In the latest Liotes Mission there was a question suggested by one of the community members @shiftrox about how we deal with the frustration when our posts don't get the recognition that they deserve.
I've found this question and the comments to it very interesting. It also showed that many don't realize why the quality of a post and the work invested in it is not necessarily correlated with the reward and interaction that the post generates. I would like to explain the reasons here in this post.
The issue with visibility
When posting content on hive, we have to be aware that there is quite a lot of content that is published next to ours. Every minute, there are posts created somewhere on the globe. On the other hand there are not that many people that go through these posts to find the nice ones.
Only few manual curators
It's difficult to define how many manual curators are active on hive. I would say the number is probably less than 100. These are the people that really try to find the nice posts among all the others for their respective curation projects. For these curators, it's not really possible to go through all the posts published on hive. They will probably limit their search to certain communities or certain tags. Even with their combined effort, the chances are very big that a quality post might be missed.
The whales have their own way to curate
If you expect to get whale upvotes on your content, you must probably wait quite a long time to get them. A big portion of the whales are actually upvoting the content that is already on the trending page. So you probably need to get at least 15 to 20$ worth of post reward to get such upvotes.
Who will upvote and interact with your posts?
When you look at all this, you can understand why there are big chances that your content is going to be missed by curation in general. You might ask how you can get some upvotes and interaction on your posts all the same. The answer is through your network of friends and connections.
To be successful on hive you need to build relationships
If you want to have minimal interaction and upvotes on your posts, you will need to have people that are actively reading them and the best way to do so is if these people have you in their favourites. To get there however, you need to build a relationship with them.
To build relationships there are not hundred different ways. The best way to do it, is to take time to interact with others. To go to their posts, read their content and comment on their posts. You repeat it many times and after a while a kind of relationship will emerge. Of course it works only if you put in some real effort and write meaningful comments. If you just comment without reading, you will never get there because the author will understand whether your read the post or not. If you comment on the same author several times, he will start to know you and the chances are big that he will want to have a look at your posts as well.
We support people we know and like
On hive it's not different from the real world. It's much more likely that we support and help people that we know and like. It means that the more you give, the more you will get back over time. The more you interact with others, the more interaction you will get on your posts.
Once your relation has reached a certain level, it's possible that your friends set you on autovote and little by little your post payouts will grow. Also, when you create good content, your friends might share your content and the chances that a curator finds your post becomes much higher.
Success on hive is not about writing quality content but about building relationships
Once you understand this, you realize that hive is a place where human relations matter above everything and it's these relations that we need to develop and sustain.
For example, it is very important that we give appreciation for every interaction that we receive. When people comment on our posts, we should at least answer these comments and maybe upvote them if we have enough Hive Power.
Another example is that we should own some hive power because the more hive power we have, the more upvotes we can give to our friends. The more hive power you own, the more people will want to be your friend. So make sure that you don't delegate too much of your hive power so that you can give value to your friends and use it to build and sustain your relationships on Hive.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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