Hi! Firstly, thank you for the great compliments! @zakludick and I are going to try and get some of the more professional musicians we meet from Cape Town onto HIVE so hopefully there will be more amazing performances by the kinds of people I get jealous of (for having the time to really reach the next level in performance, sound and stage magnetism!) The problem is that it's a hard sell... in one way it sounds too good to be true, and in the other way - it's not a get-rich-quick-scheme... it really does take time!

I sense your frustration but I have only been on HIVE for about 5 months so I'm still in the Honeymoon phase. To be honest I played quite a bit at open mics and pubs about 10-12 years ago but remember getting quite disappointed in the Cape Town scene... maybe no audience, maybe an audience who is noisy or only wants to hear covers they know well, maybe bad acoustics or sound engineering... I wasn't becoming a "household name" because that takes more than just writing a few songs, and the other stuff (social media, a gimmick, networking) doesn't really appeal to me...

So eventually I pretty much stopped altogether, except for the odd braai (barbeque in Afrikaans!) with friends... and I wasn't playing enough to improve... and eventually my internal voice was saying "are you even a musician anymore?" Then Covid-19 happened and I notice on Facebook that my old school friend @clairemobey is using the time to finally return to her songwriting and I realise I want to help her... and we are doing a gig together about once a month now, and I notice that my attitude has changed and it's more about the fun and the kind of goals about improving that I do have some control over. Even though I didn't practice much in the 10 years in-between, just being older has given me the maturity and confidence to project the emotions of the songs more. So ironically I care about the outcome less, but the audience sees something now that they didn't see before and the response is better!

Now I have HIVE... if I shared this stuff on Youtube or Facebook I would get absolutely nothing for it because I'm not famous and struggle to get 100 views... here I get something. Also the Three Tunes Tuesday and Hive Open Mic give me set challenges with deadlines to learn and improve without having the time to be a perfectionist, and so it's helping my music quite a lot and I'm improving for the first time in years!

Also, while I sometimes get jealous of pro musos who can work on their craft full time and get fantastic as a result, I think the combination of a gig a month and the HIVE challenges means I am improving, and that I can call myself a musician again. My main primary career is also very important and meaningful as well as being a safe source of income for me and my young family (I have a 13 month beautiful daughter now).

Yes, HIVE is up and down in rewards for posts... Usually when I do well and I look into it, it's mainly due to one or two very strong votes. I've been told that OCD and OCDB can only reward the same account twice a week, and I think that's true if I look at my patterns. I suppose the important question is how "appreciator", "rocky1", "ranchorelaxo" and even the "threespeak" account that's helped this post in the meantime find your posts? Is it always based on the recommendation of a smaller curator? Do they have similar rules to how they share out their votes?

To be honest, I see rewards for posts getting trickier. More people will join HIVE and there will be more posts, and hopefully more quality posts, for these big fish to choose from.

Now that I have 1000 HP, I am able to get 1HP a week from curation, which is still nothing. If that was 50HP a week, then post rewards wouldn't bother me so much and I could at least trust in my 50HP curation rewards! That means I need 50000HP or basically Orca level to get there! It took about 5 months to get my first 1000HP, so that sounds like an impossible goal haha... unless the growth does become exponential!

Then there is the price of HIVE... A lot of people say things like "when HIVE is worth $3 again..." but I think that was quite a specific peak in history. So it could go the other way and crash! If so, I only invested time into this and not actual money... the time would maybe have been spent on Facebook but instead it forced me to work on my music... it's probably still a win! Most other ways to make money out of crypto involves the risk of buying some with actual money, which is way riskier!

We will see how it goes and hopefully get feedback from stronger accounts about whether the growth can become faster, and what to do to make it so? If I learn any tricks I will be sure to let you know!