Published via Ecency

We have been celebrating the recent Milestone of Hive Learners featured edition contest hitting 100 weeks and I have to say it has been great. I truly enjoyed the topics that came out this week and loved reading about the achievements of everyone this past 100 weeks, as well as the challenges and lessons learned. Who else is also thrilled about the prospect of celebrating the 200-week Milestone? It seems very far when you think about it (roughly 2 years) but once upon a time, we once had wk1e1 tags on our post, now see where we are today.

Concerning what needs to be done or changed for us to hit another milestone, I don't have anything in mind for now and that's probably because I believe what we have now is good. It did get us to week 200, didn't it? So I see no reason to fix what isn't broken. Rather than changing or adding new features, we should rather focus on improving what we already have and growing our number. On that note, one area of improvement I would suggest is the verification process for joining the community.

The verification process can be very long sometimes and I do get it that many of the mods are very busy with things in the real world. I asked about the verification process some months ago when a friend was waiting to be verified for more than a month and someone mentioned it was because some of the mods were very busy with things offline (exams and stuff). I suggested hiring more mods to make the process easier and I heard it wasn't easy to do that. I know it's important to properly screen new members coming into the community but this process can be made smoother and easier.

Another area of improvement is concerning the weekly hangouts. Someone suggested introducing incentives as a way to get more people to come around during the weekend hangouts and I totally agree with this. The incentive can be in the form of a giveaway after the hangout where a winner will be randomly selected from those who actively participated in the hangout. What should the prize be? I suggest a curation using lazy-panda on any of the winner's posts. With this, more people will participate in the weekly hangouts

As for the genre of topics used in the weekly featured contest, this one is sort of subjective because, in the end, everyone is going to suggest a topic they have great knowledge of which is fair but what happens when some genre of topics receive more attention than others? What we have right now is already balanced in my opinion and even though sometimes there are topics I struggle to write, there are other times I get a topic that's like my daily bread and butter - a lot to write on.

So, that's how it should be because it's impossible to always come up with a topic everyone will love. Besides, writing on unfamiliar genres provides an avenue to gain more knowledge about that area, and this is just me speaking from my experience. I have learned a lot just from reading other people's entries on topics I struggle with and most of the time, I get inspiration from them to also write mine. There's still room for improvement and as time goes on, more areas that need improving will come up but as it is now, I'm quite sure we will make it to the 200-week milestone and even more than that.

Thanks for reading