The other day on Hive I was informed by @hivebuzz that it's my 6th Hive birthday. Happy Hive birthday to me!

Long Long Ago

Well, not that long ago.

At any rate, I heard about Steemit Hive near the start of the project. I had stumbled upon some YouTube videos that were in love with @dan and highlighted his work with Steemit Hive. I was intrigued and wanted to try it.

If memory serves (and it probably doesn't) one could either pay a few STEEM to instantly get an account or give a phone number and go on a wait list for a free account. If I had known how to buy STEEM I wouldn't have been opposed to doing that, but being new to crypto, I had no idea how to do that. I gave my phone number instead. This would have been near the start of the year. I didn't hear anything back. Life went on and I forgot about Steemit Hive. Several months later, around the end of August or the beginning of September, I was reminded of it again and applied to get on again. This time I was given an account within a few weeks.

It's too bad I missed the gold rush time, when people were making thousands of dollars per post. (Side note: how many of those people who got the amazing rewards in the first year are still here? I think most of them left before well before the fork.) So it goes. I also missed out on buying BTC back in 2009 when some visitors to my website wanted to donate a lot of it to me but I refused, thinking it wasn't worth the time to figure out setting up a wallet just for funny internet money. Such is life. No regrets, but I do hope that someday luck will favor me with better timing and the foresight to act.

O Fortuna, guide of fleeting fate,
Grant me foresight, before it’s too late.
Bestow better timing, a dance divine,
In every step, let luck intertwine.

Anyway, I made my way to Steemit Hive and wrote this post: Konnichiha Steemit Hive! - Hello from Japan!. I'm surprised the photo on that post still works. I see that post only got me 10 STEEM. I remember being a little disappointed by that considering most intro posts at the time received quite a bit more. Despite that disappointing first post, I jumped into Steemit Hive at full stride, trying to meet as many people as I could and learn about the platform as quickly as possible.

My Hive Journey

These past six years I've mainly been the haiku guy around here. There was another guy for a few years. I forget his name. Italian fellow. He ran a popular haiku contest for awhile. I had some nice talks with him about haiku history and philosophy. Unfortunately he left some time ago, another of the many users who didn't move over with the fork I think.

My posts over the years have mainly followed a Japan theme. In between haiku posts and photos of Japan, I've mainly posted about Japanese history, culture, and related, and Zen Buddhism, which I have been practicing for many years, since I was in university. All pretty niche stuff, I think, which may be why I've never gotten those big upvotes that many enjoy.

I remember back in the day when curie upvotes were much bigger and everyone was chasing them, I was told by several curators that it was because I posted haiku translations sometimes, and translations aren't original work (I disagree) and that tainted all my posts meaning no big upvotes. I'm not sure if that is still true. If so, well, that's how it goes. I love haiku and I love translating some of the classical ones to bring them to a new audience so more people can enjoy them, and so I have no plans to stop doing this anytime soon.

But votes aside, I've had enough fun these past six years to keep me around. There have been some amazing people too and some great interactions with them.

But this is a post about me, a retrospective of sorts, so let's dive in. Beyond the general stuff...

• I was highly involved in the old The Writers Block group. Members of that group were more or less the only people who regularly commented on my posts at the beginning, so naturally I fell in with them. @jonknight was the guy who recruited me. Shame he's not around anymore. I was made poetry editor with that group and helped many of the poets we had at the time improve their poetry. A handful of people from this group remain on Hive. One of whom I still interact with on a fairly regular basis is the great @raj808 who still writes some amazing poetry. I'm sure many of you know him but if not, go check him out.
• I followed along with the splinter group The Isle of Write when they broke off from The Writers Block, and again I edited poetry for the members. We had a ton of poets back then, so it was a pretty busy place.
• For a few years I ran a weekly haiku contest which I judged along with @geekorner. He, sadly, also never moved over to Hive after the fork. (But he can still be found on Discord hanging out in the ruins of The Isle of Write's server.)
• @o07 recruited me to help manage his group Contest Kings. It was heavily involved in the early days of Splinterlands and gave away many Beta packs. Contest Kings was a very ambitious project to gain some control of the contest and giveaway scene on Steemit Hive, to better organize them, and help direct newbies to them to help them get started on Steemit Hive by winning some stuff. I still have many DMs in my Discord mailbox from people trying to negotiate with me in those days to try to get a better deal with our group. o07 is also is not around on Hive anymore. I'm sensing a theme here.
• Two years ago I took over running Blockchain Poets from @moeknows and have been doing my best to grow the group since then. I've put in a lot of my own money but also get a lot of wonderful support from @enginewitty @raymondspeaks @stickupboys and @anomadsoul (on behalf of LeoFinance).
• Throughout much of this entire time I have been a member of @enginewitty's The Alliance which has helped me keep my sanity at times. It's a wonderful place and I recommend it to all. If you want a very supportive place, that is the one.

In my first year on this platform I was posting twice per day. Most of my posts were only getting a few cents in upvotes, so looking back I'm surprised I didn't give up in frustration. But I enjoyed the interactions I had with other minnows, so that kept me around.

After that I got busy editing poetry for The Writer's Block and The Isle of Write so my posting dropped down to just a few times per week. Since the Hive fork, however, I've been on a streak and haven't missed a day yet. All together this puts me far behind people like @tarazkp, who I don't think will be slowing down anytime soon, making it difficult for me to ever catch him. Even so, I think I've produced a pretty impressive body of work over the past six years.

If I ever did want to take the time to compile a book (and people have suggested it to me many times, especially for haiku and haiku translations) I'd have plenty of material to sort through to help me put one together (and that isn't even considering the 20 years of pre-Hive material I have from blogging at least once a week from 1996).

Here's to the Future

It's been a fun ride. I think we all wish the price of HIVE were in a better place and that all the people we lost to the Hive fork would return—and that we would find a way to onboard a lot more people, and that Hive would grow to rival some of the other social networks that we dislike. Despite all that, I'm very happy with where we are as a platform and my place on it.

Here's hoping this next year for me will the best yet!

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.