It is always nice for my OCD triggers to hit a round milestone number of some kind and last night a rare one came up, hitting 6000 top-level posts on the blockchain. This isn't a huge amount and puts me in 91st position by rank, but considering I don't spam, I don't shitpost and the average length of my articles is over a thousand words, it is relatively rare.
Also, no matter what has been going on in my life, I haven't missed a day of posting since near mid-2017 - the year I joined. That was a while ago!
It is about the most consistent I have ever been at something and I think that there are many factors to this, but they all speak to value of some sort. It is easy to look at it from the financial side of earning, but there are other things that can be earned on this blockchain besides tokens too. For instance, reputation.
The Hive Reputation system is irrelevant in many cases, as it just works on votes up and down, so it doesn't really speak to how the community as a whole sees an account. The logic is sound, but human nature being what it is, it doesn't tell much in terms of whether an account is valuable, trustworthy, community-orientated, useful....
However, with a reputation score of 84.19, it leaves me in 4th position on the blockchain, even as I climb, I will soon be overtaken again.
Go fuck yourself.
Do what you love and you will want to do more and more of it until you have no energy left to do anything else. Love is consuming, it is motivating, it is deadly. And when it comes to writing on Hive, I am in love. However, due to the dynamics of the ecosystem, I can't write anywhere near as much as I would like, because it would et spammy.
I like to write and I like to write across many topics, because that is the way I think. Because I write through personal filters that process my personal experiences, my articles are mine. There is no one on earth who can write what I write, in the way that I write it. For me as an individual, that has value, but for Hive as a content platform, it has value too, because nothing I write can be found elsewhere online.
But, because I listen a lot in my real life and then spend time analyzing and interpreting it, I tend to have many topics that I want to write about each day that never get written. I used to post more than I do today, but I have pared it back over the years, accepting that most of what I would want to write today, will never see the light of the chain, because tomorrow there will be a new list of items that will take my attention.
Short-form is not the answer.
At least for me.
I don't see a lot of value in shortform content in regards to complex ideas, because while it might raise a topic into the spotlight, it gives it no depth and in a busy world, most people will never take the time to sit back and think deeply, before moving onto the next topic in their infinite stream. So, I have built my content to break that paradigm a little and hopefully at least once in a day, give people space to breathe into a topic, rather than just consume and move on. Clarity on a topic takes time to develop and to turn knowledge into wisdom, it takes practice. And failure.
There has been plenty of failure in the last 6000 articles.
This one is perfect though!
(cough)
There is plenty of failure in this journey across the Hive, and it has brought a lot of lessons to my own life. Part of this is through self-reflection, but a big part of it is through social-reflection, where the interaction with the sea of others helps lift all boats. There are likely some people that will read this post, who have also read the majority of the other 6000 and I hope that in their lives, they feel that they have benefited in some way and, there life is better now for it. And likely, since we are what we eat, it has influenced some people to shift their behaviors even slightly. And, because it is here daily, it might have helped a few people come back more often too, even if they are not writing their own content often.
I hope it has helped, but I do not assume.
Because, people do what people do and it is up to them how they process their world too. It is because of this that it is far more interesting when people create content around their own lives and perspectives, than the stereotypical "book report" form style that many seem to use, thinking that good form means good quality. It doesn't.
While it is good to consider the delivery, the messaging is also important and a lot of people create content that has no audience in mind at all. It is fine if you are only writing for yourself, but if you are, don't expect anyone to find value in it or vote for it. I write for myself too, but not only for myself. I am a content creator, but that is a useless role if there is no one consuming it.
So much of centralized social media is designed around the content creation and the consumption of that content, but almost none of it on the actual value of the content itself. The value of the content comes down to a simple metric of how much money it generates for the platform. It has nothing to do with how much value it generates for the consumer.
The centralized platforms are drug pushers who profit from their user base coming back for another hit. They don't care about the health of the user, they only care that they buy what they are selling. The odd one might overdose, but the rest of the userbase will keep coming back, unperturbed by the death and misery that surrounds them.
And this is where I will leave it, somewhere over 1000 words that might give you some thoughts, a chuckle, or bore you to tears if you made it this far. Most people likely skim it though, because you know, who has time for reading an article when a line on Twitter X is worth so much more?
Love what you do though.... right?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
