For Those Who Want To Make A Quick Buck
Much proverbial ink has been spilled here on ye olde blockchain about Quality Content™, spam, plagiarism, formatting, and the like. But there are people who just don't care. They have no interest in improving their blog, in making an impact or a name for themselves, in building a community, or any of that. They want to earn a few bucks, cash out, and go home. And really, that's fine. Not everyone in a community is going to want to really participate or build relationships. But here's the thing.
If your only desire is the money, you are making it harder for you or anyone else to earn that money.
If the whole of Hive is nothing but spammy shitposts, reworded plagiarism, and tag abuse, nobody is going to want to spend time here. Nobody is going to want to read your blog, or anybody's blog, because it's like swimming through an ocean of trash to find a pearl. Nobody is going to trust that they can vote on it and not be rewarding a plagiarist. Nobody is going to want to invest. Nobody is going to want to build community.
And if nobody wants to do those things, guess what? You don't earn your money.
In order for the price of Hive to go up, increasing your earnings, the value of what's on the blockchain has to go up. If you are loading it with garbage and theft, you are lowering the price. It's simple, really. If Facebook was nothing but fake accounts of stolen white-guy-in-a-military-uniform photos that claim "job: doctor at military doctor" and DM you with "hey beautiful," or "did you hear about this fake government grant program?" do you think Facebook would be successful? No, because literally no one wants to deal with those sleezeballs. We all kinda wish they would fall of the edge of a cliff and leave us alone.
But there is a lot of other stuff that makes Facebook successful; popular groups and your actual friends and creative video makers and all that. If every popular page was taken over by a hacker or a phishing scammer who offers to pay the page owner to post their phishing links, everyone would leave Facebook once and for all because everything about it would be suspicious. That's what you are doing to Hive.
Look, I am obviously not The King Of Blogging here, I don't make the most popular content and I'll be lucky (and excited) if I manage to hit dolphin status by my 4th Hiveversary. I'm not going to lecture you on How To Be Popular or give you a tutorial about markup formatting. I only just recently learned that you could choose which image is the cover image no matter what order it lands within the blog itself; I'm still learning, too!
All I'm saying is, there are piles of tutorials already here you can read. You can ask questions in the comments - people are generally happy to answer (that's how I learned about the cover image!). If you want Hive to succeed - even if you are totally selfish and you only want it to succeed because you want to live off your earnings - you're going to have to help it succeed. You can't just piss out a post with one blurry photo, three lines of text, tag everyone you know so they feel obligated to upvote you, and add approximately five group banners at the bottom of your post and expect the price of Hive to go anywhere. When the price increases and you're doing that, it increases despite you, not because of you. You have to actually try if you want to be able to live off your earnings here someday.
I know what you're thinking.
Not everyone is a writer. That's fine! We have people who make videos and photography groups and games and Actifit and everything in between. You don't have to be a Wordy macWordsmith in order to participate without plagiarizing. Alternatively, you may be fine with writing but just not have any ideas. In that case, may I suggest finding something you care about rather than looking to see what post got paid the most and trying to write about the exact same topic? If someone wrote a post about snails that got paid $50, and you don't know anything about snails but you think that's popular so you read an internet article, steal a couple of photos, and rewrite what you just read that you don't care about, don't be surprised if you get paid 5 cents. Nobody wants to read your terrible high school essay about a topic you couldn't care less about. Write about what you know. Even if you think it won't be popular, it might surprise you. Maybe your simple post about your garden gets a lot of attention. Maybe your video of something cute your cat did, or of some crazy lightning near your house. There's no telling what other people will respond to, but I guarantee you they are not going to respond very positively to bullshit. They often do respond well to genuine interest and effort, though.
And if you're stuck for ideas for a day or two, don't worry about it. Yes, consistency is key and if you're the type of person who can write a real blog on the daily, hats off to you. My brain doesn't work like that though, and I'd rather go a couple of days without a post than shitpost just so I can say I "blog every day." But you know what I almost always do every day? Vote and make a few comments.
Comment!
People love comments, they love getting to know people, they love hearing that somebody liked what they shared and they're not just screaming into a void. Make friends. Talk to people. Don't just say "nice post." Actually talk about what they wrote. Read it. When you show you care, people tend to care back. You can't expect to just post blogs or nonsense comments and expect anyone to even know who you are. Engage. Like you would if you were in person. If you want to a party and someone told you a funny story from their life, would you say "nice story," and that's it? No. You'd laugh at the funny parts and maybe say, "oh, that reminds me of this one time a similar thing happened... ", right? Do that! But on the computer! Talk to people!
