RE: $200 Monthly Investing Plan Brought to You by Hive Blockchain
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six to eight good blog posts a month?
I've been on HIVE since it started (and on steem since also the start and the great migration :D ) - and I think I've struggled to find and read six to seven good blog posts a year from other users.
We need stories and genuine content, and to stop rewarding content about the platform - eg: people go to reddit to connect with their communities, or learn things about new things.
On HIVE we have so many posts about how awesome hive is, but so few posts about genuine human interest, written with intent, interesting subject matter, and stuff with real staying power.
Not every post is a journalistic prize winning piece of prose, and it doesn't have to be, but I've not seen one story broken on HIVE that has then gone to become viral across mainstream media.
Where are HIVE's breakout stories?
Are we not SEO friendly enough? Does the old guard of media get all their stories from FB groups, Reddit, TikTok / Reels / Shorts?
Where's our impact?
Having said all of that , in a rather rambling fashion - people who have the urge to create are going to create, whether they get a reward for that or not - just think about all the content on all those other platforms that people made without getting anything back. :)
Fuck, I'm devo!
🤣
Come on man, I post once a day at least. Not six good ones amongst them over a year? Fuck it, I must be doing something wrong.
When I say "good", I mean, like super hard hitting, human stories. I read this article about a man who had been on iron lung for half a century.
I read that story years ago. I still remember it. I still hold it up as a piece of formidable writing and storytelling.
I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it on hive. If there is, please point me in that direction.
Yep, no one on Hive is what I'd call a "good writer" even despite them wanting to believe they are; but there's some good people who write.
I think it goes beyond being a good writer or a good person. People are either good at expressing themselves, or not. People are either good at engaging in discussion and discourse, or they're not.
The underlying issue is that we have a lot of people on all of those spectrums with all sorts of ... dare I say ... confidence or aggrandising qualities which clash with their desire to express themselves or to confidently take a different view from another.
At times, I feel that there are certainly cargo cults on hive, waiting for the "Aid drop" (the upvote), circling those with large stake in order to nab a piece of the pie for themselves.
Strategic, ulterior, unwritten motives - but easy enough to see through. It is non genuine engagement, and I see you get a ton of it.
At the same time, people are too afraid to step on someone else's toes. If you disagree with something someone says, that's okay. Just do it with respect and decorum, but without it being said, no one knows what needs to change.
Having said that - change (and what direction that change takes us in) - is not commonly the outcome of a single actor. We collectively shift our views as our society changes those views. Or, we resist. I just want to see capital q quality like we see capital a art. I am also happy with seeing memes and discussing the banal and absurd.
I just want hive, and all of its genuine users and enthusiasts to succeed, and its my view that just one way we can get on the "map" is through having quality that is irrefutable.
As you say, (and I'm paraphrasing) you have to make your own destiny.
I want our shared destinies to be some sort of utopian HIVE land where no matter what we do, we are brilliant at it.
People have it within their power to make what they want to happen happen, as long as it's actually achievable in the first place. I think that goes for Hive and everywhere else. The problem is that most people are lazy, want to cut corners and defer to their sense of entitlement which is rarely going to gain optimal results. Or they have very unrealistic ideas of what's possible and that's also going lead them down the gurgler.
Where I come from, we call unrealistic ideas ambition! :P
But those unrealistic ideas don't become reality until hard work (or good work) is done.
Let's say I had the idea to become a London bus...sort of unrealistic right? So, let's say someone wants to be a billionaire but does nothing at all to make it happen...an unrealistic goal.
Like you say, hard work has to happen first.
Interestingly, I wrote a post tonight about being hard working. Well, maybe not interesting to you as you can't find any posts to like on Hive, but I find it interesting, coincidental that the comment thread moved towards hard work.
Perhaps I can rephrase. I haven't read many posts that have stuck with me for years. One of yours, of course, does - the one about napkins being underneath the food product, as it happened to us :P
The news that @lauralemons was no longer on Earth with us was another such post.
Several of the conversations I've had with @strega.azure were things that I liked, and liked a lot.
I have had my own issues with consistency on HIVE. I've had periods where I've worked hard, and others where I've just posted replays of my twitch streams. As I've aged the projection of myself and the value that my vanity (what little of it it there is) - comes to realise that I am more satisfied (and better able) to sleep at night, If I commit the most amount effort I can to everything I do.
