I haven't been able to post much lately, as much as I'd want to there's been a lot of things Hive in the works that have taken most of my attention. I'll try and talk about what I've been up to and share some of my thoughts about them and future expectations. There's also been this one expectation of knowing that my first post of the day gets a lot of autovotes so it has kind of suppressed me into not posting unless I have something of value to share, but I think I'm going to try and post more either way and make use of @reward.app to send most of the author rewards to curators on posts I feel didn't take that much effort/time to create and not care about those looking at numbers at the end of the day and point fingers calling out for reward pool rape even though the net rewards would not go back to me. I realize it's something not many would care about but as a manual curator and someone that doesn't like autovotes that much I'm kind of trying to show an example here.

Alright so now that the self righteous part is out of the way let's share some thoughts. :P

Communities

Aside from accepting certain niche communities under our incubation and supporting them with votes that'll grow their accounts through curation reports, delegations and most important votes on the authors posting on their communities we'll also start encouraging great authors that are posting in OCD to post onto the more appropriate communities if the content is something that would fit there better. I realize many may post onto OCD for the visibility so we'll still allow people to cross-post onto OCD but we'd prefer it if their main post is posted directly onto the appropriate communities for statistics and community ranking.

One thing I hope will start happening with communities is that they become a bit more like tribes, but not in the way you might be thinking if you're thinking about Hive Engine tokens. Of course they're free to use tokens as well but I'm hoping more about a community spirit, the leaders, curators, moderators and authors/commenters posting into each community start to find which ones they enjoy the most and are more active there in growing engagement and growing together along side others. There will be more and more ways to incentivize users to be active and I think the base layer of that will be communities.

Right now there are a lot of communities still not even utilizing the small options that exist for them. OnChainArt is doing a good job by tagging verified authors which makes the job for curators easier but a lot of communities are still not using the ranks at all. I'm hoping this will change soon and hopefully you guys aren't looking at OCD as an example cause as I've mentioned quite a few times the past few months we haven't been actively curating or doing much with that community. I'm not sure what our future plans is but it's still a little bit off of what I'd like to do with it and what I'd want it to become. Hint: it'll be a community that will help other communities get more attention.

POSH & ENGAGE

We'd also really love it if each community would start encouraging their authors to share their and others posts more onto Twitter or other centralized platforms. At the same time the ENGAGE token being distributed by curators of said communities would incentivize some more engagement onto posts to make up for the disincentive to curate comments and the penalty on them. I think this is something that will happen naturally over time but we're going to do some ENGAGE giveaways soon to community leaders & curators and other users the community think would deserve having 1000 of so they can further distribute more coins to other engaging users after leaving them a comment or reply. Stay tuned for that giveaway - it'll probably happen through the @ocd account.

I also want to thank everyone for the patience with the #poshtoken bot, dev resources are scarce right now and there's so much going on in that front as well so it's understandable that time is of the essence when there's things like wHive and DeFi that's all the fuss right now. I'm hoping the poshtoken bot will be optimized and fully functional soon so that we can make the most out of it and find great ways to monetize that token and give it some value. I do hope you #poshers do also realize though the great effect of sharing posts onto Twitter and using the tags correct has on all of us, so I hope you don't see it as a waste of time just because there isn't a direct incentive fully working right now. If you think about it, if you weren't on Hive and you're one of the active ones today, wouldn't you want to stumble upon it through a tweet? Until the poshtoken is fully working we have created a #posh channel on our Discord where you can drop your tweets and have a chance at curation from us. Feel free to also circlejerk like each others tweets but make sure to tag correctly, aside from #hive you'll want to add tags that fit to your posts so you can receive more visibility from users outside of Hive.

