I wanted to see how much time I spend on my own account versus curating / engaging with others for the past few days. So I tracked my time with a stop watch. The idea came from how much people often overestimate their efforts when it comes to doing things involving other people. So if people give me a reason like they've been working hard engaging on the platform while still having no luck, it would be convenient to see if they were more self aware and how they monitor their Hive time.
I don't really spend a lot of time on Hive but I'm still online doing other things. Under the self category, is the total amount of time I spend writing a blog or doing something for my account. The others category is the total amount of time spent engaging with other people or just catching up with the latest posts on Hive. This includes commenting, upvoting, curating or passively reading other people's blogs without my presence being known. This is just for 6 days.
| Self | Others |
|---|---|
| 19:23.41 | 44:19.34 |
| 20:13.22 | 40:23.15 |
| 15:45.10 | 25:36.46 |
| 31:50.23 | 35:23.27 |
| 35:12.45 | 29:40.39 |
| 22:11.23 | 40:54.55 |
Minutes : Seconds . Milliseconds
My own goal is to reduce the amount of time I spend on my blogs and allocate more time minding what others are up to. I initially thought I was being consistent by having less time for myself and more time for others but there were days when I spent almost the same amount of time on my blog than others. This was new since my previous bias was thinking I was spending more time with others.
These times were summed up as I had to take pauses in between hours since I was doing something else. I summed up the minutes and only saw the bigger picture at the end of the day. It's a fun experience trying to gamify the engagement. I really did think I was giving more effort to spend more time outside my blogs.
You may have notice the changes from day 1 and day 2 having more time for others and less about the self, I think it's due to being aware that I'm monitoring myself more on the first parts that I wanted to control the results.
Then having fed up and letting loose, my numbers went close to what I think were the real standard time I actually put out on the platform. And by the end of the tracking, I just tried to maintain focus and just try to spend less time on writing and more on engaging. At the time of this writing, I'm still using the stopwatch for the 7th day but that's already irrelevant at this point.
So now I got an objective answer about my time and will adjust my focus on putting more time engaging. It's just fun to be more aware of one's tendencies and mind trap.
When we're so focused on creating for our own blog, there's this tendency to be ego-centric about the way we approach creation. Like how much effort will I spend to finish this versus will this output even mount to anything that the audience would like? How long do I need to spend on writing/drawing/editing this so that I could do something else versus how relevant or useful is this content to the audience? You can have both priorities in mind when creating something for your blog but one will be more dominant than the other at some point.
I'm saying there's a tendency to inflate our efforts because we have a 24/7 conscious view of what we're doing and how we are interacting with the world than what others doing. If you heard about the spotlight effect when you get a feeling of walking into a room then suddenly all eyes are on you and it lingers on for a while, well this is only on an initial impression because the crowd will divert their eyes somewhere else after because everyone is busy minding their own business. But for the one who is under the influence of the spotlight effect. the feelings linger because you're more self-aware about your experience when nobody longer cares.
That's how I see bloggers get engrossed about the content they put out, so they leave their social skills less developed when self marketing is just as important as their own product / content. I run some podcasts on the background while doing some chores and these podcasts were about marketing. One of the lessons on the background that stuck to me was how salesmen should be found in their offices because they should be outside selling something.
While it's a given that bloggers need to mind the quality of the blogs they put out because their content is their flagship product, I think getting your name out there is just as important otherwise you're selling your blogs like screaming to the void in a space where everyone is competing for online attention.
Once you're already confident enough to that you can put out some decent material out there, it's time to start thinking about spreading your name across the space because this is the part where you can sell your personality for people to subscribe in. Think of a famous singer you might be into, if you only heard their music, you may just be contented with the product but because that singer has a team with a marketing strategy to sell their entire personality to the crowd, you'll likely get hooked into their other merchandise and lifestyle news.
