How does HP work and why to delegate it?

One of the most important aspects of Hive is the social network. Be it blogging platforms (PeakD, Ecency), microblogging (InLeo) or video sharing (3Speak). All these features are longing for our "likes" our upvotes.

If you are new to this world, then here is a small info, the amount of your Hive Power (HP) defines the strength of your upvotes. If you see an account giving a large upvote of a few tens of Hive under a content in the above platforms, then it automatically owns or got delegated a lot of HP.

For content creators this is the real world appreciation of their posts (though likes are nice as well).

HP is used all across the Hive Blockchain, when you confirm transactions to:

• create posts
• comment under posts
• playing games like Splinterlands, Cryptoshots, WOO or other games.

There are only a few ways to get it like:

• get upvotes to your contents
• Curate content on hive. and get a share from your reward back (50% to content creator / 50% for the curator). Curate simply means upvote a post.
• stake your Hive (or how the fancy kids call it Power It Up!, hence Hive POWER)

It is easier to get Hive:

• buy on big exchanges, where it is listed (see here a few places)
• buy on the secondary market like Tribaldex
• earn from staking
• earn in Liquidity pools

Now if you are not a big fan of curating you can invest your Hive Power into other projects, which might give you some kind of benefit.
Let us take WOO (Wrestling Organization Online) for example:

WOO asks the community to delegate HP to them, so they:

• can give out bigger upvotes for WOO related content creators
• gets a share back from the upvotes

The HP delegator gets:

• staked WOO, which is one of the game assets. The delegator can prepare for the game launch with these assets, or undelegate them and sell them, when the price is right
• If the HP delegator creates WOO related posts, then they will get an upvote from WOO as well.

There are other similar projects, like the new Holozing, the good old Hive Pizza project, and there are a lot more such projects...
You can receive upvotes on your content, if you delegate to the SBI Project.
Feel free to share more projects in the comments. I definitely scratched only the surface of the Hive ecosystem.