If you're reading this post, you've probably been invited from another social media platform recently. You may not even have registered yet. However, poker must have brought you here in some form, whether you are a streamer, blogger, full-time or hobby player, or just a friend or follower of one of the above.
You probably already understand the essential difference, you can do the same activity here as anywhere else, but no matter what role you play, the possible rewards are for everyone based on how much others value the content you create. A blogger can receive a reward, a streamer can, but they can also reward their followers, how people who just hang around can also reward each other or the content creators.
Since Hive is very different from other social media, it can be confusing at first. Based on my own experience, I have collected some useful links for the beginning and I will describe my own experience and opinion, maybe you will avoid the initial mistakes that I made, due to my incomplete information.
It will be long, and only words (maybe I add some pics, or create different tutorial posts later on regarding problematic, questionable topics, what is not clear for newbies), but please read it for your own interest, even if certain parts do not concern you at the moment, this may change in the future.
What is Hive?
For this question, I recommend reading the FAQ of the different user interfaces, where you will find answers to many of your questions. (My own experience, some information is not up to date or incomplete, but still informative.)
The main frontends:
hive.blog
LeoFinance
PeakD
ecency
Feel free to check them all out. Choose which one is most suitable for daily use. Of course, you can log in to all of them with the same username and password. Personally, I recommend ecency in the beginning, I will explain why later.
Registration
If you haven't registered yet, here is the link to the different options. Some are not free, but the free ones work just as well, maybe a little slower. While free registration is available, I definitely recommend it.
Below is the HivePoker community referral link on ecency, if you pick that one for registration, please use this link, it gives some small benefits for the HivePoker community account what can be shared later within the community members. (I am not sure, it will automatically add the community account to Benficiaries (Advanced option, next to topic tags, when you post), if so just remove it, it is not about that.)
https://ecency.com/signup?referral=hive-144726
I'm sure it's clear after reading the FAQs that Hive doesn't have any reset password option.
Only you can access it, no one else. Therefore, I highly recommend that you store it in a safe and accessible place! (My processor burned out a few weeks after I registered, I only stored my keys and passwords on the hard drive. Fortunately, HD survived, but since then it has been written down on paper in two places. Since the passwords here are not only necessary for social media logins, but also for the wallet, for every transaction you make on the Hive blockchain, really pay attention to it. Imagine that in a year you won't be able to access it because you lost the keys, passwords, which is equivalent to losing your entire account and the amount on it.)
You. Must. Store. Your. Keys. Safely!
So you are registered, you understand the essential difference between Hive, web3 social media and other web2.
First post
Before you write your first post, a few things worth mentioning.
There is no mandatory KYC on Hive. It's your decision to choose anonymity or not. (If you will regularly use the site, community, you will see that I am a privacy maniac, so I did not write or post anything about my personal data. Which of course has a negative effect in the beginning, in terms of rewards. This is a choice that I made, and I can live with the consequences. You can decide freely.)
In the case of both choices, it is recommended to write an introductory post with the tags #introduction, #introduceyourself. You can post this in your own blog or in any relevant community.
Since this poker community is only now taking shape, I recommend the following for the introductory post. (In order to be able to post in a community, you must first follow/join it, within a few minutes the followed community will appear as an option on the post writing page.)
You can also read some here to see how you should write it. OCD really reads the introductory posts and based on that, recommends communities according to your interests. Hive is not only about poker, but about everything else, like any other social media.
What extra benefits ecency offers? Ecency Points. It can be collected by several ways and later on can be used for promote or boost your posts (at the beginning worthy to use it for boost, 200 points adds approx. $1 worth of HIVE to the rewards. Of course, it's not guaranteed, read about it in the FAQ).
From the FAQs, it was evident that posting, like all other transactions, requires RC. In the beginning, if you want to start using the site for free, it may not be enough. If you encounter such a problem, you will receive an error message, ecency has an temporary RC delegation program for similar cases, but you can also contact me about this.
Hopefully, after a good introductory post, you will get a Hive reward worth at least 10 HIVE. (The rewards showed under a post or comment are in $ and you will receive half of that.) Powering that up will result enough HP and RC to post and comment in the future. (If you haven't figured it out yet, the possible rewards will arrive in your account 7 days after the creation of the various contents.) I started with 50HP, and it was more than enough for me. Actually, I think, 10-30HP is really enough for uninterrupted use, so it's really just a beginner problem.
