Let me start by saying I don't disagree with anything you have said in this post. I don't. There is no guarantee in HIVE. It's about finding and expanding your circle.
The problem, as I see it, is how hard it is to break in with the people who have the power to change someone's Hive experience. If you don't write about the right things, you won't get the "Whale Votes" that have the capacity to be life changing.
You've chosen a subject matter as your niche that has gotten you on some big hitters' radars. Congratulations. I look through your blog and see a lot of high value posts. But, when digging a little bit, all of that value tends to come from 4-5 big account holders. So is your message getting out to the masses? Or are a bunch of people who are not reading your content voting for your posts in hopes of curation rewards knowing that big votes are coming?
I gave up. I spent over a year on STEEM putting a lot of effort in to creating daily posts that weren't just shitposting, I turned to the bots and used the voting services offered to boost my content in hopes of being seen. Eventually, I got tired of it and stopped.
Hive has brought me back, at least partially. I am trying to reinvigorate myself, but I still see a lot of the same behavior with a whole lot of people earning 0.63 HIVE on all of their posts, while a select few get these 50 HIVE payouts like this post is lined up for.
There is an economic gap between the haves and the have nots on HIVE, just like there was on STEEM, and I really haven't seen many efforts to amend it.
@acidyo having @OCD is one of the good projects, but there is a lot of pandering to the #OCD tag. Being seen and voted on with any sort of regularity is difficult at best.
All of that said, You seem to have found the right combination to get some big votes on your side, I'm happy for you for that. And you are correct that persistence and engagement are key to eventual success. But it is also very easy to get mired down in the struggle of the minnow class, and never be discovered. I could name 15 people from STEEM who had brilliant blogs who are no longer here because they never found support, and that was not through lack of trying, but because their subject matter was personal and not structured in a way that drew the power players to them.
Hive on! I'll be following your journey in my feed now.
You described your position quite well. I respect your statement and sorry to say I can't agree with you with all of your logic. I can't blame you or me for that. Everyone has their own perspective and thinking process.
Do you know when I felt successful? When I saw your comment. I wrote this post for folks like you. Clearly, you didn't get the motivation, but at least you noticed it!
How did I get big votes from 4-5 big account holders? Do you think I earned this in a day? If you think so then you know nothing like John Snow! :/
I started my blogging journey like you through blockchain-based social media Steemit back in September 2017. Today is 15th July 2020. I spent almost 3 fuking years to get upvotes from big accounts. Yeah, my posts weren't valued like yours, I didn't have anyone to guide me. But don't you think I waited enough! And yeah after proper guidance of some veteran bloggers, I got the right path on Hive.
Yeah forget about Steem, we're in Hive now. I can guarantee that the Hive is not centralized like Steemit! I am a real-life example. I can proudly say that I earned it. Nobody came to me with big votes, I brought them to me by my skills. You can easily compare my posts before 2 months then now, and you'll understand how I changed myself, how I improved my qualities!
I was also depressed like you and questioned - Why are some shit posts getting more rewards than good posts?
At that time experienced users didn't hide in the shadow. They came forward to answer my questions, even on Discord! I never saw this type of engagement on Steemit. I can show you, 15-20 new people, only from our native community @bdcommunity, who got their success on Hive within a month!
This is the success of Hive (Except very few communities, I can agree with you on this) which you can't see on other platforms. Yeah, there are some flaws! As Hive is still new it has lots of issues that need to be corrected! But within a few months, Hive already crossed Steemit in every aspect. I am not saying this as I am earning, I am saying this because newbies with potentials are making good money as well.
I don't want to mention any newbie or anything here. I will urge you to go to the trending and hot page again. Check how whales and curation trails (like @ocd, @bdvoter, @discovery-it, and so on) are helping minnows to become popular. I can argue with you all day on this topic. But I guess you can understand what I am trying to say.
Thank you for your comment. I loved it as you freely described your state. Just followed you. See, according to my "Start Building Relationships" theory, we are making progress already! ;)
a bit random but from my previous comment in this post:
This is also a reason I was very vocal about some downvotes on "overrewarded content" during the pump to $1. Even though I realize they will start to happen a lot more each pump people shouldn't just jump the gun based on numbers. I'm also sick of people saying "but it's at $x rewards!!" as if they forget that 50% goes to curators and the thing that reminded me from your sentence is that many have worked hard for these pumps, many don't want to power down and continue posting like usual instead and many deserve to enjoy the pump and higher rewards for a little while at least because they've worked hard for them and hive like most other alts has been low for a majority of time.
Isn't it great that we can have a conversation with respect even from opposing viewpoints?
I did not mean to belittle the effort you have put in to getting to where you are, I can definitely relate to your journey! And I have huge respect for your efforts to publish in english when it is not your native language. Your posts are clear and concise, and I could never even put together a sentence in any language that I am not native to. Mad respect for that.
I've always advocated that the best way to build your network is in other people's comments. There is too much in the Recent feed to wade through for useful content discovery to take place there, unless you are a curator who is making a job of such actions (I was once a curator for @curie, I know the struggle of scrolling through all the feeds). So you go to people's posts and comment and hopefully get a reaction and build a relationship.
