It's been happening for years, so I don't know why it feels like this is suddenly a new thing. Over the past month I have seen an increasing number of people come into the Leo Finance Discord and complain that they wrote a great post but it isn't getting any upvotes.
We've all been there right? Heck, I probably jumped in a Discord or two and did the same thing back when I was starting out. The difference was, back then, I didn't know any better and more than that, I didn't have anyone to tell me different.
That isn't the case anymore. Although not as prevalent as we would like, Hive has grown. More people know about it now and it isn't the fringe platform that it was 4 to 6 years ago when some of us first created our accounts.
I'm not going to name names, but one of these bloggers showed up in Discord the other day. People were asking what their Hive name was so they could check out the post, other people were giving critiques on the post. All well and good, but I had some other questions.
One of the first questions I asked was how they heard about Hive.
Sure enough, they were introduced to Hive by someone else (like many of us). No big surprise there. They said they heard their friend speak about Hive. This is where a red flag went up for me.
Perhaps it was just a language barrier issue, but I found the choice of words very interesting. If I were to talk about how I heard about Hive, I would say "my friend (relative) told me about it. Using the word speak leads me to believe it was something else.
In my time as a "referee" for the Sports Talk Social community, we would often come across users who had heard about Hive by attending a seminar. These seminars were largely centered in a specific region of the world (where isn't really important). People would "speak" and get large numbers of users to invest money and create accounts. Basically it was just a giant planned circle jerk.
Eventually, one of the new users would violate a copyright rule or outright plagiarize content and they would get flagged by our team. Discord would fill with the users and the people who spoke at the seminar saying we were not being fair and that our actions were driving away investors to the platform. How dare we downvote someone who is investing their own money into the Hive?
Of course other pleasantries were usually exchanged, but I digress.
No, my thought was always "How dare you?". How dare you promise these users something that you likely know is going to make it harder for them to grow on Hive. How dare you sell Hive as a get rich quick scheme and not give people the actual tools they need to be successful.
That needs to change.
The second question I started asking myself when the latest user came into Discord and started complaining about the traffic to their post is "I wonder what their engagement is like?". Luckily, HiveBuzz has a great tool for that. It may not be as robust as Hive Stats, but it does the trick.
Not to toot my own horn, but those are some pretty awesome numbers there. Approaching 31,000 comments and just over 1300 posts. Feel free to check my math, but that is a 1 in 23 (or so ratio right there). Over twenty comments for every post I write.
You probably won't be surprised to find that when I looked up a couple of the people who were recently in the chat complaining, the story was very different.
User A: 29 posts, 5 comments (it has since increased to 12 comments after encouraging them to engage more).
User B: 20 posts, 5 comments
I have little doubt the results would be similar if I looked up some of the other people who have been in Discord lately complaining about upvotes or views.
Remember my numbers? Go ahead and scroll back if you need to. Maybe you think I am just an outlier, or a freak with too much time on my hands who does nothing but comment all day.
Okay, fair enough, let me give you some other numbers:
Get the picture?
It isn't just me, these are some of the most influential people on Hive that I follow and they all seem to understand the one thing that isn't being taught to new users of the platform. Captain Picard gets it, why can't we?
It reminds me of the old daytime talk shows where they would bring people on and do paternity tests. There would always be a point where the host said something like "the numbers indicate that you are in fact the father" (or not).
In one of the recent discussions on Discord a person said they were not getting any upvotes. I asked if they were curating and commenting on content. They said "yes, but it is hard because I am not getting any upvotes" (or something like that), I looked at their Hivebuzz statistics and it was definitely a case of "the numbers indicate you in fact are not engaging".
I get it, it is a lot of work. Trust me, I do. I had to start taking weekends off from the blockchain because it was seriously a full time job. Go ahead and look at my account though, it's blockchain after all, everything is transparent. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
Engagement works, it is important, and unless you have golden content or a whale in your back pocket, it is the only way you are likely going to grow your account into something on Hive.
If you are on-boarding people and glossing over the importance of commenting and engaging on the platform, shame on you. That should be the single most important thing you talk to them about (okay, maybe keeping your keys secure is the most important thing, but you get the idea).
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 
