Here's a happy giraffe, done in oils on wood. There was a time when I painted pictures like this for a living. Although I still sell art here and there, my primary income for the last 7 years has been from writing. This involves a variety of activities. Since 2014, I've worked for wanttoknow.info, summarizing news reports about corruption for a weekly newsletter. Since last year, I've been producing articles on crypto, blockchain, and NFTs for The Writer Company. And throughout this time, I've been publishing sci fi novels.
Maintaining a public blog is an important part of writing professionally. Even if the blog contains mostly personal stuff, having a good place to put sample articles is critical. I've tried a bunch of different platforms over the years. Wordpress. Blogspot. Steemit. Voice. And of course Hive.
To be honest, I gave up on Hive when things were slow and it seemed like no one was reading my writing. For months, I focused exclusively on Voice while neglecting Hive. Then, Voice announced that, beginning today (April 6), content would no longer be publicly accessible on the site, but would require readers to be logged in. Hiding content behind a registration wall is a deal breaker for me. Whether or not Voice follows through with privatizing access to the platform, the incident was a stark reminder of the perils of centralized corporate control.
EDIT: Voice is wiping all content from their site and pivoting to an NFT platform, completely screwing over users like me.
So I came crawling back to Hive with renewed appreciation for its decentralized governance model. I may owe my loyal followers here on Hive an apology for neglecting them in recent months. I'm sorry. Ignoring you was a mistake. Hope you like the giraffe.