A short intro

Almost one month ago I discovered the Hive platform. I was searching for information on the internet when I found a great article on Publish0x which contained exactly what I was looking for.
It was the first time I heard about Publish0x, but I did know the concept of paying for content which they use there. It reminded me of Steemit where I used to create an account in the past.
Curious of what has become of that platform I browsed to Steemit. And then I read about the hostile takeover and the fork of Hive.

Why this post?

It’s been a month since my first post here and I’m still here. That is because I really like the concept of sharing things with people with the same interests, getting feedback and even being rewarded for that.
Since I just picked up my photography hobby again Hive gave me an audience to share my content with.
In a short period I learnt a lot about this new platform and the challenges it’s facing so I thought it could be useful to share the experience of my first month here. Maybe It could be a good input to improve the Hive platform and might help getting more engagement and keeping newbies like me on board.

The first steps

When I read about the Steemit takeover and the birth of Hive I wanted to look into Hive. At first it was difficult to find the right Hive because there are a lot of other products called Hive like Apache Hive, Hive Smart Home technology etc.
When I finally found my way to the Hive.blog website I started looking around. At first I tried a search for photography with a quite disappointing result.

The content I was presented was all months and even years old. The pictures and subjects weren’t that interesting either and I had no advanced search options. I’m really wondering what the results are based on.
Clicking through the posts I managed to find the photography community where I discovered that there was recent content and people shared some really nice pictures. This made me decide to create an account myself and become active on the platform.
This looked quite simple; there’s a sign up button on top of the page, but it turned out to be a little bit more difficult than I thought. On the signup page you can choose out of 10! different registration providers.
As I wanted to start immediately and didn’t want to pay for trying out something ‘only’ 4 providers were left. I didn’t look into the possible advantages of the paid providers as I had to visit all the different pages and the Hive.blog website itself also didn’t have any information about the providers. I chose Ecency which had a quite simple registration process and an app.

My first post

Logging in with Ecency was quite simple. Mostly because I was already familiar with the use of keys.
I’ve created my first post (@friendlymoose/shooting-some-bird-pictures) for the Photography lovers community curious about what people thought of my pictures.
The outcome wasn’t really what I expected it to be.
Within 5 minutes someone replied “curate” and then the upvotes started coming in. Within an hour the post had over 100 upvotes, 2.76 Hive reward and a few non personal/automated replies.

I was thrilled to see that I could actually earn money with this, but I was a bit disappointed that no one actually took the time to post a personal reply with their opinion on my post.

Another hurdle

After my first mixed experience I was looking for posts with more interaction. While browsing the different photography communities I noticed some photography contests. These contents had more interaction. These contests received a lot of replies and there was attention for the submissions. So I decided to join in.
When I tried to create my second post I experienced another hurdle; not enough resource credits.
As I was eager to join the contest I tried to find out what this resource credits was all about and how I could get some more. I found it quite difficult to find more information about it. I ended up joining the discord of the photography community (luckily I was already familiar with discord).
There I was delegated a few Hive so I could post some more.

The learning curve

After joining the contest the snowball started rolling. I knew about resource credits now, but there were a lot of other terms being used on Hive (HBD, Stacked Hive, Liquid Hive, Curators, Keys, Witnesses, Voting mana, Experience points…) so I decided to find some information about that.
I was looking for a kind of beginners manual, but that wasn’t easy to find. The search within the Hive content didn’t give me a lot of good results so I decided to ask some people on the different discord channels. I finally joined the discord channel The Terminal where I received a lot of information like links to posts with very useful information for beginners and the importance of engagement.
I switched from Ecency to PEAKD, changed my default settings and installed a keychain plugin.
I managed to do so because I like exploring new things and I have affinity with technology. For people with less affinity with technology the learning curve is quite steep. Especially if you don’t know anything about the blockchain, cryptocurrencies and things like discord yet.

Humans vs bots

The couple of weeks after my first post I started posting content in different communities. Posts of varying quality and with varying results. Most of them didn’t receive a lot of upvotes. The few of them that were curated received a lot of automatic upvotes. Altogether I only received a handful of personal replies on my posts which was a bit disappointing to me.

Conclusion

I really like the idea of getting and giving appreciation for quality content and I think it really has the potential to grow bigger.

But the learning curve is quite steep and information can be difficult to find.
I see there is a lot of engagement, but it can be difficult for newbies to get personal interaction on your posts.
I’ll stick around here for a while. I’ll delve more into Hive to learn, engage more and try to create better content.

Recommendations

In several blogs about Hive I read about the difficulty to attract new people to the platform, get them to interact and keep them coming back. I would like to share my experience of my first month on board and share some recommendations.

1: Show better search results in hive.blog
As mentioned before I received mostly old content when using the search for the first time.
I would suggest improving the search by sorting the results on recent and/or popular content.

2: Simplify account creation
There are just too many choices when creating a new account without proper explanation the differences between the options. Give some more information about the different options or maybe create a workflow with questions.

3: Create a Hive beginners guide and make it easy to find
Creating a beginners guide and making it easily to find would make it much easier for newbies to

4: Give newbies a bit more resource credits to start with
I could only post one blog before running out of resource credits. This can be a bit demotivating.

5: Stimulate personal reactions on posts
I think personal responses are important. Especially if you’re new to a platform. Help beginners with their first posts and guide them to the beginners guides.
I still don’t know exactly how the rewards work (if someone has a good tutorial for that, please post it in the comments), but maybe it could help if good quality comments received more rewards.
The same as you see on some forums where users can give points to the best answer to a question.

Any comments anyone?