So, in sum: even if you don't care about anything else on this blockchain or any of the people on it, just your own wallet, guess what? YOUR WALLET WILL BE FATTER IF YOU MAKE AN EFFORT. In the time it takes you to rewrite somebody else's article about a topic you hate, you could write a real post yourself and I bet you'd get paid better. You don't have to be "professional" and "perfect," you just have to be real. This is not a college entrance essay. This is social media. People want to interact with other people, not some faceless copier. Be yourself. Let snail guy be snail guy and you write about cars, or crafts, or dogs, or whatever it is that you actually like. When you start enjoying your time here, then you're doing it right.
Thank you @phoenixwren, for using the CO2 Compensation Coin (COCO / SWAP.COCO) on Steem-Engine or on Hive-Engine to reduce your CO2 footprint. You want to join? Buy some COCO / SWAP.COCO and transfer them to CO2Fund's account @co2fund.
There's another side to this aswell. People try to make a quick buck by upvoting the accounts that always get high payouts, even if their quality really doesn't represent the amount they are getting. That means trending will be filled with bad content, which doesn't make Hive and interesting place to share your own, quality content. So we ourselves should also reconsider upvoting shit posts, just because they get the big bucks. Especially the people with the big votes, the ones with the biggest stake in this.
Honestly, I ignore trending and I feel like it shouldn't even be a thing given the bias of the monetary aspect. Or, actually, trending should be based on comments. Even with the "nice post" people, they're not getting upvotes on those comments so it doesn't serve them to spam high-paying posts with bad comments.
I never even considered that, but that's actually a great idea!
Your content has been voted as a part of Encouragement program. Keep up the good work!
Use Ecency daily to boost your growth on platform!
Support Ecency
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Your content has been voted as a part of Encouragement program. Keep up the good work!
Use Ecency daily to boost your growth on platform!
Support Ecency
Vote for Proposal
Delegate HP and earn more
Can you please stop writing great posts, my VP is getting hammered...
LMAO thank you. And sorry. 😂
I'm running out of curation cards too.
Oh yes, I've got this one:
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 65/78) Liquid rewards.
really great post! It's definitely a learning curve here... I think it takes a while until one finds the posts one wants to write about. Of course one limitation is that it's all about blogging currently. I think in the future there will be other ways to earn - not that, as you said, should necessarily be the first thing that should come to mind. But it obviously plays a role. It's a good feeling to get rewarded by something you created (a text, a picture etc.). I still think this concept is new and revolutionary, it's just that not a lot of people know about this concept.
While fundamentally correct, the market does not "care" about these fundamentals. Steem is a good example; looking at that blockchain, the lack of development and the spam and plagiarism on it, it is currently valued twice of that of Hive. Investors and abusers don't care about fundamentals as long as they can make a quick buck :/ But I have faith that the tide will turn eventually with so many improvements going on around here :)
@tipu curate
Totally true. I don't understand the valuation of a lot of the "big" coins when there's nothing being done with them besides speculation, really. But ya know, people wanna gamble, so they're gonna do that. But I'm with you in that I think eventually the tide will turn. In so many tech areas, especially during the dot com bubble, people threw money at any cool internet thing even if it was a terrible idea - that's where we're at with crypto in a lot of ways. Those entities that survived are those that evolved and grew.
I think that a post that contains only the phrase "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", would work - if the post was the marvelous conclusion to a tale about how a crypto-currency or another rug-pulled.
The value of the blockchain is not connected to the value of the content, at this stage. The value of this blockchain will increase when content that is not about the very blockchain upon which it is ensconced is that which is most rewarded.
People do not use platforms like reddit, facebook, twitter, instagram, etc to exclusively comment and speak about its structure, governance, and other bits and pieces. They go there to look at what they like, engage in conversation, or some casual trolling. A lot of them are bots, just like here.
Sure, there's a great deal of content on those other platforms that speak of the platform - but they're not what is getting the lion's share of the views and traffic. On HIVE the inverse is true - the lion's share of the view and audience's attention is devoted to the platform itself, not the content.
Make content, not content about a platform.
🤣 Yeah it probably would.
And you are probably right, at least to some degree; a lot of people start on Hive because they're already into crypto, so a huge chunk of the users are crypto-people who want to discuss it, like WallStreetBets people want to talk about investment on that subreddit. When we have enough of a user base that the non-crypto "normies" outnumber the crypto-enthusiasts, it will probably be a very good sign that the chain has enough on it to attract the masses.
