As many of you know, I've been around on HIVE for a while, and as the leader of Natural Medicine (one of - our whole curation team leads, as far as I'm concerned!), I'm often the first port of call for newbies who are puzzled about the reward system and what's expected on HIVE. I often get asked questions about why they haven't got any votes on their post. No less than seven times this year (but who's counting), I've recieved a number of Discord messages from people who've written under the Natural Medicine tag or in the community who have wondered why they aren't getting rewards for their posts.

Now I love supporting newbies, don't get me wrong. Like many HIVERS, I like to think I help people get on their feet here, find their voice and feel valued. I'm happy to delegate to people struggling with their resource credits, to point them in the right direction, or advise them about how they might get more attention on their posts. But I'm also a human being, and sometimes I get a little exasperated about the expectations of rewards here.

First of all, tell me how much you get rewarded for post you make on social media. Nothing? Nada? Zip? So any reward you make should be a bonus, right?

And if you've delegated, you expect something in return, even if your work is substandard. 'Hey, I wrote something', you'll say, 'where's my upvote?'.

But we're not into vote buying. We are into quality content and social interactions. We're into stories. We're into authenticity.

But, I here you say: 'I put so much work into it and it's not fair that others get more than me'. And I get that. I really do. It's one of the things that does suck, and there's people all over HIVE who are trying to address that with curation projects such as @curangel and @ocd. There's people who are working hard, including our own curators, to prevent vote farming, plagiarism and other ways around the system. And there's curation projects like ours that are working around the clock to support you by tweeting, commenting, sharing, reblogging, and tipping your work, and submitting you for more rewards where we can.

But sometimes I feel a bit sad that people attach more value to their work than might be due.

Here's a few of my bugbears for Natural Medicine posts I don't like to support, or that I struggle to upvote. Some of them are such simple fixes. If you're reading this, please don't take offence - go away and think about where I, and the Natural Medicine curators, might be coming from.

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Formatting

Please learn some basic markup or use the post editor in PEAKD. There's no excuse for images that aren't centred, or using a bold type and bigger font for subheadings.
Consider page dividers, bullet points, centred images, subheadings.

Images

Don't use them. If it's poor lighting, learn about lighting or don't share until you can take a better photo.
Source your images if they're not yours. There's no crime in using images that aren't your own but please don't pass them off as if they are. Trying using this code underneath them: <sub>[Image Source](place url here)</sub>
Try the Hive Stock Images community and support a HIVER by using one of their images.
Try Canva or other imaging apps - check out @danielpevs posts to see what a cool thumbnail looks like. Please ask yourself why a blurry picture of a dark lunch might be appealing to anyone who fancies giving away upvotes.
Consider which image is your first image or preview/thumbnail. In Peakd, there's an option to choose which one people see as the thumbnail, even it's not first in the post.

Titles

I'll let you in an secret. Natural Medicine curators hate any title that says 'The Health Benefits of...'. Why? It's boring and doesn't hook any potential reader to want to read your post. Try googling 'how to write an engaging title'. Look at news headlines. How do they 'hook' a reader?

Try to keep your titles reasonably short, especially if they are in dual language. One solution I love is a title in one language, but the title in the other language is in the image eg English title, Spanish title in image. @pavanjr does this well.

Dual Language

This is a hard one, because it's not fair that only English posts are supported. We've tried out best to be inclusive, particularly of Spanish posts as we have a high amount of Spanish speaking bloggers here, and two spanish speaking curators, @drrune and @pavanjr.

But honestly, skipping over a few lines or a paragraph of spanish to find English, and then flipping back again, can be really, really hard for curators to focus on. Please write in either one or the other, or write half your post in English, then in your native language. Remember most of our curators are English speakers, including me. Some people write in columns, which is not bad to read either.

Content

Please understand how many times we've read about 'the health benefits of a banana/moringa/garlic'. What might your post add to the story of garlic, for example, or are you just telling me something that's easy to find on the internet?
Don't plagiarise - that is, copy big chunks of text from any website and pretend you wrote it. People just don't get away with it here. You will be caught.
Read the 'trending' section on NaturalMedicine.io - I often boost these posts with LOTUS to show you what kind of posts we like. Also, try the #lotusrecommends section of our Discord. Is your post as interesting?
We like personal journeys and stories. What's your relationship to this plant, for example? How do you prepare it? Do you have a recipe? Is there are story behind it?
Read some of the post ideas we outined here.

If you believe you've done all of these things and still haven't been noticed, sure, shoot me a DM and I'll try my best to help. But please be ready to accept constructive criticism and not get defensive if we offer you advice for how to present a better post. I did nearly downvote a guy for arguing with me that 'Bananas Are Good for You' is a perfectly okay title. I think that's the point, isn't it? It's 'okay', but does it want me to read your post when there's many other better ones out there? Does it steal my attention in an attention grabbing world?

Of course, if your motivation is merely to earn LOTUS and you don't care about your content, there's better ways to do that. Comment and engage. Buy and stake LOTUS. Buy some miners and stake them.

Oh, and one more thing. For those who are shitposting wilfully, we've created @lotusmud, a downvoting account that will downvote your LOTUS to zilch, zero, nada if you're plagiarising or votefarming or persistantly undertaking activities for rewards that we have kindly warned you against. In the next day or so we'll be loading it with LOTUS and all our curators have permission to downvote with it.

Because if you're not willing to come out of the mud, their will be no ~~soup~~ lotus for you!

Sounding grumpy? Well, it is Thursday afternoon, and it's about time for the weekend! Please forgive me - I love you all enormously, especially all you wonderful people who put so much effort into what you do. You are appreciated!!