Am I a parasite?

"Am I a Parasite? It's a fair question and one I'm forever asking of some Hive users on a daily basis. The Oxford English Dictionary describes Parasite as:

2 (disapproving) a person who always relies on or benefits from other people and gives nothing back.

So the question is Am I a parasite? Like a lot of things in life most statements initially appear plausible it's upon after closer examination the accusation starts to fall apart. We're all trying to find our place on Hive, and most mentors will tell you that you need to find a Hook to make people not only follow you but to come back each time and follow your work. Some people produce 'instalments' to their posts "Find out in part 8 if I finally become Prime Minister" some people post their running - jumping -riding activity in the Actifit community and then there are those who write about any old tosh (IMO). I come from the FOSS community where the constant question was always "How do I contribute?" now the vast majority of new users and sadly some developers would think that to 'contribute' a person had to be able to write code to be recognised as a valid contributor or at the very least be able to write documentation to be taken seriously. I believe that just by downloading a piece of FOSS software be that a Linux distribution or even Firefox web browser you are 'contributing'. I don't code, but I've written a reasonable amount of blog posts regarding FOSS topics over the years, visited FOSS based events both here and in Europe. Oh, and I co-hosted a FOSS podcast for five odd years, so I feel I've not only earned my 'Contributor Badge' but also a place within that community.

When I joined Crypto Blogging back in 2017 I was under the impression it was just that a place where you wrote something, people hopefully upvoted it and you eventually got rewarded and that's fine, a nice simple formula to follow but I along with many others am not a professional blogger, it's not my 'thing' sure I post what is in effect a weekly newsletter itsfriday and yes I have a community seriously but those are both created fixed streams of information, I don't generally look at a bag of wool and think "Hey! I'm inspired! Let's write about the Black Welsh mountain sheep!" although I'm kinda lying as this post was inspired by what someone said to me. Most of the stuff I write has a reason behind it so I'm sort of sparing when it comes to creating a blog post which then begs the question for me: "How do I contribute?" There are some awesome individuals who are literally flogging their guts out trying to promote Hive on other Social Media platforms such as Twitter in a concerted effort to bring new users to the Hive platform or at the very least get exposure for its members the obvious name that springs to mind is @nathanmars but that doesn't mean he's the only one! A year or so ago I was moaning to another member that I was earning next to nothing (Where have we all heard that before?) the individual knows far more than I do about all this including how to interrogate the Blockchain for all sorts of information something I truly envy him for, he responded: "Well, you could earn more curation." I don't just upvote for the sake of it, neither do I share peoples work simply for the sake of it I honestly only upvote and share what I like. The only time I ever downvoted was for a post that I felt should have at least been labelled NSFW by the way. The other thing they said was "I notice you're not commenting much?" I'm not very good at commenting 'out of the blue' on peoples posts although once a sort of conversation has started I'm good to go. The other thing for me is its hard work going through each and every persons account that I know to see if they've posted something new.

How can I contribute to the community? Increase my earnings? Get my name under peoples noses?

So the question remained "How do I contribute?" I gave it some thought and came up with a way that I feel helps everyone. I decided to find a worthwhile post every weekday morning, take a leaf out of Nathan's book in terms of promoting Hive on Twitter by sharing the people's blog post but I would also make sure I completed the Holy Trinity of Hive which is: Voting, Sharing, Commenting on the actual post as well as sharing a link to it on Twitter. Now as I said, I don't like 'comment bombing' and didn't want to spend the additional time crafting specific comments on individual posts so the best bet was to come up with some pre-defined text I could use for everyone so I came up with this.

I shared this post on Twitter to try and get your work in front of more people.
You can find your post and me on Twitter if you like? https://twitter.com/dick_turpin
I've also upvoted you and shared your content on Hive.
I read your post. No Bots were used, this was all done manually. Hope That Helps.

"If you don't have enough power or Crypto to upvote me; reshare me instead. Reshares are worth their weight in gold!"
Don't forget, you can upvote peoples comments too!

Now you could argue that I'm earning from the curation off the back of someone else's work and that by promoting it I'm artificially inflating the return but I would argue that's what happens when we share stuff on Hive anyway? I'm just taking it a stage further. At no point do I ask anyone to upvote me in return so it seems to me all I get out of it is a curation fee and hopefully a reputation for helping others? In my mind, I'm contributing but what do you think?

I created a very simple Poll here for a bit of fun: https://dpoll.io/detail/@dickturpin/am-i-a-parasite/

Am I a parasite? | Ecency