I am one of the normies that doesn't frequently wade into these discussions, but as the price is finally up from the floor, we're seeing more of a return of the shitposting, and more of a discussion about the shitposting, so I threw my hat in the ring.
I've never seen anyone extract their hat from a ring. Only supply. Are rings in hats a giant ponzi?
Is there a field full of hats somewhere in the world? Could make a decent tale.
Here here!!! I get so sick of people writing nothing but posts about the blockchain and complaining about post rewards... I completely agree and why I rarely ever make posts about Hive itself... at least on Hive... lol.
The reward is the act of posting and sharing itself. A creator is going to create whether they're rewarded for it or not - it is an insatiable itch that they have to scratch until their creation oozes out into the world. I know I'm like that with my photography and art!
Same here, for me, it's not about how much of a reward I get, I think it's awesome that we get rewarded at all... I would still be posting as well on other platforms otherwise, so at least I am giving my data to the giants anymore.
I love the last graphic. 😂 Absolutely agree with the rest, as well. I always try to approach my blog as fun. If I'm not having fun writing a post, why the heck even do it? Though it probably helps that I still look at earnings on here like Monopoly money. I understand for some people it's a lot different because they may really need these earnings, but that still doesn't excuse plagiarism and the like.
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I'm one that could really use the money, but also I enjoy writing, and am interested in various topics, and would like to make friends, and would like to help others who struggle even harder than I do so that we can all do well. I guess I just don't understand the singular fixation.
You are a unicorn of the blockchain! Haha, no I think there are a good group of people that really try to bring value and encourage engagement, so I do hope the others continue to learn from the positive behavior and that the price of the token follows. The more posts like this the better, because I still think a lot of people make an account and don't know what to do from there.
Oh for sure, they're definitely out there! Sometimes I think it's a matter of people stumbling onto them and taking new information on board, but others I think just don't care. So I was trying to convince the not-carers that it's in their interest to well, care. LOL
Haha, well it would be great if you can convert some of them! Different people respond to different approaches, so I'm sure yours will hit the mark with some. 😄
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🤔 Have I mentioned lately that I like the way you think?
True words spoken...umm written. I suppose those who this is aimed at didn't make it to section 2 reading but if only one is thinking about it you have done well. :)
I just happen to click on some of those "blogs" that screamed at me " I don't give a fuck." just to leave them thinking there seem to be more of them popping up.
And I'm not a big player here but even in a small short post you can show some personality for gods sake lol.
Thank you! :)
And yeah, that's probably true. 😂 I might even get a "nice post" comment.
But yeah, like - I know my arse is generally pretty wordy but I've seen some short posts that were great. I would much rather see: "Y'all, you have to see this hilarious thing my dog did today! (photos or video)" like you might see on FB or Twitter than these essays written like high schoolers trying really hard to rephrase what they already read or what their teacher said for a grade because that's what they think teacher wants. Like, please rant to me about how Beowulf is misogynist af and you're rooting for Grendel rather than another boring book report about the Themes™ that your lit textbook told you were "important."
Agreed, I mean I get it, in the beginning you might think this way but sooner or later you have to realize that this is not exactly what most are looking for.
A teaching post once in a while is fine but don't disguise yourself as something that you are not. It's a learning process, I had to learn it myself.
But I also think that in the outside world we are living in superficial, pretending behavior often gets rewarded and personality doesn't count.
The world needs more personality / personalities so does the Hive. Let's create a place for personality...Amen ;).
This. Our society rewards conformity and generally punishes those that don't. Sometimes the quirky ones succeed, and then they are held out as examples of, "See, they made it, there's no excuse for you."
BOOM! Well said my friend, this is something that seriously needs to be addressed. I just read the comments and agree, trending should be based on engagement rather than income from a post.
Great article and love that meme. haha
hugs to you 💚🤗
Thank you and hugs back! :)
I just got back into blogging after a long hiatus. You're talking about snail guy making 50 bones. Someone in the community told me about the hive power up days. I didn't have enough hive to qualify but I decided why not participate anyways. Made a post showcasing some photos of bees I took years back and someone voted it up to forty. Never made that much on a post before and it was pretty cool. Love these communities for their positivity.
Those sporadic power votes are very encouraging, aren't they? Early on in my days on the old chain, I got power voted by blocktrades and was just so excited. Not only because I got a big upvote, but because I wanted to be able to do that for others someday!
