Much as we’ve enjoyed the newbies initiative and would like to keep learning in it, our time is up and we must give way for others to also embark on and enjoy this awesome learning experience. It’s been a 7-week journey packed with more education than you possibly would unravel in months! Hive is a big ecosystem and even the best explorers can get lost without someone to guide them.
| My Task | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Hive Goals and Strategies for Achieving them |  @starstrings01 | Task 1 | My Task 1 |
| 2 | Hive Guidelines, Markdowns and Use Of Tags |  @samostically | Task 2 | My Task 2 |
| 3 | Hive Keys and Security | @samostically | Task 3 | My Task 3 |
| 4 | Ecency, PeakD & 3speak, Liketu (Hive Dapps) |  @projectmamabg | Task 4 | My Task 4 |
| 5 | Tribe tokens, tipping tokens, mining tokens, and Hive Engine usage |  @ksam | Task 5 | My Task 5 |
| 6 | Blockchain Games: Rising Star Tutorial | @ksam | Task 6 | My Task 6 |
I think the newbies initiative is an awesome initiative, not just for newbies, as there’s a lot to learn from the lessons even for oldies. Setting or changing account trustee for example is something I’m sure even a lot of oldies don’t know how to do.
Image credit:
It’s been a joyous ride learning under the tutors of the initiative, and I personally have enjoyed the privilege to be a part of it a lot. A lot has happened in the span of this 7 weeks of the newbies initiative, and as far as my Hive Journey is concerned, I am a better Hiver now than before I joined the newbies initiative on several fronts.
This task helped me not just set goals, but set SMART goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. I'll be doing a recount of each of my smart goals in the later part of this post.
The beautiful #markdowns I'm using in this task are thanks to the markdown lesson and personal research I did for that task presentation. I'm hoping to be able to do more advanced markdowns along the line.
I also learned more about the general Dos and Don'ts of Hive like Plagiarism. I had a pretty fair understanding of this particular aspect already even before this lesson because everyone on Hive is always stressing the importance of producing original content and staying away from plagiarism. But I gained some extra insight after this lesson.
This is another thing I also increased my knowledge in. In my search to discover the best ways to protect my keys, I stumbled on something I didn't know already. Ledger Technology! Surprising enough, a week after I submitted my assignment, I saw a post announcing that Hive officially supports ledger now by @engrave.
The task also helped me understand what account trustees are, how to change them, and why it is important to choose only people we trust as our account trustees. Aside this, it also covered how to initiate account recovery if the need ever arises. I think this was very useful knowledge not just for newbies, but soething even oldies can learn from.
This task dived into the operations of the front ends of Hive, specifically, Ecency, PeakD, 3Speak and Liketu. Honestly for me, because it was required we submit this post via 3Speak, this lesson helped me more with creating video content itself, and I was less stressed by the operation of 3Speak itself. It helped me appreciate how much of a good job vloggers like 
I learnt in depth on Tribe Tokens in this lesson.
I explored something totally new in this task. I've always talked about how i wanted to start playing blockchain games, splinterlands in particular, but even though splinterlands wasn't the focus of this task, Rising Star was pretty good too. Not my type because I'm not really a music person, but it was pretty good.
I dared to try splinterlands itself after the task, and I'm currently on I think a 5 game losing streak. We move still. lol.
Even the most formidable systems have weaknesses and flaws, needs maintenance and improvements occasionally. The newbies initiative has a few things I think can be improved as well.
For one, I think since the community where the newbies initiative is hosted, (Hive Learners) encourages posters to use customized thumbnails, it would be a great addition to add a canva tutorial lesson to the next round of the initiative. This doesn’t have to be anything advanced, just a basics to guide them on how to design simple posters for their post thumbnails.
Another thing would be to start grading the tasks of newbies. Now this will be a lot of work, and I have another suggestion to handle the man power that this grading will require. Team leaders passing around checking and commenting on newbies tasks is fine, but I think grading will encourage newbies to do better and make them proud of themselves when they really perform well in a task.
For the grading, team leaders could develop a standard marking scheme covering several parameters during the growth of the newbies. Maybe parameters like markdow and understanding of topic and presentation. Obviously when they just start out, they have no knowledge of markdowns, so that section for example can be withheld from the marking scheme until they’ve been taught markdowns. Every time they’re taught something applicable in their everyday blogs, that can be added as part of the assessment of the marking scheme, to encourage them to actually apply everything they’re taught in the duration of the initiative.
Obviously, grading tasks will be too much work for one person (team leader) to handle. In light of this, I also recommend that in the next round, more team leaders should be recruited. Maybe 2 team leaders for every team, sharing the workload.
Last thing I think the initiative needs to improve on is curation. I am fully aware of the agreement newbies came to terms with in regards to curation-that curation is not guaranteed for them and that this initiative is to teach them about Hive. However, doing these tasks take a lot of time and energy if you want it well done, and nothing gives you a boost of motivation like appreciation in the form of upvotes. Maybe all enrolled newbies can be guided to follow the 
I understood
This recount was one of the reasons why it was best to really set achievable goals. Accounting for how far you’ve come with the goals you set 7 weeks ago can be both fun and encouraging, or sad and discouraging depending on how realistic your goals were. But someone I know on Hive has hammered too many times never to set the bar too low with your goals or expectations. So even for people who weren’t able to achieve their set goals, still did a great job and their inability to hit the set goals could’ve been due to several other factors and not simply setting unrealistic goals. I’m starting to slide down the motivational speaker lane, a place I definitely don’t want to go, so let’s just stick to what I’m doing.
