To tell the truth, I don't really understand why noise.cash would consider Hive/Leo to be a cometing site in the first place. The former is focused on microblogging and thus super short content while the latter is focused on fully fledged articles, often times consisting of 1000 words or more. I don't think anybody would start writing full articles on [noise.cash] nor would anybody start to post 10 word posts on LeoFinance. Now I would get if it was about Project Blank, but the examples given above are basically just other parts of the blockchain ecosystem. They don't compete, they profit from each other! That directly ties in to my next point:

Hive/Leo is bringing users to noise.cash!

I mean seriously, when noise.cash took off you couldn't throw a stone around here without hitting an article about the platform! Consequentially, a ton of people from Hive and its tribes signed up for noise.cash. At the same time, a lot of people probably learned about Hive through posts on noise.cash. It's not like the two services are taking away from each other. On the contrary, they both help each other to grow!

The Hive crowd probably delivers the highest quality content on the whole platform!

This is the most important reason in my opinion. If you look around noise.cash, you'll notice that a lot of the best quality content is coming from people active on Hive! Yes, we obviously link to our articles back here, but we also produce a lot more content exclusively targeted at noise.cash. If you take away their free tips, chances are they will stop producing content altogether and the platform would loose a lot of its quality content overnight.

The truth is, noise.cash would hurt itself immensely by seeing through with this measure. Project Blank is taking a lot longer than we all had anticipated and honestly, by now I wasn't sure how easy it would be to convince people to leave noise.cash behind and get involved with Project Blank. But by making these changes, the platform will essentially scare off the whole Hive community and while we obviously aren't the only ones producing quality content there, we are playing a huge role in those 4% good quality posts.

So what's going to happen now? For the moment, most users will probably just continue what they are doing and just post what they did before. It will take some days before the changes really come into effect. When they do and if people find themselves to no longer be eligible for free tips, they will probably just leave the site behind. It certainly is what I'll be doing. Fun enough, I'm among the first accounts that they linked to, stating that I produce good content:

So there might be hope that things won't be as dramatic as they sound. Nevertheless, not all people will be as patient. According to some other posts I've read, there are already some users that did leave the platform for good after the announcement was made. So the damage is done either way and we'll just have to wait and see how severe it will be in the end. At the very least, though, it once more illustrates why Project Blank is so badly needed!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!