That doesn't stop me from being shit, though :P
Haha, yeah I'm permanently scarred by the under-food napkin thing.
I think, and this is what I've done, the way forward is to make Hive fun not a job. I write and post for myself and if people don't like it, or if they do, doesn't diminish or augment my enjoyment of having written the post. Sure, I like it when people engage and get involved with my posts but it's the writing of it that matters to me...after I click post the rest is up to others.
Me too! I do this for me. I write my tirades and ramblings because it helps me cope with existing. Sometimes I try to make it profound. Other times, I do it to help me understand.
Interaction with others is also a reason I do it, because I want to seek feedback on said ramblings or self-doubts. (I've decided that I want to write an anthology of the short story ideas floating in my head) - and if its good, great, but am I expecting a movie deal and a book deal?
But is it okay for it to be an ambition? For me?
But the only way I'll ever get close is by doing the hard work :)
Also, I noticed that probably about ten minutes ago you surpassed 105k comments / posts on HIVE. Comparison is the thief of joy, but at a mere 11k myself, I can confidently say that you've gotten almost 10x more enjoyment out of hive than me :P
Releasing the "job" that many make Hive is the way to go for sure, brings a lot more enjoyment. It relieves the pressure that can build (similar to having a wank) and things just happen more easily.
I've done 105,000 comments? That's a lot I guess, but it's another enjoyment factor just like we're doing here...engaging. Of course, it's easier that we've met personally but I have some really great relationships and I think that's another element that's pivotal to an enjoyable experience here. Genuine relationshipa.
Integrity helps. You've got it in droves.
Grazie mille.
This is the longest discussion thread that I have ever had on one of my posts :) And yes writing about what I like and am interested in helps me stay consistent. If I approached it from the "Its a job" mindset I would not have lasted a month :)
Indeed, it's worked for me.
I have read the whole thread and you make a lot of valid points. I am fairly new at Hive as I have started first as a Splinterlands player before really discovering Hive less than a year ago. I think you were a big Splinterlands player and Twitch TV streamer? Here is my perspective with somewhat fresh eyes.
Why there are no viral Hive breakout stories you ask. My view on that is quite simple:
It is mostly a numbers game. Reddit has 108 Million daily users, we have about 8,000 total active users. It is not enough to have hard hitting genuine stories, you have to have enough of those and to have a loud user base that is impossible to ignore (millions of daily active users).
Just like the phenomenon that you mention of having people circle the whales, you are right there is some of that, but there is also the part where if you have a million staked Hive or even 100K+ that is not an accident and people are interested in what you have to say, because you must have done something right in your life to get there. Same thing applies in the case of Reddit, they have the big number they have a loud userbase and are impossible to always ignore even for the old guard media.
There is one more factor that plays against Hive - we are a blockchain based blogging site and there is a huge mainstream bias against anything Crypto. Bitcoin might be hitting the news and becoming a more legitimate mainstream asset, but altcoins and crypto in general is still viewed as a scam and at best Casino Coins.
We have good writers and besides those here and already mentioned we have people who are professional writers like @ericvancewalton who are quite good at writing, we just don't have enough of good posters or posters in general. So my purpose writing this post was to try to get something out there that would make case for Hive and why people should come here and be active. I am not good at writing, but I consider this post at least a partial success as it got some real engagement from what I can see 😀
And who knows, maybe this post will come up high in Google searches when people search for some of the subjects covered here...
@topcomment
Thanks for the mention @seattlea and I'd like to chime in regarding this topic. So many talented writers have come and gone from the platform. In my opinion what would be considered "good" writing isn't always rewarded here, or isn't discovered quickly enough.
I think we should have more people with serious voting weight actively scouting for this kind of talent on Hive so engaging content is discovered more quickly and rewarded appropriately before the creators get frustrated and leave. Most writers I know value genuine engagement as much as they do getting paid.
The platform was very good to me in the early years (2016-2018), it changed my life actually. Back then there were a handful of content creators that rose to the top (@surfermarly, @heiditravels, even celebrities like bestselling author @neilstrauss) who were phenomenal and were handsomely rewarded by not only votes but attention. This created a buzz amongst the entire community. During the early days it seemed like the whales were more actively engaged in crafting a solid talent-base. If we could just rekindle some of that original spirit and excitement we'd be growing the platform a lot more quickly. During the past seven or so years the current philosophy has been to spread the rewards around to more people but I think really showing more love to the creators who make a real impact might encourage more people to step up their game and also attract new talent here.