For this recount, I’ll be quoting my goals I made 7 weeks ago, and making an account of the progress report on each of them. I’m going to be starting with the one I consider most important…
In the 7 weeks of the newbies initiative, I want to raise my HP from the 370HP I currently have, to 650HP.
I’m not an expert on planning or setting goals, but this worked out pretty well. Almost like I knew how it would play out. In the course of the 7 weeks, I have earned HP from both post payouts and a little by powering up on random days. Although the random power-ups have been nothing huge, just small powerups to give my HP round whole numbers.
I really was able to take my HP from 370HP to 650HP and honestly, if it wasn’t for the fact that I wanted to diversify, I would’ve been well over what my HP currently stands at. Don’t get me wrong, I love building my stake. It’s important to me. But right now, there are many other projects I have my eyes on and looking to get a piece of while they’re down in this bear market as well. Hopefully, the return on investments on those projects will ultimately still drive me towards an elevated HP.
To be honest, I delayed writing this task because I wanted to have hit my HP goal before I made the recount, and today’s #HPUD was the power up that took me there. Before powering up, I had 634.57HP and after powering up 30.43HIVE, I rounded it to a nice 665HP. This is not necessarily a huge power-up or the biggest HP growth, but with consistency, I think it’ll yield the desired results.
I’ve started putting a few accounts in my auto vote and have realized that good curation with auto vote will require I have an even bigger HP seeing that I set my Upvote Mana Threshold at 80%. For now, this is nothing exciting for the authors I put there, but the upvote value definitely sweetens as I increase in HP and HIVE price rises. But for now, I'm building and I like how it's going!
I’ll make at least 735 comments in these 7 weeks. If this adds to my current number of comments (1,188), I should’ve made 1,923 comments by the time this initiative ends.
As we sit, my comment count sits at 1,946 which would mean I hit my comment count goal. I was really surprised to find that I was only a little above it, because I expected to be a lot above this number.
However, even though I have been able to hit my comment and engagement goals, I have to admit that my engagement hasn’t been as fierce as it used to be. This is because of a lot of things, one of which I realized during this initiative was that placing expectations of a certain number of comments daily took the fun out of the engagement for me, as it almost turned into having to chase a certain number of comments daily even if I had nothing interesting or of value to comment or add to other authors’ posts.
I’m glad I realized this fast though, and when I did, I took it easy and only commented when I really had something of value to say. So, I’m proud to say that even though my average comment count has decreased, the comments I leave are comments of value and not just words I leave on posts because I want to reach a certain comment count.
I would like to get at least 25 followers over this 7-week journey. It took me 4 months to earn 71 followers.
I have 98 followers at the time of this writing, suggesting that I’ve earned 28 followers (3 extra followers than I thought I would get) in the course of this 7 weeks journey. I would like to believe this is a direct effect of engagement and my authorship (posts).
I plan to publish at least 5 posts every week. I won’t have any final year project or exam to write (maybe one underpaid national service job, but I’ll manage it) so I’ll publish posts as much as I can.
I found that even though I planned to post at least 5 times a week, my posting history has shown that I actually post mostly 4 times a week. I didn’t force my posting though, and only posted when I wanted to and could. I’ve seen the dark rabbit holes that forcing posts lead people to and I’m staying clear of those. Besides, forcing posts take the fun out of the experience and just makes it feel like a lot of work.
for my reputation goals, I want to have a reputation of 64 by the time this initiative ends.
This seems to be the one place I fell short on as it is one of the many things I can’t control. My reputation sits at 63.535 according to hivetasks. This difference looks close to 64 to the inexperienced, but will take a while to actually gap. Increasing Hive reputation is directly linked to how many “good” votes you get, and I can’t be ungrateful and say I haven’t gotten good curation, but it seems I over-placed my expectation of how good I thought the votes will be. Lol. This has yet reminded me of a very wise thing everyone on Hive say: just do your thing and don’t expect anything.
I want to make 1 Hive friend every week during the initiative’s duration. Followers are not necessarily friends. What this goal is about to make real friends here.
A lot of people are going to consider this one wack or irrelevant, but I assure you it is not to me. I don’t think I’ve been able to make 7 friends here in the 7 weeks, but I’ve made close to it. At least ones that I know of. There might be many more people I’ve become friends with without even knowing. I won’t mention any names for obvious reasons.
This one took more than just Hive though. For some of these friends, I’ve had discord chats with them and even for those who are part of this initiative, I’ve attended the discord meetings with them. I love making online friends so this was definitely a fun thing to add to the mix.
This brings us to the end of this long as hell post and my time in the newbies initiative as well. It was an educative and fun ride and I enjoyed every bit of it. I hope that the contributions we make on improving the initiative are carefully looked at attempts are actually made to improve the experience for the next batch.
To everyone who was a part of this round, cheers to our graduation lol. And thank you to the people behind the initiative and the team leaders. You guys did an awesome job!
