Hive Is...

This post marks 2 years of daily posting. This month marked my third year on Hive. For the first 5 months I posted daily, dropped the streak, and came back with a few months at the end of that first year which pushed me to go further and aim for one full year of posting, that became two, and now I'm thinking of trying to make it three.

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Things I Like About Hive

There is a community spirit here which - from my first few weeks/ months here - I noticed. It's different than any other social media site, and it seems to be one of the only social media style blockchains.

Rewarding authors, creators, curators and savers is amazing, and the benefit of doing so is plain to see. It encourages people to be social, and it encourages people to share their thoughts, work, and in general their time here, without it being wasted.

Reddit, is very similar of a model, but doesn't really reward people nearly as much as Hive in general does.

Reddit has a much larger user base than Hive does (and probably ever will) Account creation is simple and it's a recognizable brand. People who have never used Reddit, know about it and know what it is. Hive on the other hand is flying so low below the radar that even people in the crypto space don't know about it.

Because of the lack of a user base, it can very much seem like we're all calling into the void, and that's no different than our "advertisement," I have had many conversations with people about Hive, online and IRL, I've signed a few people up, and of those signups only 1 posted more than once, and inevitably they stopped after about 5-10 posts.

They didn't leave for any reason other than the fact that it wasn't really for them. Of all those people, it didn't seem to be for any of them, yet they're the same people who share music online, constantly post on Instagram, or TikTok, so I suppose it's strange that this place can't attract or hold as many people as the big social media companies.

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How To Get Ahead On Hive

"Add Value... Obviously." When asking about rewards, or how to get to attention here, especially in the early days, I was met with this response. Another response I received which more people said was, "be social."

That's not really true. Yes, add value, either through creating compelling content, building something, or bringing people in. Well, I try to do the first, that doesn't really work, I don't have the skill or money to build here, and bringing people in hasn't worked.

I've tried sharing ideas and thoughts on what we could do to bring in more people, but it's hard to really get any attention, as mentioned before, we're essentially calling into the void here.

Then, about a year or more ago I saw how to really get attention. It's none of the above, and it's not even about being social.

I'm not going to mention names, but does anyone remember someone joining and powering up tens of thousands of dollars worth of Hive. Everyone got excited about it, then that excitement led to that person receiving $10-$20+ payouts for every post they created for months, until of course, it was discovered that their content was AI generated. That's how you get ahead here, if money is what you care about, then add a lot of money to your account and you'll get exactly what you're looking for.

It was at that moment I kind of felt a bit deflated about the entire place, if I'm honest. We have/ had, so many active writers, very talented people I don't see around anymore, who wouldn't get the steam off someone's piss, reward wise, or attention wise. People who worked hard to bring people together and encouraged competitions, who were essentially ignored. Then some AI producer comes in and gets all these rewards, praise, and attention.

Even after getting discovered they consistently received decent enough payouts. Kind of shitty and a big middle finger to so many more talented creators in this space.

Apart from that, and a few other things that bug me, Hive is grand. I like it here.

I essentially use my account to create and store content, mainly fiction, world building, and things of that nature.

Using it to store information is good, but also inefficient. On google drive, I can create stuff and organise it into subfolders, whereas here, I can't and instead have to thrall endlessly to find stuff I'm looking for. So, as a store of information it's not that great.

But, at least we can earn some money for posting and commenting, and also with work going out publicly we can earn some much needed criticism which in turn makes us better writers.

I don't really care about the money, and I don't care what anyone else gets, but that example shared above really did rub me up the wrong way, especially because I could clearly see that this person wasn't genuine, and they barely spoke with people.

We're all guilty of that, don't get me wrong, but that was just taking the piss to be perfectly honest.