I decided to perform an experiment and start a new "blog" on a completely different platform that I have not yet tried to use. Currently I'm not going to give you any details, because I want to first try things out and see how everything will evolve, but I will talk about how it feels to start again from scratch.
This is something I've been doing for a very long time, especially with games. I would play a game for a while, maybe even finish it and then I would start again, either with the same type of character or with a different one and I would use everything I already knew to get to where I was or even farther.
I've done this especially with MMORPGs. I would create a character, usually a mage, play until I reached a fairly high level, when the progression starts to get very slow and once I felt bored I would just create another character and use everything I learned up to that point to get to the same level and see how much time it would take me.
I don't really know what makes this so fun to me. Maybe it's because I really like seeing how the knowledge I acquired within the game up until a certain point helps me get to the same level of progression quicker, or I just like the untroubled experience of just replaying the game with more knowledge and not worrying too much about unimportant things.
What I do know is that I have this feeling when it comes to work as well. I obviously care about the work that I put into a platform and all the progress I make. If I wouldn't, I would not post anything here any more. But it's also equally nice to start from scratch and work on something different than what I normally do.
One particular thing that I noticed is that starting anew and on a completely different platform feels quite liberating in terms of originality. Let me explain this properly.
If you're posting for a very long time on a single platform, like I've been doing with Hive, and you have a certain number of followers, there comes a time when those people will get bored of what you write if you never approach a new topic. If you just write about the same things again and again, people will stop reading what you write, because it's boring.
Therefore, you need to be original, and if you post often, you need to be original quite a lot. You need to think about what new articles to write and make sure that they aren't the same as what you've wrote before. If you posted hundreds of articles this gets even harder, because unless you have a list with all the article you've posted since you started, you might end up writing the same type of article multiple times, simply because you forgot you ever approached the topic.
Starting on a new platform allows you to forget a bit about having to be original and gives you the liberty of writing about whatever you want, regardless of whether you approached the same topic on your main platform. The people who will discover your new content might not know about your old work so they will not demand originality immediately.
This is not to say that every time you run out of ideas you should abandon the platform you're currently on and just move to another one. If you run out of ideas you should find new things to do in your day to day life, such as reading or consuming new content so that you can get exposed to new ideas. But if you need a break to just talk about things that you already know well, a new platform might help with that.
The main advantage is that you get to expand. No matter how great your current main platform is, you should never, ever, put all your eggs in the same basket. Nothing is everlasting, so if something bad happens to it, you might end up losing all your work and, in case you were making any money out of it, all your income. I have learned this lesson the hard way, so I'm trying to avoid making the same mistake.
Beginning to write on a different platform alongside Hive has been a good change for me. I get to talk about some old topics that I wanted to approach again but didn't want to post here because I already did in the past and I don't have to force myself to think of only original ideas every single day. I can think of something to write for Hive that is better than what I wrote before, but then I can also go to the new platform and just relax a bit by writing about something I'm comfortable with.
So, if you have some free time and you've been feeling a lot of pressure to create new and original content for a while now, starting to post on a different platform just temporarily to have a bit of fun can be a good idea. Not only will your main platform benefit from it, because you'll be more relaxed and more eager to post something new and original on it, since that's where your main work is, but you'll also be expanding and making sure that you have a backup platform in case anything happens to the main one.