Joining a new platform takes a minute. Feeling at home on one takes about a week, and that week goes a lot smoother with a map. This is that map: what to do on Ecency from the moment you decide to sign up until your first posts have found real readers.
Day 1: Get an account
An Ecency account is a Hive account. That single fact explains almost everything else about the platform: your account lives on the Hive blockchain, secured by keys you hold, not in a company database. No company can delete it and that includes us.
You have two ways in.
The free path. Ecency offers a free signup at ecency.com/signup and a friend already on Ecency can smooth the way with a referral link. Free account creation includes an email verification step, which is normal for how Hive accounts are provisioned.
The instant path. For $2.99 you get a premium signup: a ready-made account created on the spot, with your keys delivered to your email, bonus Points to start with and enough Resource Credits to begin posting immediately. If you just want to start writing today, this is the shortcut.
Whichever you choose, the result is the same kind of account. The paid option buys speed and convenience, not a different class of citizenship. We have wallet signup and ask a friend options as well.
One thing to do before anything else: save your keys somewhere safe, offline if possible. Hive has no password reset. Your keys are the account.
Day 2: Write your first wave
Your first action on Ecency should take less than a minute. Waves are short posts, like a quick status update: no title, no formatting pressure, just a sentence or two.
Open Waves and post your first Wave: who you are, what you are into or what brought you to Ecency and Hive.
Vote on a few Waves you enjoy and reply to one. Conversations start faster in Waves than anywhere else.
Follow a handful of people whose Waves you like, so your feed has life in it from day one.
Do a daily check-in on the Perks page to start your streak and earn Ecency Points.
Day 3: Write your first post
There is a tradition on Hive worth following: the introduction post. Tell people who you are, what you care about, what you plan to write about and add a photo or two if you like. Use the tag "introduceyourself" and post it.
Do not overthink it. The introduction post is not a performance, it is a handshake. Hive has an unusually welcoming culture around newcomers who show up as actual humans and a genuine introduction routinely gets more engagement than a polished essay from a stranger.
The editor will feel familiar: write in plain text or markdown, drop images straight in (Ecency hosts them free), preview, publish. Your post goes on-chain under your account and it starts a seven day window in which other users can vote on it and it can earn rewards from the Hive reward pool.
Day 4: Find your communities
Blogging into the void is the fastest way to give up, so do not do it. Hive is organized into communities: topic homes with their own feeds, subscribers and moderators. Photography, fiction, travel, gaming, gardening, finance, languages, there is a room for almost everything.
Browse ecency.com/communities and subscribe to a handful that match what you actually care about. Then spend a day just reading. Notice which posts do well, what the community rules say and how people talk to each other.
When you post into a community, your post appears in that community's feed, in front of people who already care about the topic. That is the difference between publishing and being read.
Day 5: Understand Points
By now you will have noticed a Points balance ticking up. Points are Ecency's utility currency and they sit on top of your Hive rewards, not instead of them.
You earn Points for free by doing what you are already doing: posting, commenting, voting, checking in daily, completing the daily quests at ecency.com/perks and referring friends. You spend them on useful things: promoting a post to readers across Ecency, boosting a post, a temporary Hive Power delegation through Boost+, the AI writing assistant, AI image generation, or gifting Points to someone else.
You do not need a strategy for Points in week one. Just know the balance is building and that it will be useful later.
Days 6 and 7: Engage like a neighbor
Here is the part most newcomers skip and it is the part that decides whether week two goes well. Comment on other people's posts. Vote on things you genuinely like. Reply to everyone who comments on yours.
Hive is not an algorithm you feed, it is a network of people who notice each other. Ten thoughtful comments will do more for your first month than ten posts published into silence. Curation is also rewarded on Hive, so voting on good content is not charity, it is participation.
If short-form is more your speed, try ecency.com/waves. A wave is a quick post, published in seconds and it is a low-pressure way to be present between longer pieces.
What you have after one week
An account no one can take from you. A first post and wave on a public blockchain. A few communities that match your interests. A Points balance you earned by showing up. And, if you engaged like a neighbor, the first familiar usernames in your notifications.
That is a better first week than most platforms can offer and everything you built during it is yours to keep. We have more checklists and guides on our Docs page as well.
Start at ecency.com. Your blog, your keys.
I'm a very new user here, so reading this gave me a clearer idea of where to start. Coming from another Web3 platform, I can already see that Hive values interaction and community more than I expected. I'm excited to learn step by step and become more active here. Thanks for sharing these tips!
