The illustrious @anomadsoul, @blocktrades and @ocd have put together and an initiative titled My Introduction To The Hive Community. This is my (re)introduction.
I've been around the block(chain) since February 2017 but I really became active only in June 2017. I was introduced to Steem by @gamer00 who is another go player and cryptoinvestor. He introduced me to crypto as well. But that was years before he started talking to me about Steem.
I'm really glad he did because I'm what you could call a compulsive content creator, active since the early days of the web when it was mainly the province of academia. When I first became an Internet user World Wide Web was just three years old. The HTTP protocol had been introduced less than two years prior to that.
Soon after becoming an Internet user, I started to take part in discussions on Usenet newsgroups. I have written volumes on Usenet, on my blogs and later on corporate platforms. I did it for the fun of it and out of a need to communicate and share thoughts with others. In the beginning, Internet of Value, which is one thing that blockchain technology can be used to implement couldn't possibly have occurred to anyone but the most forward-thinking handful of visionaries. What I mean by Internet of Value is, of course, the transfer of value trustlessly without using applications built by trusted third parties - like you could transfer information in a decentralized manner using the basic protocols of the Internet. At that time, any of my activities being able to capture value, which they must have produced to some extent, did not concern me at all.
Since the mid-1990's, the commercial potential of the Internet became obvious. Google was founded in 1998. What followed was the current state of affairs. A few gigantic corporations take a large cut from all value generated by activity on the Internet. It's a sad state of affairs because most people are still captives to them if they want to network and reach large numbers of people.
I never found trying to monetize my content creation through advertising, product placements or dropping affiliate links appealing at all. Who knows, maybe I could've been successful at it, but I never bothered to consider the marketing angle at all because I felt it would've interfered with my relationships and content creation.
When I started getting seriously into Steem, I fell in love with Proof-of-Brain and the tokenization model. If only this had been around since 1992...
Never again will I let value carelessly slip through my fingers like in the first 25 years of my time as a content creator.
Hive is a fork and a sister chain of Steem. I prefer to be part of Hive rather than Steem because Hive represents the decentralized vision whereas Steem owned by Justin Sun doesn't. I'm transferring my stake to Hive from Steem. But I don't mind double dipping by posting some of my content to Steem as well, at least for as long as there is any chance of reaping rewards on Steem.
A couple of years ago, I started getting into photography, which I probably wouldn't have had I not found my way into this community. I started out taking photos with my phone camera, a cheap Android phone. Even with modest gear, it is entirely possible to take interesting photographs. Any gear is perfectly fine for practicing composition.
I bought my first DSLR in October 2018. Since then, I have taken, edited and published thousands of photos. It's great fun and I absolutely love the idea of being able to pocket the value plus whatever extra there is to be had thanks to crypto speculation - without any meddling or leeching by a third party.
I've included a few random shots of mine in this blog post. If you want to see more, I suggest you go and take at look at:
Twitter:
Interesting.. So you travelled along internet!
I actually didn't get to experience the pre-web internet fully myself. Some people I knew used apps like Gopher, a predecessor of HTTP which allows you to create hierarchical shared document structures on the Internet. Bulletin boards had existed since the 1980s but I never used them. But I can say that the web was a much, much smaller in the early days. People used to share link lists on their homepages. The earliest social media I took part in was Usenet news, which is not built on the web at all, and of course, IRC.
This is absolutely a new information to me and many others! Out of curiosity googled Usenet news and went through this Wikipedia article- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
It still exists but the largest social media giants have a dominant share of the market.