Newbies Initiative Task 1: Experiences and Challenges

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Image designed by @tripode

Good day hiveans and my dear friends. I hope that you all are doing okay. Well, I am excited on my end because I was successfully admitted into the newbie initiative by @starstrings01 after fulfilling all requirements.

As part of the program, newbies like me are being given tasks to complete which lets us earn rewards and connect with more authors.

The first task of the month is to give an overview of our experience on hive which require that we highlight the difficulties we have faced and are still facing on the blockchain and how the initiative can help solve such problems.

Below are my responses to the first assignment -

My experience and thoughts of Hive:
In two words, I would say that my experience on hive has been a bitter-sweet one. That is because I've had both my highs and lows. As a person who knew little or nothing about this particular platform, I had a hard time understanding the basics even when I know myself to be a fast learner. It wasn't easy when I also learned that one of my friends was blacklisted and that made me shrug a little because I felt the rules were too strict. But with time, I got to know that hive is the most standard of platforms I have come across and the rules were not less than great. Besides, what makes a platform is the quality it brings and I learned to source every of my image correctly, set my tags right, and find the perfect niche for my content.

My thoughts on the hive is a good one though. I think that hive is a place where you can learn and earn. You can connect with people from different parts of the world and even get more people interested in working with you if you provide the kind of content that they like. Hive has changed a lot of lives in past times and I hope to be part of this life-changing experience while taking pride in doing what I love(blogging).

Confusing issues and challenges I have experienced on the hive:
Normally, we all encounter challenges in our everyday life. Most times when we come across a certain subject that we are new to, or a different phase, we learn to adapt and this comes with learning and trying to get through all hurdles. Below are the issues I've had on the hive and still might be facing -

1. Choosing the appropriate community to post my content:
In my introductory post, I mentioned being a freewriter and that was the only community I posted in regularly asides from hivenaija. But when it came to other varying content, I had a hard time choosing which community to post in because I didn't know a lot about them and I saw some people post random things in communities where they were not supposed to. For instance, I once posted a story in Leo finance after I saw someone post something like that there. But I later was cautioned by a good human here and I began to read a community's description before making a post.

2. Learning about my private keys:
Like I learned about every crypto site, once you lose your mnemonic phrase or password, you can't recover it. I had that at heart but at some point, I was a little bit confused on which keys to use. When I first tried using peaked, using my password didn't work so I used my master key until I was notified to use only my private active or posting key. Thank Goodness that was the last time I used my master key because I learnt that using your master key could your put your account safety at risk.

3. Correct placement of tags:
I think that a lot of people abuse tags a lot. You might find a freewrite post that has a foodie tag in it when the content is unrelated to food. I was guilty of this at some point by using curie and OCD in one post but I learned better. At the terminal I also read to position my content tag to come first, then the community tags before curation tags like entropia and ocd.

4. Formatting Style:
Yes, I'm quite creative but I have a problem with what format style to use in my blog mainly because I don't know how to create separators just like the one @tripode uses in her smile posts. Secondly, I have tried putting photos side by side and translating the words just like @starstrings01 does on his posts but it seems confusing as well. I have missed entering some contests because it was a requirement. I would really love to learn this so my blog can have a good presentation and easy understanding for both the english and non-english writers.

How this initiative can be of help to solving these issues:
If you ask me, the initiative is already doing so much because lots of people can testify to the fact that the smile server has helped them. Most newbies that enroll in the program are being guided and the ones who are not part of the initiative get inquisitive sometimes and they get answers to their questions regardless.

But I think roles can be assigned to learned people who are always active in the discord so that when there is an emergency question, he/she can provide answers to that user and also put the answers up in a channel where new users and oldies can refer to from time to time.

I also suggest that tools and maybe a guide written by experienced people in the platform be provided for every newbie enrolled in this initiative. It should include the proper usage of tags, why staking hive is beneficial, how powering up and down influences one's account and how to use the tokens earned because I read my mate's post where she mentioned not knowing their uses. Every newbie would be expected read all of it and apply them on their blogs on hive so that after finishing their time in their batch, they would be seen as people who present great blogs and can help others who are new to the platform.

I hope that all these would be put into consideration. Thanks to @tripode and @cwow2 for supporting this initiative. Thanks too for reading.