Woahhh, so yeah, @selfhelp4trolls posted here celebrating 6 years on Hive!

I knew we joined at roughly the same time so I had to double check and would you know it, my own 6th anniversary was 2 days apart! So here is my commemorative blog, something I never did in the past but selfhelp's thoughts provoked me into contemplating my own.

How has Hive influenced my life? It turns out the more I think about it, the more unfolds. As I continue writing, it just keeps coming. Crazy. So here's an attempt and distilling it down into a 6-year summary:

History

I can barely remember how or why I joined. I was never into crypto really. But after my sister showed me this place, Steemit at the time, I found myself captured.

I soon joined steemit.chat which is where... a lot of shit went down. But I also found a whole bunch of really valuable people. Philosophically and quite literally.

@acidyo for example has always been an incredible support of my content, as probably 80% of people on the entire platform would also say, and I also found myself feeding my nerdy obsession with science by joining @SteemSTEM, now @stemsocial where we curate STEM-based content.

This was run by a few people such as @suesa, who I believe is living life in Ireland these days doing a PhD or something, and of course the founder, @lemouth, and for a while @trumpman and @ruth-girl. There were also... less desirable people of the team, such as anarchyhasnogods, a super-woke transgender anarchist of a sort who flipped out about pretty much everything and spit at capitalism somewhat ironically, and his arch nemesis who was a co-founder with lemouth (brain fart means I forgot his username. It began with J) who was very high friction in general. Quite the drama.

Ultimately they left, and it was down to lemouth and I, the two stable individuals to continue the project to this day along with @gentleshaid, @mathowl, @eniolw (the true champion), @iamphysical, and occasionally @carloserp-2000 - with also a spattering of @dexterdev, @cyprianj and @scienceblocks.

Although I never managed to do any of the meetups cuz I'm stuck in China, STEMsocial did in fact meet up numerous times in awesome places such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and lemouth even went to HiveFest.

So right off the bat, from the first few months, this ecosystem was really transformative for me. I had this long-term side hustle of a sort helping and supporting people around the world. with a long term series of friends I'd never meet. That's pretty rad.

Steemit.Chat brought me so many more interesting characters.

There was @berniesanders, the absolute Chaos of a whale who divided opinions about as much as the other Bernie Sanders. There was the ultimate scammer and spammer, Bilal Haider, a Pakistani guy who made constant threats, hacks, and really disgusting but kinda amusing, and surely blasphemous, diatribes against various women. _{He went quiet conveniently after I started adding all his friends on Facebook. Which I am still friends with, interestingly.}

Everyone was interesting there, because it was so global, but for the most part it seems 99% are gone. You get used to that around here.

Boom - Bust

At one point, the price of Steem and SBD went crazy, something like SBD hitting 14 or $18 I forget. It was a golden era for me particularly because @blocktrades decided to follow me of all people, and I received quite a lot of atomic upvotes making my posts absurdly visible each time.

This was the single time I took money out (I told @selfhelp4trolls I never did but then I remembered this one occasion I blanked out) which helped me to finance a year off from work, something I regretted deeply, but had to learn the hard way.

Not having a job or a direction in life is just... pretty awful. It was a complete wasted year of my life and I hold Steem personally responsible! I didn't really learn anything about myself or improve myself. I felt no drive to accomplish anything, or get a qualification. I just kinda wallowed in my own depression for a solid year.

Jeeze, the more you look at it, the more cripplingly bizarre it gets

Well, now I know. Never again. Perhaps this was when I truly became an adult. Perhaps I should be grateful for that - I no longer dream of a utopian society where I get to do nothing until I die.

Then of course, from boom to bust, Justin Sun came along. I'm sure anyone reading this knows all about that stuff, so naturally I quit out and transferred over to Hive, and the rest is as it is.

My writing

I have written a lot. Unlike most people, I always enjoyed writing. I attempted a wordpress blog before Steemit, something that never got a single view, so it was another one of my passions I never really had a proper outlet for. Hive/Steem changed that.

I liked to write in series. I always have more to say than can fit in 1,000 words. So I made a lot.

One or two of them I will, one day, find time to expand them into illustrated books.

• One book-worthy series is about evolution. It's an overdone steak at this point but I think my approach was pretty unique from the perspective of a pleb like me, going step by step from the origin of life down the specific tree branches to humans, discovering what I would along the way.

• Another series was about absurd celestial objects, from hypothetical doughnut-shaped planets, to legit 7-star solar systems.

• I also wrote a 'crazy evolution' series which dived into, well, crazy evolution. I liked to go a bit beyond the kind of pop-science viral media stuff which to me resulted in way more interesting stuff.

• I also wrote a mini sci-fi novel

• A lengthy series on debunking Chinese Traditional Medicine which really trained my skills of research and critical analysis of research papers, and genuinely helped me understand the world of science and its inherent flaws.

• I did a history of music series

• A second, still ongoing musical theory series I dabble in every few months here

• A 'what I learnt this week' series

• A travel series in which I spin the google globe and stop at a random point, take a look on street view or whatever I can, and write out everything I can learn about the place. No matter how dull, I would strive to make it interesting.

There were several others, but you get the idea.

What keeps me here

I suppose one thing that keeps me here are that 1% who have stuck around as familiar faces, even if we're not exactly zoom calling each other every day. @gtg is my personal secret hero, and all the other witnesses are fascinating personalities - much of them pretty abrasive, but nobody voted them in to be a fake politician.

Another thing is just the occasional reminder that this ecosystem is still being developed quite substantially. You'll occasionally come across posts by blocktrades, gtg or others just showing how much work they've been doing behind the scenes. It's all over my head but evident that there's a lot more to come.

I'm not somebody who expects or hopes for this place to explode. I don't like the idea of the platform becoming big. When it becomes big, it becomes scammy, botty and beggar-y. Drama will come that will toy with your account's value like a yoyo on a spring. Coups and division will ensue, greed will dominate.

If it pleases y'all, just let me enjoy my little community! I like it.

I also still believe in the dream that is @stemsocial. It can coast for as long as it needs to as far as I'm concerned; we are still helping people every day, and one day things will come together and make a bit more of a footprint on the planet, or maybe just the blockchain lol.

It's my home away from home. I've invited personal friends and family on, and none of them stayed, so it's like my private little island where I get to live a separate personality, a little more free than the one I've crafted over a lifetime of peer pressure, job expectations and social contracts. I'm still me here, very much so. But a little bit more... curated

So yeah, I have written a lot, changed a lot, learned a lot. I've written Hive on my resume before, and most importantly it's been a creative outlet I would otherwise not have. Thank the heavens I never had to resort to medium.

I often wonder whether all this writing will come back to either vilify or vindicate me when I'm old. Will the total sum adequately describe who I am, or will it be more an abstract painting of somebody I wanted people to see? Perhaps a blend of both? Will the content I wrote 6 years ago stand as an accurate representation of who I am 30 years from now, or simply who I was over a brief period, and does my writing explain in any way how I became who I will be, as I lie in my death bed, desperately trying to pretend like I'm not afraid of the end. If this blockchain is still out there, will it be a comfort in those last moments, knowing that my words are still out there, even if nobody cares an iota to read any of it?

What if I become famous, will I be cancelled for my views over the years after somebody digs this account up? Maybe I've not said anything too controversial by todays standards, but who knows 10 years from now? Perhaps the word years will become taboo and hyper offensive.

Clearly, I have no intention of leaving any time soon.

So here's to another 6 years!

_{Left: Me. Right: all the abandoned autovotes}