A letter and request to all my brothers and sisters from the great continent of Africa!

in ecoTrain2 years ago
Authored by @eco-alex

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Jambo, Selam, Sawubona, halo, dumelang, sanibonani, dumelang, salibonani, dumelang, hurini, inoali.. OK sorry if i got half of them wrong. Africa is a huge continent with so many dialects! Firstly id like to say, welcome to all of you from Africa who are here on Hive, and may have recently joined up! I'm sure it is very interesting and exciting for you to be here, and discover the blockchain and in particular Hive! This is a unique place with people from all over the world! We are all here for different reasons, but all of us are sharing and writing and upvoting and I hope commenting.

I've noticed lately a lot of people from different parts of Africa joining the ecoTrain community and its great to see.. Im happy to read your posts, and your ideas, views and opinions on so many things. It's impressive to see you all manage to write in English, as i know it is not your first language and in many parts of Africa there is no English spoken at all.

Africa is a special place, so big i should be careful not to generalise. I have once visited the country of Guinea many years ago to improve my djembe skills and had my first and only experience of the Guinea culture. IT was an amazing experience, I will never forget the incredible hospitality and full respect i was given by the community, and the strength of that community. I will also never forget the financial poverty, and limited access to opportunity for everyone. I am very happy that Hive presents an opportunity for you to make something to make your lives that much more enjoyable... I know it doesn't take much to make a difference!

On that note i would like to make a request, and also give some friendly advice to you and in fact everyone who is new here on Hive really. I am sure it must make you quite excited to have this opportunity, and yet i feel there are some issues and what i will call 'traps' that I would like to steer you away from. Hive is an amazing place, with room for all people of all nationalities but i think its important to understand certain things so that you do not end up having a disappointing experience.

Let me start with the simple request!

There are a lot of people on HIve who are quite protective of it, including myself, and have spent many years taking part in its growth and evolution. Its exciting to see it still thrive after so long, and continue to have so many posts. In particular i noticed the Question Of The Week that the @ecotrain asks each week has SO many posts from you all, which is great to see. The thing is, the majority of these posts are really a bit on the short side, and that is where this request comes in. There are no hard and fast rules on Hive, that is what makes it special.. but there are some conventions and ways to post that we mostly agree on to prevent what we call 'shit posts' taking over and devaluing the ecosystem in general. Now, i wouldn't actually call the posts im seeing shit, so please excuse my terminology here, however most of them are very very short.. with around 200 words. The problem with this is that its not really possible for me to upvote them with much at all, as i dont feel that 200 words is sufficient to warrant a good upvote. Until now i have been upvoting them a very small amount, about 5%, but i have decided that I am going to change this.

From now on i have decided that i will no longer up-vote your posts unless they are at least 500 words long or more. I think that is a very reasonable minimum, and really doesn't take long or that much effort. You will have to spend just a little more time writing, but that is of course the point of posting! I ask you to dig a little deeper in your posts and write a bit more about whatever it is you are posting on.

I hope you understand this, and can make that extra effort so that i can reward you and hopefully make your day that bit more amazing! It's a real honor to be able to share this abundance with people from around the world, but it also needs to be beneficial to Hive and everyone who is here posting. Im sure you can imagine that those who do spend a lot of time writing and posting will not so happy to see so many short posts get rewarded.

SO, please take your time, write and then write some more! It is of course worth the effort and you might surprise yourself at what you come up with once you put that but more time into it.

A note on rewards in general!

I mentioned that I would like to also share some advice to help you stay out of a 'trap'.. That advice is simple, and yet very hard to really follow. As im sure you may have noticed, there are some people and posts that receive huge upvotes and others that get very little. It's so easy to get totally preoccupied with this aspect of Hive, and it is a shame because in the end you actually end up missing out on the best part of it. Let me just say that paying too much attention to upvotes makes your Hive experience very dull, quite sad, and almost always unfulfilling. Once you receive them, very quickly it feels that it is never enough, and even if you start getting good regular upvotes you will still end up wanting more, and never be satisfied. That is human nature!

So instead i urge you to focus on other things, and let the rewards be what they are. In many cases people receiving large upvotes have been here a long time, and in other cases they may just be friends with others who have a lot of Hive power. The dynamics of Hive are very complex and impossible to understand as each person voting has their own reasons for upvoting.

SO my advice to you is to ENGAGE! Write posts, but more importantly please engage with other people's posts. Read them, and respond with something thoughtful. It is the community that is really what brings any measure of joy or happiness here, and i think many people forget this and almost never comment or interact with others.

Once you start doing this im sure you will very quickly discover that you are having a much better time, and you will make friends and followers. You will see that when you comment on other peoples posts they will come and read and visit your posts and likely do the same. The thing is you have to start as there are a lot of people here and so the only way to get noticed is to put yourself out there and take an interest in what is going on. Its a bit like life i suppose!

A note on images

I notice also that many of you are not using images that you choose to go with your posts. A good thumbnail image at least is SO important and makes all the difference to your post and everyones experience reading it. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words!

Therefore I will share a few websites below that offer totally free to use images that you dont need to reference or ask permission for to use. They are called royalty free images, and you can just search and download them. Please try to do this when you post, you will see it makes a difference.

So here are my favourite royalty free image sites you can use!

Thank you for listening, and PLEASE share this with your friends and share this post to your blog! i hope to see some of you take this advice on board for the next Question Of The week and of course your other posts as well!

Much love and Hive on!!!
@eco-alex


ecoTrain Question Of The Week 8.5: WHAT IS THE BEST KIND OF ACTION?