I highly recommend, after you made your first post, look around deeper on Hive, read posts, interact (you can receive some rewards for comments, too), connect with other users, get to know more, check out communities etc. I've been using it for more than half a year, but a lot of things are still unclear and unknown. The search engine on Hive is unfortunately not the best, it is quite difficult for me to find important information there.
Dapps
I think, it's the right place to link the decentralized applications (dapps) link here:
https://hive.io/eco
https://hiveprojects.io/
A few words about them. First, since poker probably brought you here, I'd like to point out that there are a lot of p2e games on Hive, most of which are not free. Be careful with them, if you are interested, read them in detail. (I tried a few, some of which I had good experience with, some of which I didn't, and I regretted it.) Coming here from the poker world, you probably can't stand bots. Many p2e games allow it, or at least don't ban it, can't ban them. Also worth to note, some games 2nd layer tokens are devaluating very fast and never recover. DYOR!
The rest, from a poker perspective: there are video sharing apps and you can even stream if you want. (I haven't tried the streaming part yet, as I can see, direct reward access is not yet developed, only indirectly available.)
https://3speak.tv/
https://www.vimm.tv/
I would like to mention here that in the poker posts, please link your sources, which poker room you are sharing pictures, videos, streams, or other 3rd party owned pictures from.
I will write more about referral links here.
Rewards
Before you make the mistake of thinking that you can make a lot of money here fast, simply by posting, please forget this quickly! I mean, just don't get too excited. It will only lead to disappointment, for the vast majority. A different mindset is required. (Not only for poker related contents, as there is no real poker community yet, but also for everything else.)
Personally, I started with the idea that part of the time I spend with poker related things, outside playing poker and using different social media (e.g. poker forums, twitch, watching YouTube videos) I will spend that time on Hive, and it is not important that I am a content creator or consumer, follower, commenter, voter on a given topic, as both sides are paid 50-50%. So over time, in the long run, it will pay off, certainly better than everywhere else, where mostly only big tech or content creators followed by millions get income.
Of course, some level, all kind of activity necessary.
The above doesn't mean that it is impossible to achieve significant rewards in a longer or shorter time. However, it definitely requires determination and perseverance.
The poker community
Since there is no active poker community on Hive, I decided to create one. I don't even understand, since everything is given in one place for blogging, video sharing and streaming. Necessary dapps are developing rapidly.
So, hopefully this is the start of something, something good. I am not one of the 'whales', so the options are limited at the moment, that the HivePoker community can provide relevant benefits to the users, but at least there will be a place where you can post poker related contents and hopefully it will grow quickly. Plus I have some ideas for that, how to improve the benfit parts.
I saw the lack of this from the very beginning. Hive has a poker app:
Unfortunately, in the last few months, there is almost no traffic on it.
Recommended tags: ??? #hivepoker
The vision:
At the beginning, to reach a few dozen or hundreds of poker-loving people who actively play at any time as a hobby or for a part- or full-time living. (It would be nice to do that before autumn, winter poker season time.) In this case, the post, comment rewards would also increase, and more importantly, an active community would be created here, and community poker events could be held in different formats on Lucksacks or other future, on Hive poker dapps. Perhaps I am not expressing myself well regarding that, so I would give the example of The Chess community. Online poker is obviously more attractive than chess.
I already have some future ideas for later down on the road, but first focus for the beginning.
HivePoker rules:
I am not a fan of rules, so we will see how it goes. So only the Hive rules apply.
Few, worth to mention, common sense things for best interest of all of us.
Please don't spam it with a lot of posts what doesn't carry any value, if you wish to do that, do it in your own blog (won't work anyway), and select weekly 2-3 better one what you post here. I suppose weekly 2-3 is more than enough. Video sharings, stream announcments are welcome, too. Please, don't copy paste any poker news, it should be about your game, your player experience, strategy, hand sharing, analysis, progress, keep it original and focus for value, creativity, quality. (I am still working on that myself, as it looks far from the format I wish to achieve.)
This is the first, raw version, I'll update and edit it in the future, based on feedbacks.
Disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser, nothing above is a financial advice.
