For myself being in hive for well over 5 years now it can seem easy for understanding many things on hive and how it works. However clearly for others it's till a major challenge to get them involved. While there have been great attempts to make it easier to on board people it still falls short but we are getting there.
Step back and try to remember when you first joined hive. Do you remember all the questions you had and how confusing it was? Things like...
Let's spend a moment and go over some basics that new users might not know.
Once you have some hive power you can then start to cast your vote for the top witnesses. These are mainly projects and developers that help the hive blockchain. It's still a bit of a challege to really know what each witness does and contributes unless you follow them and they write blog posts about it.
You can access this witness vote page in areas such as PeakD Witness Voting
While voting doesn't really earn you anything what it does do is gives you power to cast your vote on people/projects that you feel have hives best interests in mind.
As a witness they earn Hive for running the critical nodes that make hive run. Also in many cases they support or own other projects that make hive a better place such as Hive keychain, Splinterlands, LeoFinance and so on. Casting your vote is a very important part of making hive a healthy blockchain and community to be a part of.
Hive has grown by a huge amount in the few years it's been around. From a blog only type platform that only interested a select few to a blockchain that now supports NFT art, NFT games, Blogging, Social media (Twitter, Facebook and I'm sure many others are on the way), DeFi and much more.
It's a rather expansive blockchain now but still a bit behind the times in terms of what it should be able to do and that comes down to a lack of development on the chain. If you're a dev I would HIGHLY recommend development on the Hive blockchain over some other larger blockchain right now that you would just get lost on. Plus the hive community has always show rather large support for devs and new projects to help them out. By doing a weekly progress report or other details it's a great way to help fuel your project while providing value and updates to the community.
We are just starting to see this. Hive is a resource that allows you to interact and do things on the hive blockchain. Have too little of it and you'll find yourself not able to perform actions you want.
As more applications come online it's going to be increasingly important for projects to have a bunch of hive to support the onboarding and general growth of their project.
I would highly recommend that at first you don't blog or don't blog often unless you have something really awesome to share with people. I would instead first work on a few articles but mainly work on comments on others and general interaction to grow your following and build your reputation. From there you can start expanding into blogging as a income source on hive.
Don't expect huge votes right away. A introduction post goes a long way but you should seriously think about what you want to include in it as your one introduction post is like going on a first date, first impressions matter!
Think of hive as a blockchain to call home. It's a place you're going to spend a large amount of your day on and also earning from and contributing to. Focus on your reputation, building community and interacting with others. There's communities for gardening, pets, homesteading, gaming, finances and so much more. Learn about the chain and cast in your vote. It's a rather large community effort for helping hive grow and you're a fundamental part of that.