CLICK HERE TO JOIN US FOR THE QOTW


I leave you with one of my favourite songs! This song is dedicated to the people of Africa!

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Thank you for talking about us.
Since joining Blockchain in 2017, I've wanted to help Africans with all my strength because I'm well aware what $1 means to an African man, and when I got a Delegation from @fulltimegeek (I'm still grateful to him to this day), which was a strong motivation for me to help Africans account, and I was very happy to upvote for any post from an African Until the war happened,(I think you know its story),
my goal was to build a strong account, but I went through Very difficult years (My son's disease due to vaccine ) that made me give up ... now I still have a dream to build a strong account and I will be very happy to take care about Africans because I am a part of them ...
I am an African man (from Algeria) and I am well aware of the difficulty of writing in English Most of us use the translation program, but the problem is that the translation program changes the true meaning of the message, so we try to write least words for the publication to be understandable and not forget the problem of internet, although I live in a fairly good African country but we have a very bad Internet ...
That's why I hope you understand why some write short posts

 2 years ago  

thanks for your comment. yes i understand the challenges you speak of.. i think in general the translators do a great job, and even if sometimes its not perfect im sure we understand what you are trying to say. I think in time this will also improve..

please keep up the great work, and share this sentiment with your friends!
best of luck and Hive on!

I really don't know if I'm permitted to make requests in here, but if I am, then I'd say that I implore everyone trying to write over 500 words if they haven't been doing it before to try and work on the contents. Make people flow with what you write

SA here. English is my first language although I speak and married Afrikaans. Great tips but I know for many in the rest of Africa they really struggle to communicate in any other language. Life is so much about basic survival that Hive may be seen in the same light. I hope they can understand and apply your advice @eco-alex . As far as engagement is concerned - can't agree more! It is sad for me that so many will post and expect support and yet do not cross-pollinate by engaging. I have learned so much and enjoy the interaction on this platform

Thanks for the wise counsel. I've always felt that 2 minutes read is usually sufficient.

Wow @ecotrain you've spoken well like a true king, great post you've made thanks for this

Thanks so much for this good knowledge you impact on us. A big thanks to you @ecotrain

I endorse this message. We will certainly have to discuss this on hivenaija today. Kudos to the good work the Ecotrain community does in supporting African writers on hive. It is greatly appreciated

 2 years ago  

Thanks so much @ecotrain I really appreciate your efforts towards making hive a wonderful place to be. Keep up the good work moving.

In truth @ecotrain, these requests and recommendations aren't out of place. In fact, they are necessary to help one develop love and greater interest for writing, for interacting with other members of the community, for building ones portfolio and for one's growth in the Hive community.

I hope we all consider these, put them to heart and work on them.

Thank you!

Let me just say that paying too much attention to upvotes makes your Hive experience very dull, quite sad, and almost always unfulfilling. Once you receive them, very quickly it feels that it is never enough, and even if you start getting good regular upvotes you will still end up wanting more, and never be satisfied. That is human nature!

The most realest things I have read today. ⬆️

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Thanks so much Ecotrain, I've learnt a lot from this Blog....thanks for the love and support, can't wait to express same love from here
Much respect champ!!

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This has alot of impactful and strong message to pass on , @ecotrain like you said it's not just about the upvotes alone but the commitment and dedication makes it all special.
Thank you for this wonderful piece of advice and i hope we all learnt alot reading this.

We will keep doing our best in making hive community the best.

This is more louder than I thought, it is a great honor reading through all the guidelines.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

This has to be the most insightful post I have seen on the Hive and I truly appreciate your effort in pointing out this salient point. Thanks and stay safe.

I know it can be a hassle to write in english when it is not your native language. I struggle with that too for many years and use translators a lot. But it got better over the time and I don't need the help of a translator that much anymore. I would like to read more stuff from people all over the world.

Thanks so much putting us in the know @ecotrain feels good to know this very important points now.

Thats a very good welcoming intro to many of the newbies and the people connecting themselves with this community and the co-authors of the blog.

I think,engagement plays the bigger role in expanding the area of publication and which makes it bit perfect as we keep plugging in with the friends and others.

Thumbs up to you, 👍

AFRICA UNITE!!! and crank up that word count :)

It's a great subjective we have here. Lengthy posts is what I'm always writing but I hardly get upvotes from you. I'm not the type who can write less than 500 words, but I do see those writing less than that receiving more upvotes. I'm glad this write up comes up to air out respective views.

Yes you are right. Engagement is the mother of making hive a lovely and better place to be. Many people may not see it this way but just few of us saw it to be. So, you are right about this fact. When I newly joined this platform, I was having no votes, but I kept in engaging making new friends and now I have lots of friends despite that most of them are weak in upvotes, but I just hope they will grow large one day.

There is huge power is unity and so we must all try hard to make our fellows who are finding it tough and has good contents happy.

There is something I also discovered about some of these Newbies. They need proper lectures about how this platform is being run. This will make them best with great performance.

Once again, thank you @ecotrain for your effort in bringing this idea.

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This is indeed a worthy post and I hope that many will take heed.

Another issue if I may.
Single comments on posts like "Nice", "Lovely" etcetera will not get a response.
Likewise comments like "Great photos", "I love" and such.
If you cannot tell what is great about the photos, or what you love about them, then don't bother to comment.

Thank you for this, we're so honored to that you have us in mind and proud to be part of this great community. I personally promised to improve more on my posts.
A very big gratitude.❤