When I started blogging roughly six weeks ago I thought I had a certain understanding of what happened when I got a Hive account with my Splinterlands account.
Since then I went on to discover I knew way to little about what was happening. With that in mind I think I still do not know nearly as much as I would like.
I started commenting, voting and posting. I wrote about Splinterlands of course, that's what brought me here. Additionally I started diving into different communities and left a post here and there. And all that also made me realize, there is still much to learn.
Most things in live worth learning about need a lot of time and experience. So I need to keep interacting and most importantly reading.
With this post I want to give an update about what I learned since my first post, maybe it can even help some other newbie in the future.
Different front-ends
At first I thought the ability to post a blog on Hive comes from peakd. Well, it's true and not true.
All the information is stored in a block in the blockchain. That is open and readable for every participant in the network. There are different front-ends (and peakd is just one of them) that read the blockchain and present the information stored in there in a nice way. They also allow you to post information onto the blockchain, broadcasting it into the network. The other front-ends pick it up and voila, the next blog post is presented to everyone connected to hive through the front-end they decided to use.
More than just blogs
This new information started to sink in and I finally realized (or so I think I do) how Splinterlands is doing its thing with hive. All the information the game needs is stored in the blockchain. The ownership of assets, the battle information, card rental system, etc.
Other games exist and utilize the blockchain. The big aha moment came when I stumbled upon the Proof of Brain Game by @fulltimegeek. Reading the comment section to his announcement post I learned that the json information to the game is stored on the blockchain.
Any Hive account can post any information that way. And that is where DApps (decentralized apps) come into play. That will be my research project for the next few weeks.
What other DApps are out there and what do they do?
You are not alone
But staying focused on blogging for now, there are important aspects that make the difference to a normal blog. People have power and what it can do is not apparent at first. So what did I learn during the past weeks?
Reputation
People not only have the power to up-vote you, they can also down-vote you. Communities (more on that topic further down) can also mute you. And with every vote you get or lose reputation. @sacrosanct posted a very good explanation about that.
Interaction
Votes
Distributing up-votes is as important as receiving them. If you want to be appreciated and have your work curated, you also need to do the same for others. That is how the system works. But don't fling your votes around, you should care for the content. And leaving a comment can also go a long way.
Comments
Of course I appreciate it when someone likes my work and getting up-votes feels good. In that we are all human and more or less the same. But a word of appreciation can go a long way to encourage people to keep on doing good things. And a well placed and well written criticism can help people do things better.
I encountered that when I found the Stock Images Community and posted some pictures of my Sunflowers. @crosheille was kind enough to point out my mistake and help me improve myself (once again, thank you for that).
So go out there and do the same. If a heartbreaking story moved you, tell the author about it. If someone made a mistake, politely advice them to do better.
Communities
There are a lot of communities out there. I spent hours just opening the overview and browsing the communities, looking at their content. Communities are a great way to read about a topic you are interested in and you can post your content there to get a broader audience.
Communities have their rules and every community has different rules. It is important to obey those rules, otherwise you get muted and can not post in there.
But as seen above, making mistakes is human and the first time you are hinted about what you did wrong.
Keep improving yourself
What a relive. We are allowed to make mistakes. As long as we learn from them. And learning how things work here is not that difficult, it's just not a fast process, sometimes it even hurts a little bit. Every day there is some new little detail completing the puzzle.
I found people writing comments with (what I now learned to be) bot commands. They wrote "!PIZZA" and some bot controlled account started distributing tokens. Later on I found a post I enjoyed and wanted to contribute the same way only to be slapped by the bot that I don't have any PIZZA tokens staked. Ooops.
So I went out and started learning about how this system really works. I staked some PIZZA and now I can give back to others.
A lot of tokens are our there and some work the same way (just need to stake the appropriate token) and some work different. Some require a command, some a tag and some day someone else will find some other way. 😉
Check your work
Whenever I read one of the many newbie guides out there I find they all have one common message: No plagiarism
So be sure it is your original work. Of course there is a lot of free material out there and you can (even should) use it to make your postings more enjoyable. But be sure to give credit. I adopted the usage of a divider at the end and post all the sources after that.
Directly below that I would rank the message: Mind your formatting
There is a lot to consider when formatting your text. From a nice header picture to the headlines down to the line breaks, dividers and paragraphs. All this is to keep it readable and provide a nice user experience as the software developers call it.
I learned the most from this ULTIMATE MARKDOWN TUTORIAL by @carrieallen.
Quality over Quantity
I spent a lot of time writing these posts. Gathering resources, creating an image, proof-reading (and still some mistakes slip through) but I think it is worth it.
I see people posting almost every day, some following the guidelines and some not. Wondering were they get the time made me realize: I need to get more organized.
Again, this process will take time. When I started on Hive I did not know how long it will last. There are times when there is just no time even though I would have liked to post something. And then there are days where I have a lot of time but I don't use it efficiently enough.
To improve my efficiency while also maintaining or even raising the quality of my posts I need to discover my style, create templates and organize the resources I gather over time.
Thank you
With that goal in mind I want to thank you for reading and wish you a nice day. I hope you enjoyed taking part in my journey of discovering Hive and maybe you will read some future updates again. 😊
Header image based on own photograph and Community emblembs
Accompanying images based on screenshots
Dividers are free use provided by @thepeakstudio