!BEER
View or trade
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BEER.I feel like there are a lot of partial truths being explored here but also some logical fallacies. Hopefully we can respectfully disagree because I would like to operate on the good faith that this post was made to encourage others and not obfuscate the ugly truth of what is happening.
That being said, I think this is a bad take overall based on the conclusions it comes to and what it implies. I agree with the beginning of the premise that people adding more value to the blockchain instead of a quick buck extraction would help Hive and its price long term. But I think you're wagging your finger at the wrong people.
First of all, quality of content is largely subjective. Some people may enjoy long posts and some may enjoy those with more memes and ecetra. Also, just because a post is more well written doesn't necessarily equate to it more accurate. This is further complicated when 3rd parties defend the incorrect premise because it's either well written or written by someone of high esteem. I'd even opine that this well written post that misguides people is inherently more dangerous to the well being and longevity of Hive than a short low effort meme. At the end of the day, quality of posts are always going to vary widely and expecting people on the lowest part or even the bottom half of the spectrum to bootstrap us to $5 Hive is quite silly. It completely ignores statistic principles like the 80/20 rule and is largely putting the onus on the least impactful areas. To me, this would be like traveling to the United States and seeing all the bloat and corruption in the government and federal reserve and then hassling broke panhandlers like they're what's wrong with the system. I wouldn't encourage panhandling but I also wouldn't pretend like the US economy would be more stable if they didn't exist or just stopped panhandling and 'get a job'. This is actually a really common perspective that can be easily debunked but I won't get into that for the sake of brevity.
In my opinion, Hive largely needs better development and infrastructure if it wants to stay relevant and compete. But unfortunately many developers don't get their proposals funded because most of the funding has been going into the HBD stabilizer experiment. Speaking of low effort posts/accounts look at face of the stabilizer Smooth. His posts are some of the least effort I've ever seen and get valued at over $200. The only lower effort I've seen is Tim Cliff's HBD funder posts. They're just literal copy paste comments 10 a day. https://peakd.com/@hbd.funder/comments
If you want to downvote/shame shitposting reward pool rape that would be more impactful than all the posts you've complained about combined. These comments are upvoted by some of the major witness accounts, signaling about the centralized cabal I've heard some speculation about. Smooth also makes this controversy worse by hypocritically targeting a number of posts that are well written but on subjects he disagrees with, stifling the core fundamental you're defending. It's entirely possible that Hive's upper echelons are actually worse than Steem's. It's entirely possible for us to flip this around and fix it but it requires integral changes that doesn't involve browbeating minnows and shifting the blame down. Punch up and you might find a path to $5 Hive.
My intention was not to say that minnows (hi, I am one) can bootstrap us to $5 Hive; I'm just saying that shitposting and plagiarism sure isn't helping because it makes the environment seem sketch and a chore to wade through. Reward pool rape is its own separate issue; I don't think the shitposters generally make much in terms of earnings so I don't think they are contributing to that problem in particular. I'm just talking about the experience in social media terms; if I have to wade through thirty crappy/stolen/copypasta type posts in order to find one really good one within a community that is devoted to a particular topic, such that you have to search even within that community to find the things that that community is supposed to be about, it kinda sucks, and people aren't going to want to engage with that. This is why I was relating it to Facebook, because nobody is earning on FB but if you join a group there and it's full of unrelated nonsense, you leave that group.
I am not a techie-inclined blockchain bro type and I genuinely have very few opinions about governance and reward pool rape and things of that nature because that's mostly outside my wheelhouse. I see that there are some cool things built on Hive, and I appreciate them, but I feel wholly "eh" about the HBD stabilizer argument.
My whole angle on this post is from the "normie" using a social media platform and if it's enjoyable to use or not. I would also, if we're asking devs for things, ask for some variant of "block," not just "mute" here, because it can be unsafe if you mute someone who is potentially threatening but they can still see everything you post, eh? What if someone has a stalker and that stalker finds their blog? That's actually my biggest wish as far as "please build this" goes, and it has nothing to do with price, just user experience. That's what I'm talking about with this post, user experience and if us non-techies will come en masse and stick around, and mass adaptation is, generally, a positive influence on price, no?
Had me laughing hard. I am having flashbacks of all the cussing and headaches I suffered learning how to "Hive," which is still an ongoing process. Death to poopy posts!
LOL
You should have heard me cussing at an exchange earlier. Technology makes me cuss faster than anything. 😂