Hey everybody I've been away for awhile and it's good to be back. The last time I posted it was on steemit and I concluded a cross country trip from Athens, AL to Salt Lake City, UT and back. Right now I should be getting ready for another trip to do it again. But.....I'm not. The scheduled trips through Texas and New Mexico have been postponed due to the fear contagion caused by the goddamn coronavirus. Theses trips will still happen they will just be a little later than planned.
<p dir="auto">Yesterday I was looking through steemit and saw the posts about Hive. I've mostly been busy with other things but I did keep up with the whole Tron takeover thing. It seemed pretty wild and the creation of hive.blog was a pretty slick move. I just hope the steem that I do have doesn't go to shit before I can power it down and sell it off. I'd like to trade it for some other coins and reinvest. <p dir="auto"><span>Until last June I didn't know a damn thing about cryptocurrency and still don't know that much. Steem was my introduction. I had been doing a few youtube videos on different subjects but I didn't like the way they monetize the videos. It was as if you already needed an audience before you could get a successful channel....it sucked! At that time I was thinking I didn't know anything about crypto but it got converted to USD some way or another so I was going to take a swing at it. I started with photos as many people do and had alot of help from <a href="/@photocircle">@photocircle early on. Honestly if it wasn't for the help of photocircle I most likely would've gotten frustrated and quit. I enjoyed Steem but I noticed some problems right away. <p dir="auto">I could get any of likes but they didn't pay anything. That's when I started learning about whales. Now I would see all these posts about how to write a good post. All these posts on how to not write a shit post. Then I would see complete shit posts make a lot of money. I'd also see people damn near write the next great novel and get nothing. The last run I had on steem was actually pretty good. Here is what I learned. <p dir="auto">Power Mattered - You could have a thousand upvotes and unless one of them had a lot of steem power you weren't going to get paid very much. Nobody wants to write a shit post or at least I hope not. But who saw the post mattered more than the quality of the post. That is going to piss some people off to read that but it's the truth as far as I could see it. I saw many posts preaching the opposite but at the end up the day the numbers did not support that argument. <p dir="auto">Consistency - I'll be the first to say some of my posts were better than others they weren't always the best. We all have bad days and slow days. However, it really was a case of out of sight out of mind. You need to post regularly so your followers always get new content. You can't do like some on Dporn did and just post once every couple weeks and expect to be paid well. You gotta post consistency and make them the best posts you can. I tried to run the gambit. Some days I'd post photos from my archive. Other days I'd post videos play guitar live and put it on Dtube, but I tried to always have something to post and keep it interesting. Even with playing guitar I'd play different genre's. I did everything from Black Sabbath to Genesis. I did from the Allman Brothers to the Isley Brothers. Keep it interesting. I would also say don't post more than twice a day because with the rewards pool it becomes self defeating. <pre><code> There are other things but I don't want this post to be too long so I'll skip to the most important thing. <p dir="auto">It's a community so be part of it. Join the Discord and make friends. Being an introvert isn't going to get you that far. This will also get you in front of the right people because many of them are on Discord. Comment on posts you like and put yourself out there. Try not to be negative. There is a great Discord community out there than can be a great resource for you. It made a huge difference after I joined. Check your trending pages and upvote posts and get to know your community so they can get to know you. But trust me Discord makes a huge difference. <p dir="auto">So as a new person coming into this space that is some of what I saw, experienced, and learned on Steemit. So what about Hive? Well right now I see Hive as a great opportunity for a reset. I can't tell you how many times I've sat on Discord and watched people who'd been here since the beginning talk about how the rewards went down and things weren't as good as they used to be, how everything was so good in the beginning. Well, this is day one and this is the ground floor. This is the time for a new beginning. Obviously the people who started Hive are passionate about their beliefs and believe this can work or it wouldn't be here. It's a new chance to do things the right way. It's a clean slate. I'm slowly getting back into this space but I'm very optimistic about Hive and I hope it won't give way to the same issues that affected Steem in negative ways. I think this is a really cool thing and I look forward to supporting it in the future. Thanks