I've fallen into some pitfalls to content creation like trying to spend a lot of time minding the bigger details that don't matter and giving less time to the smaller details that do matter. If anyone has gone way back to how I started writing anime reviews, they'll see some experimentation with formats and overloading some images that don't really add value to the core of the content and only serve as a visual fluff.
When I reduced those things, it's not like my material reduced in quality, on the contrary, I think it even made my blogs easy to read quickly because there are now less images to stretch the page. While running through these changes, in my head, I only thought about whether if someone like me were to come upon a stranger's post that looks the same, how would I approach the content?
The answer was making the type of content I want to read myself even if it was done by another stranger. And the reviews I make are often straight to the point because I don't want a lot of fluff and prefer to hear more about the analysis of the show. I'm still at the part where I share how I reduced my content creation time because this sets me up to the more important matter which is spending more time getting involved with what others are up to.
That's why I put more emphasis in gamifying how much time I spend checking out other people's blogs even if I don't actively engagement in everyone single post people make. It's good to have that sort of mental note and getting to know people across the platform so that familiarity could make it easier to talk about something the next time.
But for occasions where active engagement is done, this is the part where people should be focusing more on because attention given to others comes back around as people have a default tendency to reciprocate the attention too.
How are you doing?
Good. How about you?
Seems so mechanical but if people can pick up the healthy mechanical social cue there, it's common courtesy to reciprocate the gesture of concern as a ritual. You've seen this across other cultures in some other sophisticated to simple forms. And trying to get people interested in you requires you to get interested in other people's business too, that includes their product / content on this platform anyway.
When we are so engrossed about creating something for our blog, we become more conscious about the time and effort it takes to pump something out. And this consciousness doesn't extend to others because their inner world may process their perspective differently, what we only see is the final output and we can valuate things based on what we see.
This piece took me more than 3 hours to make because I'm using different neural circuitry than my usual go to writing content. Less than a hundred words and only a final output to show for.
But producing the written content that can span to more than 1k words can be done within less than 30 mins (without proper proofreading) because this is the type of skill I'm more familiar with. The visual art will take only a few seconds to appreciate despite how long it actually took me to make it while the written form can get some people to spend a few more minutes reading even if I relatively took less time crafting the content. But at the end of it all, it really boils down to an audience's subjected valuation of what the content's worth is.
But for artist or writers that are more involved with these types of content, they can have a better grasp at the product and point out the flaws. I still firmly think my writing isn't that great because I've worked as a ghost writer under a demanding editor who frequently shits on my writing but they were right about the grammatical errors pointed out and were worth their salt. I didn't have any hard feelings for them and would love to have them criticize my writing again if I really want to improve.
That's a humbling experience in my book because my tastes and standards were also influenced by these mentors working in the industry are doing while I'm just a tourist at it. It's liberating to not be trapped in being expected to produce content with high standards because this frees up more time to be concerned with other important things like getting acquainted more with people on the blockchain.
When it comes to engagement, the metric I'm looking at is less about the votes and more about the reblogs and comments because those hold more value in your account's visibility long term than passing votes.
While we can bicker about what makes quality content and how should it be rewarded, it still depends on who's looking at your blog and their subjective criteria is. The safest play would just be doing what others are doing that already works, like average mundane topics but this is still relying on the whims of curators that come up to your blog by chance. What you should be prioritizing are relationships that give you more visibility.
The common idea: Upvotes > Reblogs / Comment
My preference: Reblogs / Engagement > Upvotes
Because commenting takes more effort that clicking upvote and reblogging gives you a placeholder on someone else's blog and it spreads through other people's feed following that person's reblog. I consider upvotes as at the bottom in terms of gauging engagement because it's easy to cast them out and forgotten once the 7 days are paid out.
Sure, you may not get any guaranteed big votes for your content, but everything piles up in value if you are consistent with your engagement practices. This is how I discover other authors by chance because some of the people I follow got their posts reblogged for content discovery.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