Buen día les voy hablar con el❤️ soy usuario de Hive desde el 2022 por un amigo que me habló de la plataforma y eso para aquel tiempo Hive estaba en 0.51$ y desde luego enganchaba , con el paso del tiempo me enamore de Hive y no he podido ahorrar en la plataforma por la situación d mi país 🇻🇪 pero ahora decidí hacerlo , en todo este tiempo para hacer el cuento corto he usado Hive.blog , peadk y ecency todas muy buenas pero la más genial a mi gusto es ecency , me avisa cuando alguien interacciona conmigo, me da puntos es más amigable en fin adoro 😍 ecency
When I joined, I made some mistakes; one of them is that, I didn't introduce myself. It was "a friendly member" of the Hive family who told me to introduce myself and I complied. I'm also happy about the reminder that the keys to access my account is my sole responsibility; this is noted. Thanks for the valuable information
It's more than platform it is aquiring the position of a cooperative
When I joined this platform, my dear friend provided me with the same information, as you guys have mentioned. And the day 6,7 thing is so real, plus affective for me. As by far, I have not earned much from the posts. Rather from interacting - as a friendly neighbor - with others, or by posting short-waves content. I recently found out that those transfered Liquid Hives were because of waves, as I was receiving ecency.waves votes 😆. I thought those meant nothing, but thanks to those, I have accomplished my first 1 dollar staking of Hive. Many more to go.
Thank you for the support!
Hive is our home i am here to give a welcome to all new users.
This is a very useful post, @ecency team.
This is another great post. @ecency is the best
Are you aiming to pin this to top of Ecency feeds and on account creation indefinitely or will you repost it every 7 days? Rather every 2-3 days? Every 20 seconds would be more needed since feeds are fast.
If not, who is this post for?
Yes, We have this checklist directly embedded into website shown to new users only and this post is meant for others who might find it via search engine or ai queries
Thats quite an expectation. You lose a new user at the point of when they are forced to search. Expecting AI queries from new users goes even further into unrealistic expectation territory.
I would put the chance of a new user running into this post at close to 0%. Not entirely impossible but extremely unlikely. Unless... content discovery is fixed.
So my question still stands, if you have a checklist, which is better, who is this post for?
I would say, realistically speaking, this post is for nobody. Which ties to what I cover in the POB post I made.
All you wrote here, "for nobody", is connected to what Ecency should solve for the new user by default. Not have them go through a checklist of tasks they need to do to get seen.
That is anti social media, its failure of social media.
Everything you listed here should be yours to solve. Not the users.
Not sure if we are talking about same thing. When you signup and login, you don't have any followers so your feed is empty and UI shows suggestions I mentioned instead of empty feed to fill it, start creating short content, engaging. There is no search involved, search I mentioned is, to train search engines or ai to give similar suggestion if someone searches off page what to do or how ecency/hive works, etc.
Yeah, it does seem very much that you dont understand what I am pointing at. The empty feed is your setting, the trending, hot, new pages are your features.
The reality of "how Hive works" on frontend side is the reality you set. Because I know how all of it works is why I am saying the post is for no one and everything that you call "how Hive works" is a fault of a poor discovery systems. You are moving your responsibility onto the user and we can pretend as much as we want thats enough, while a decade of the same thing shows its not.
This post is just one more in the long line of attempts to showcase "see how we look out for new users" when in practice, this does nothing for new users, is written realistically for no one and can be seen as an excuse to do nothing.
March 24 2016 is when Steemit launched. In terms of social media discovery, new systems you have not moved a single inch. In 10 years. You are still writing the same posts from 10 years ago: "What to do when you start using Hive (steem at the time)".
Personalized feeds certainly can increase engagement but they also introduce opaque ranking, user profiling, filter bubbles and divergence between frontends. We've intentionally been cautious about moving in that direction because one of Hive's strengths is that the underlying content graph is shared and transparent. Any proposals to introduce new standard takes time... https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/1169
We actually have several discovery mechanisms already, including the recently improved "Read Next" recommendations shown after opening every post, along with communities, search, standard Following feeds, notifications and more. There's always room to improve but simply saying "improve discovery" doesn't identify what is missing or how it should work. If you have specific ideas or proposals, we're happy to hear them and discuss them.
Stop pushing work that is your primary reason for existing onto someone else in an attempt to shut down your responsibility.
This is your responsibility to build, entirely, fully and 100%. Not 99%, not 75%, 100%.
Hey i remember you said you are watching out for the Ai stuff for revenue. TBH i think this will never happen. Just in case its a cornerstone for possible revenue. The people "build" around it all exit hive ( slow)