Another thing I wanted to talk about Poshtoken that may not be obvious to some of you is that before we started Posh there were barely any people sharing their posts onto Twitter. If you really think about it, and as some stakeholders have time after time mentioned in the past, most of the content on Hive would not earn the same amount anywhere else. I mean if we're going to be honest here, I'm not even talking about half of the posts that are about Hive like this one. It takes a lot of time investment and effort to grow on ad-revenue platforms until you can start making some monetary rewards. As many of you know things are different here and they've never been working as well as now after the EIP. One thing earning authors could do that would bring back some value is to drive traffic to their content from outside of Hive. Even though we know many are always focused on driving traffic to their posts from other Hivers because of obvious upvote reasons this lead to kind of an echo chamber, but I think posh is a good start and many others who have been incentivizing that kind of sharing on their own initiatives.

The other part, poshtoken, once it's fully working and we've evolved it a bit more over time after seeing how it's functioning, I believe will be of even more value to our ecosystem. The part I wanted to mention is that it will incentivize anyone with a Twitter or other platforms we'll be adding in the future, to share authors posts and directly receive some tokens for it that'll in turn be tradable for other coins such as Hive. This means that from the upgrade of no one sharing their posts anywhere to authors sharing their own posts for possibly more curation from us, it'll lead to anyone sharing anyone's posts on any platform.

Just a couple weeks ago I had a random idea that I shared with @roomservice who in turn shared it with the @peakd developers and it instantly became a reality that'll incentivize people to #posh even more. The idea was simple enough, instead of just having a referral link when you try to onboard users, let them generate referral links for each post they want to share. If you use peakd you can now generate a ref link under each post. This will give the author of the post the referral rewards and with more and more users #poshing we will start to see more and more authors suddenly receiving beneficiary rewards that they may not even know where they came from. In one hand it's great cause it'll also let us track some more statistics of how effective posh really is and at the same time reward the content creators even more than just the upvotes they may have received one time during a payout window. Needless to say I think you can all imagine what it will be like once front-ends such as Peakd were to integrate ad revenue or BAT through brave for each author specifically. Another noteworthy thing to mention is that posh would also make sharing older posts rewarding, on top of the referral rewards and possible adrevenue and tipping I think we're getting pretty close to evergreen content which a couple years ago was seemingly impossible with the way things worked on our blockchain.

Going back to communities I think they will see some good strength in utilizing both posh, engage and creating other social media accounts where they share a great selection of their best posts with referral links. I'm still thinking of a great way to incentivize onboarding that would mitigate abuse, a mix of giving onboarders a tip, letting them use their own referral and in a way guaranteeing curation of their referred users intro posts and guidance into more communities might work well to get the word of mouth to spread and more content creators on our platform. If you have any more thoughts on this or ideas I'd love to hear them if you're willing to share!

More words

I don't know about you but it's really starting to feel like things are falling into place. A great feeling as well that any developer can come and create whatever they want on Hive and it has such a big community here waiting to test their product or service out and even help them fund it in many cases. I'm still looking forward to see more projects seeking funding through delegations, once we start getting more serious ones I think people will be running for the door to get themselves as much Hive as possible and be able to invest them riskfree and receive shares or tokens in return while the service or project uses their voting power to promote their content through authors posting about it. It's something I still think is very undervalued compared to the ETH and BTC ICO craze where people just lost a ton of their coins and never saw any returns. Here we can hold them accountable much easier by removing delegations if we think they're not doing a good enough job or by unvoting their proposals if they don't meet the standards we each set for them specifically.

There's still a lot of things to do and more new things popping constantly. It's getting impossible to keep up with everything that's going on on Hive and I hope that once my main ideas and services are rolling as well as I'd like them to be and doing Hive justice I'd like to go back to my roots of using Hive as I've used Reddit for many years prior; engaging and curating. That's also how I started on Hive, I think I only had tens of posts but thousands of comments for the first year as I was trying to focus on engagement and curating with a trail even though the rewards were barely existing at the time. Fortune rewarded me for my efforts and I'm trying to do my best at putting those rewards to good use and once I'm a bit out of the red in my finances I'm looking forward to spending those rewards to growing the ecosystem even more.

Exciting times in cryptoworld and especially on Hive, can't wait to see what the rest of 2020 has in store for us. Thanks for reading!

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