I created my Leofinance account in January 2021 after seeing accounts on noise.cash earning large amounts here.
I was amazed seeing articles on the front page reaching hundreds of dollars in rewards and wanted to try earning for myself.
Previously my only experience writing articles was a review of the movie Tenet and the game Destiny 2 on Publish0x which earned me a grand total of $0.22. I was excited that I could earn talking about topics that interested me, something that I quickly learned the importance of.
January
That photoshop cover photo, chef kiss
I must have had a lot of coffee that week and I managed to smash out 12 Leo articles in a week. Easily the most I've ever written in my life. Mind you there was a lot to write about, doge had mooned and the GME/AMC short squeeze was in full swing.
The articles were only getting around $1 in rewards but it was blowing other platforms out of the water. Coupled with winning cryptography contests hosted by onealfa I was hooked.
Compared to making $20 a year selling the data equivalent of my soul on treasuretroooper (yes I really did used to do surveys there) this was big bucks.
This guy still gives me shivers. What a scam.
I then had to try and find my niche. It was exhausting monitoring and commentating on crypto events and disheartening seeing others getting huge amounts of upvotes for shorter articles of the same event. I briefly tried using my photoshopping experience to make crypto memes and even made a tutorial for anyone that wanted to give it a try. Both completely flopped earning $0.70 but taking days to write.
Around this time I also made two posts on Hive (I signed up to Leo having no idea what Hive was, confusing times) posting pictures of my cat, both earned $20 which really got my attention.
March
CUB launched and I bought a few hundred dollars at around $3. Whoops. I also convinced my girlfriend to buy some, double whoops. Still holding out hope it will pick up though, CUB and Leo being this cheap has always been a mystery to me. It feels like the more development goes into it, the further the price sinks.
July
I then left the UK for work and travel and made Hive my more permanent home. I will definitely continue making articles here because crypto is such a huge part of my life, but I find it a lot easier to write about topics that are more at home on Hive.
November
I bought a goddamn house. It's still an ongoing thing but the complexities of it should give me article inspiration for a while, and allow me to give advice to any buyers on here, y'know when CUB hits $50.
Now
This year I have managed to power up 555 Leo, and have 500 Hive staked to Leovoter to continue growing it. I'm still confident that Leo will start getting the attention it deserves and leaving completely to focus on Hive would be a mistake.
Writing this article showed me the rapid start I had with Leo that quickly trailed off. While I may use it a lot less than Hive, I will always be grateful to it for bringing me to the Hive tribes.
And now for a rant.
One thing that I think Leo needs to do better is curation. It feels like every newcomer is depending on being seen by one of the very few curating whales.
It's something that Hive does well because of the communities. If you post a relevant article in a relevant community, you could be overlooked by curation teams, but you would still be rewarded by actual people reading your article because it's content they're in that community to read.
Every time I post in Leo however it feels very all or nothing. If a whale doesn't upvote, nobody will upvote.
It's something I think could be helped just by simply changing the default view from trending, to newest in the subsection views. Just to give the little guys more of a chance of being seen.
This brings me to why I'm writing the article. I'll be posting a sister article to Hive at the same time and monitoring engagement on both. It should have some interesting results.