Did the title get your attention? I just want to make the point that you can criticise this platform without getting your accounts totally censored, which has happened to me on Steem. I would also say that some big accounts need to be less selfish. Forego the short-term profit to support more small content creators. Do not self-vote yourself a few dollars on each post. Saying this may gain me some downvotes, but that is okay. I earn a nice amount on most posts thanks to the support I have gained through being an active member of the community. I appreciate that people set me up for automatic votes, but I would like to see more rewards going to people I have featured in #FollowFriday. I do see projects like Curie supporting some of them, so that is good.
Looking at the charts over on @DappRadar you can see Steemit is just about managing to stay ahead of the Hive social sites, although @Splinterlands is number one. Overall Hive seems to have more people using it, but a few thousand is tiny compared to other social platforms. We need far more people engaging here. Not all of them need to be content creators, but Hive can reward fans too if they vote and comment. That is something the more conventional platforms cannot offer.
I put out a call on Twitter for suggestions of people to feature on #FollowFriday, but only got a couple of replies. I will include those people here.
has not posted much, but he is promoting Hive on Twitter.
is interested in renewable energy and also footie (soccer). He is using an 
blog for the renewables posts. He only has 22 followers right now, but ought to have more.
, but he has confirmed the link to his YouTube account with me and his music is just so infectious (in a good way). Check out these grooves. He should really have more than 10 followers. I know the Hive Nigerian community is pretty active. There is a potential audience of millions there.
is a prolific musician posting his music on Hive, including in the Guitar community.
. He was away for a while, but is back and very active across Twitter in promoting Hive. He is organising some meet-ups in London and Zurich from next month. It may still be possible to physically meet people within the lockdown rules. Just take care.I would encourage everyone to be more social on Hive. Even if your vote is not worth much you can leave comments which can encourage people to keep posting. I see too many posts with no comments at all. You may even earn something from doing that.
I do not have specific candidates for The Doghouse this week, but if you are heavily self-voting then you may want to watch out! People are checking for that.
I may have reached hundreds of #FollowFriday posts by now. I do not keep count, but I keep writing them as I think building community is key to the success of Hive. Not everyone can earn the big bucks, but everyone can earn something and being social is what drives people to spend so much time online. If we even had 1% of the engagement Facebook gets we would have something amazing. Maybe some people dread a massive influx of new users, but the platform will stagnate without 'fresh blood'. More users will bring new challenges such as spam and trolling, but we need to find ways to deal with those.
High five!