But then your own Blog has to be something that they are interested in so they follow and continue the conversation in your own blog. I think here is where you have done a masterful job of picking your niche. Writing about Hive, Blockchain, SEO, these are topics that a lot of the whales are interested in. But if everyone wrote about these topics, HIVE would be a pretty boring place. Where are the big stake holders who want to read about daily life, sports, parenting, or other more social based content?
I think part of my problem is I am old, (said tongue in cheek) and I don't adjust to change easily. I will be the first to admit, I don't understand communities enough, and am too set in my ways to learn. It seems like a lot of success is coming from the community accounts, like your @bdvoter. Maybe I should try to start a community for Hivers in Tennessee, because a USAVoter would be way to broad to still do any content discovery.
You've done a great job, I am not trying to belittle that at all. My key point here I suppose is the disclaimer that "individual results may vary". For every account like yours that has found success, there are those who have not. But to wrap it back around to your YouTube analogy, for every YouTuber making a living posting videos there are hundreds who have an audience of 10, not everyone is cut out for success on YouTube, or on Hive. That doesn't mean we should stop trying, it is just means that some people won't ever get discovered, and that is okay.
One thing I can give credit to autovotes is that those who use them well, i.e. monitoring them often (and the authors on them) and not just doing it for max ROI (by giving very small percentage votes) do very well for retention but as said giving big votes will only be able to cover a certain amount of accounts. The downside of manual curation which is what I've done in forever now is that it goes in periods, some times you curate 10 certain accounts a lot while spreading the rest around and then a few of them drop/get forgotten/voting power just isn't there/i just don't happen to see their posts. Yours a month ago for instance I think someone had reblogged, I remembered your username from the steem.chat days and threw it a vote but somewhere along the line I must've unfollowed you (i sometimes prune my following based on inactivity but haven't done so in over a year now cause I figured it's better to just leave them there in case they come back).
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that while focusing mainly on one community (OCD) for a while it felt great cause me and a couple other curators from the team were able to check each and every post posting there (while the rest of the curators were curating outside our community for the daily @ocd compilation posts), but then we decided that having a general "original content" community was not the best idea - thanks to those that made me realize to stop it as early as we did cause switching curation to the more niche communities has done wonders for them and for communities as a whole. Point being it gets more difficult to cover same authors more often no matter how consistent and great quality they produce. One thing that's great is that many accounts like to "spy" on what we curate and set autovotes on those accounts to maximize rewards and we usually don't care too much if posts already have a lot of rewards on if the content is great - although as a curation guild focused on newcomers and underrewarded content we tend to curate that but there's a big lack of late voting going on because they know they may end up being the last voter and receive minimal returns.
Man this comment is getting long, I recently posted about something that may help this whole dilemma I mentioned at the end of the last paragraph but it's still a very experimental service we have to monitor closely to avoid abuse, at the same time we don't want to focus curation on those using it cause it will seem biased and that we're doing it for the extra rewards - even though that has almost never been our main focus as we curate manually and 99% of our votes are not cast within the first 5 minutes.
I think the way rewards work right now we're slowly entering a phase where getting consistent good rewards will only land on a few people on the platform and getting high rewards will be even harder. I assume if Hive were to pump there will be a lot more usage of downvotes too because there's already so much talk of "overrewarded posts" even at $60 where as only $30 go to the author and half of that is stake, so you can imagine that if Hive pumps 5x again those rewards will also go up by quite a lot so your content will have to be very outstanding to constantly receive a lot of rewards. In @pitboy's case here he's shown that he really knows what he writes about and produces results, people like to reblog his content or like in this post's case share them in chats so other curators can trust the sharer and some times not even need to read every post to know it deserved the rewards it's getting. So yeah, we're kind of moving in this zone where stakeholders are kind of being forced to hold more stake and curate with it since curation rewards is now 50% and that's something that is way more guaranteed than post rewards - not just because of how often curators find you but also cause of downvotes that can happen at any time for any reason - although the latter is really a low percentage of cases.
Okay, I kinda lost track of where I was going with this so better to end it here, lol.
Thanks for the feedback @acidyo! I have always thought @OCD was one of the best curation efforts around and really respect your efforts. Once upon a time I had time to spend time in Discord Channels and knew a lot of the OCD Curators, all a good bunch of people! I think with a curation effort like yours, finding more new accounts to curate is the key to success. But it can't be all on your shoulders. Other big players need to step up and spread the wealth too.
Keep up the good work! you are appreciated for sure!
I think it's like Medium, where unless you get your post added to a major Medium publication like HackerNews, it's very difficult for people to naturally find your content.
The content discovery mechanisms on Hive have come a long way and benefit from continuous improvement.
Communities are still underrated and I believe will do very well for content discovery and consistent rewards in the near future, more stake being distributed wider, more communities existing with a bigger audience and more curators that check each post and hopefully even more genuine curators that aren't just interested to maximize rewards but will vote on things late no matter the rewards it already has because the content is just that great and they want to showcase the best of that week's content on their trending page of their communities. One thing communities lack which I think is mainly cause of the abrupt unemployment of the steemit devs is a way to fund the moderation and curators through beneficiaries of each community but we have something in mind with OCD that I think will help a little (more about that in a post soon).
I agree... Very well said! (^_^)