Talking about Filipinos on Hive

This post is a comprehensive scribble of my experience within the community and my future plans on building it. Just one of the rare instances when I talk about the community. I temporarily lead the hiveph community until someone wants to step up and take my place just cause there’s no sucker that wants the spot yet.

I got the spot after @romeskie had some real life issues to take care and when she came back the position just stuck with me. It’s not really my show but everyone who pitches in putting in the work that we still manage to keep the community alive.

Outline of the Post:

The timeline
The insights gathered.
What has been done for the community
Future plans

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The timeline on how the community shaped my views about Hive:

I joined the old blockchain from a friend’s recommendation right around the prices started to fall. One of the first thing I did was lurk around the ecosystem. Let me tell you about one of the toxic Filipino culture still prevalent on any platform, it’s having a regionalistic bias over the greater community. Think of it as just having selective members who live in the same region being more favored over the others when it comes to promotion and attention. In practice, it would be like:

“@ UShive.[insert state here]” but only on a smaller scale as we live in an archipelago. This way of thinking made it possible for ancestral tribes to be close knit for survival but also hindered unity as a nation when colonialists tried to take over. I’m saying it’s in the culture to have favorites because of living in the same region and this made it difficult for public relations being an anon and a nobody.

So I just ended up not giving fuck and just did my own thing while eventually joining a small group where it preached financial literacy but actually just a shilling practice for new tokens out there. A lot of frictions happened within the community and I’m pretty sure I struck several nerves when I was calling out community plagiarists when most prefer to look away because friendship matters more than integrity. There’s also calling out shitposters that fish for votes by simply using some tags to win an orcas favor (not going to name them but they received a lot of delegations from STINC to make a name for themselves).

There are a lot of initiatives that have been made to keep community engagement going but it is a great wall to overcome the mindset of hand to mouth way of using the platform after rewards have been given, being apathetic to initiatives and simply not caring because people just don’t have a lot of stake to be bothered socializing to. These are the main reasons why I just didn’t have high expectations for the community and wouldn’t mind it reaching a dead end even prior to Hive’s creation. There’s just no point in building in a community that has no long term vision of their use on the platform beyond just accessing the money printer.

So how I ended up with this position is even more of a surprise when @ybanezkim26 can be the figurehead the community needs.

The Insights Gathered

Those days are gone and so are the people that shitposted with the hype. Maybe if Hive comes close to a dollar or more will these people come back again. There would always be pricks that are just self motivated to post and go vote trading, not interacting while passive aggressively comment how the lack of unity deteriorated the community but can’t even be assed to lift a finger trying to give a fuck about others. A lot of Flipino community groups have been created but none lasted this far as HivePH and I just attributed it to quality members still sticking around instead of chasing hype somewhere else.

These are the people I want to invest my time with in the long term as it’s far easier to build on the people that are with you when times are hard. For the folks that are still active on the other chain while silently dissing the Hive community, sometimes it’s tempting to outright just call out the behavior of shitting on the platform that feeds you but then I’m the asshole for bullying the entitled. They still post here and I notice but don’t mind.

I'm working with people that have near 0 returns for their time invested on the community. If I were to count how much time they spent on curating and minding the small background details to keep this community alive, they are at a loss as they could be doing something more lucrative with their time. That in itself gives me more confidence that it's just volunteer service.

We don’t really need a lot of members to be active and I stopped caring about engagement levels or activity on the community page. There’s no point trying to persuade people to care when you don’t have a lot of stake to “support” their wishful lifestyle. Just support those that still bother and the status quo is just a label. If 1 out of 10 people will remain to be active members doing some good for the community long term, then it's worth the bother as this platform requires new blood to continue. There would always be people that would waste your resources and that's just how the social part of the blockchain works.

What has been done for the community

I wasn’t overselling the idea that HivePH still has quality members on its roster. The community can still run with less than ten people on discord while still managing to cover the #philipines and #hiveph tag along with other auxillary functions for community building. The discord server has low traffic but is always open to anyone willing to hang out.

When I asked @jazzhero to make part of the functions automated, it helped make the curation works more efficient. Bless the man for his underpaid and over appreciated work to make it all happen. Even the rewards distribution has been favored to curators as the previous setup was listing featured authors as the recipients of the beneficiary rewards. What changed was my insistence on rewarding more people who keep running the community as it’s a thankless job. It’s not like people can be asked to say thank you if you hand them votes as most just prefer the efforts the community has been doing.

Ever since we had the bot automatically picking up posts with #philippines and #hiveph tags on it, there was no longer any need for people to visit the discord server and drop at post promotion. Naturally, this decreased the activity on the server because lol. We can still mute posts from people abusing the tag.

Future plans

The stake that is being used by the community account is the same stake community members pitched and it snowballed to what is it now. I intend to keep building that stake as it’s a community account. The account’s earnings will be used to onboard new users and continue to support existing active users. It doesn’t matter whether the favor gets returned if people decide to support the account or not, it was created to help new users with whatever vote value it can offer.

Our focus is onboarding new users without giving people false expectations on how the money printer works.

Part of the long term plans was supporting @whoaretheyph, a charity program I recommend you checking out (as soon as it becomes active again). Right now, we have made some onboarding goals to hook players into trying out Hive through the play to earn model using Splinterlands and Dcity (along with other games Hive has to offer). Not everyone can blog and some are just happy with the play to earn model as exhibited by the recent Axie hype.

When one builds on a community, one forfeits resources that could have been used to build on the self in exchange of building on others. I’m not overly optimistic about the results of my efforts but I know what I do has value and it isn’t wrong.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time