Much proverbial ink has been spilled here on ye olde blockchain about Quality Content™, spam, plagiarism, formatting, and the like. But there are people who just don't care. They have no interest in improving their blog, in making an impact or a name for themselves, in building a community, or any of that. They want to earn a few bucks, cash out, and go home. And really, that's fine. Not everyone in a community is going to want to really participate or build relationships. But here's the thing.
If your only desire is the money, you are making it harder for you or anyone else to earn that money.
If the whole of Hive is nothing but spammy shitposts, reworded plagiarism, and tag abuse, nobody is going to want to spend time here. Nobody is going to want to read your blog, or anybody's blog, because it's like swimming through an ocean of trash to find a pearl. Nobody is going to trust that they can vote on it and not be rewarding a plagiarist. Nobody is going to want to invest. Nobody is going to want to build community.
And if nobody wants to do those things, guess what? You don't earn your money.
In order for the price of Hive to go up, increasing your earnings, the value of what's on the blockchain has to go up. If you are loading it with garbage and theft, you are lowering the price. It's simple, really. If Facebook was nothing but fake accounts of stolen white-guy-in-a-military-uniform photos that claim "job: doctor at military doctor" and DM you with "hey beautiful," or "did you hear about this fake government grant program?" do you think Facebook would be successful? No, because literally no one wants to deal with those sleezeballs. We all kinda wish they would fall of the edge of a cliff and leave us alone.
But there is a lot of other stuff that makes Facebook successful; popular groups and your actual friends and creative video makers and all that. If every popular page was taken over by a hacker or a phishing scammer who offers to pay the page owner to post their phishing links, everyone would leave Facebook once and for all because everything about it would be suspicious. That's what you are doing to Hive.
Look, I am obviously not The King Of Blogging here, I don't make the most popular content and I'll be lucky (and excited) if I manage to hit dolphin status by my 4th Hiveversary. I'm not going to lecture you on How To Be Popular or give you a tutorial about markup formatting. I only just recently learned that you could choose which image is the cover image no matter what order it lands within the blog itself; I'm still learning, too!
All I'm saying is, there are piles of tutorials already here you can read. You can ask questions in the comments - people are generally happy to answer (that's how I learned about the cover image!). If you want Hive to succeed - even if you are totally selfish and you only want it to succeed because you want to live off your earnings - you're going to have to help it succeed. You can't just piss out a post with one blurry photo, three lines of text, tag everyone you know so they feel obligated to upvote you, and add approximately five group banners at the bottom of your post and expect the price of Hive to go anywhere. When the price increases and you're doing that, it increases despite you, not because of you. You have to actually try if you want to be able to live off your earnings here someday.
I know what you're thinking.
Not everyone is a writer. That's fine! We have people who make videos and photography groups and games and Actifit and everything in between. You don't have to be a Wordy macWordsmith in order to participate without plagiarizing. Alternatively, you may be fine with writing but just not have any ideas. In that case, may I suggest finding something you care about rather than looking to see what post got paid the most and trying to write about the exact same topic? If someone wrote a post about snails that got paid $50, and you don't know anything about snails but you think that's popular so you read an internet article, steal a couple of photos, and rewrite what you just read that you don't care about, don't be surprised if you get paid 5 cents. Nobody wants to read your terrible high school essay about a topic you couldn't care less about. Write about what you know. Even if you think it won't be popular, it might surprise you. Maybe your simple post about your garden gets a lot of attention. Maybe your video of something cute your cat did, or of some crazy lightning near your house. There's no telling what other people will respond to, but I guarantee you they are not going to respond very positively to bullshit. They often do respond well to genuine interest and effort, though.
And if you're stuck for ideas for a day or two, don't worry about it. Yes, consistency is key and if you're the type of person who can write a real blog on the daily, hats off to you. My brain doesn't work like that though, and I'd rather go a couple of days without a post than shitpost just so I can say I "blog every day." But you know what I almost always do every day? Vote and make a few comments.
Comment!
People love comments, they love getting to know people, they love hearing that somebody liked what they shared and they're not just screaming into a void. Make friends. Talk to people. Don't just say "nice post." Actually talk about what they wrote. Read it. When you show you care, people tend to care back. You can't expect to just post blogs or nonsense comments and expect anyone to even know who you are. Engage. Like you would if you were in person. If you want to a party and someone told you a funny story from their life, would you say "nice story," and that's it? No. You'd laugh at the funny parts and maybe say, "oh, that reminds me of this one time a similar thing happened... ", right? Do that! But on the computer! Talk to people!
So, in sum: even if you don't care about anything else on this blockchain or any of the people on it, just your own wallet, guess what? YOUR WALLET WILL BE FATTER IF YOU MAKE AN EFFORT. In the time it takes you to rewrite somebody else's article about a topic you hate, you could write a real post yourself and I bet you'd get paid better. You don't have to be "professional" and "perfect," you just have to be real. This is not a college entrance essay. This is social media. People want to interact with other people, not some faceless copier. Be yourself. Let snail guy be snail guy and you write about cars, or crafts, or dogs, or whatever it is that you actually like. When you start enjoying your time here, then you're doing it right.