What happened to those three authors? They have all been gone for over 6 years, did they stay on steam or just quit posting on blockchain?
Some whales are still encouraging new users with upvotes, I have seen it with others and have experienced myself. But some of our biggest whales seem to be more concerned with keeping HBD stable instead of encouraging top writers or new talent.
I am sure upvoting HBD stabilizer is very important, but perhaps some of that voting power could be used to really encourage the best talent on Hive with the hope of growing Hive user base.
There were many more like these three and they all left because of dwindling rewards/engagement. Some of these were real ambassadors of the platform too. There were a lot of philosophical skirmishes back then, people who had different visions of which directions the platform should grow. Can you imagine the traffic a person like Neil Strauss would bring here today?
That's good to hear some whales are encouraging new users! It sounds like there just needs to be more of a balance between concern over HBD stability and rewarding talent appropriately. In the beginning the model was more of a meritocracy where everyone with skill and imagination would aspire to reach the highest levels of engagement/rewards. This had an effect on everyone to become better as well.
Thank you for chiming in. I appreciate it. Your posts are stand-up. Having slept on all my comments, and waking up refreshed, I have a good view and another perspective of what makes "an excellent" piece of writing for a platform like HIVE.
My pleasure! I appreciate that. Hive has become such a big part of my life in the last, soon-to-be, nine years. My days of being a regularly trending author on here seem to be behind me now but Hive still really means a lot to me. I've seen it at its worst and at its best—how it can change lives for the better. A lot of us who've been around for a while can see Hive's untapped/underutilized potential and that can be frustrating sometimes. For all of the benefits that decentralization affords sometimes lack of an agreement of a cohesive vision of the future is its Achilles heel.
As a reader I share all four of those metrics with you. There are certain authors on Hive that I really enjoy reading and try to support as much as I can (@zirochka, @honeydue, @meesterboom, @bozz, @nancybriti1, @dbooster, and many more).
Thank you very much for your support, Eric. I really appreciate it. I think beyond the financial incentive we may have at Hive, it encourages us to do what we love here: writing, crafting, reviewing. Hive is a museum where you can exhibit what you do. Not to mention, there is the opportunity to meet people from other latitudes, talented, with whom you share interests and who become your friends and even family. I value those connections very much. A hug for you
I love the statement that "Hive is a museum". It is a museum of all of its authors. :) A museum where you can never tear down exhibitions of the past because they're now uncomfortable or no longer trendy.
It's a true record of what people elect to intentionally commit to their own exhibit - which no doubt sculpts their character.
And where there is room for everything and everyone. A museum where no one can tell us what art is: we ourselves invented the terms. Greetings and thank you for your answer.🌺
Thanks for the suggestions, I was following a large number of these names already, but a few, I was not :) I've added them to my list.
I don't even think that there's a cohesive vision at any real organisation, and it could be argued that the disorganisation is what inevitably leads to progress.
If everyone blindly followed the same goal, that is the only outcome that would be achieved. If numerous people have different goals, then well, perhaps one, or many of them would be achieved.
But the problem lies (in traditional places as well) - where multiple people are working toward the same goal in isolation of one another.
You're welcome! There are so many writers that I regularly try to keep up with and support...life sometimes gets in the way though.
Yeah, that is a good point about decentralization. If we had a centralized power structure there probably wouldn't be all of these front-ends and different projects being built on the Hive blockchain. Development might have been more focused but only in the ways in which the few in power wish. Government bureaucracy is a good example of this. On the flip-side, I've seen how many times the platform has devolved into periods of chaos and bickering and I feel like that's held the overall progress back but, I guess this is the price we pay for the freedoms of decentralization.
I love to not care a out that fact that HIVE is "crypto". What draws me to it and compels me to continue making a return is the fact that everything said here is immutable.
We have a ledger of statements. A ledger of thought.
Not everyone realises that immediately, but seeing a full edit history of everything is a powerful tool in helping to understand human behaviour, and indeed the way in which we use language.
The fact that I'm having my remarks distributed across multiple nodes, servers and immutable, verifiable ledgers makes me somewhat drunk with the power of my word.
If hive was crypto but not immutable, I wouldn't be interested at all.
Thank you for paying such close attention to all the comments on your post.
Your reply is upvoted by @topcomment; a manual curation service that rewards meaningful and engaging comments.
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