Six Years on the Hive Blockchain: A Rollercoaster Ride of Content Creation
Hey blockchain enthusiasts and fellow content creators!
Yesterday marked my sixth anniversary on the Hive blockchain, and what a journey it's been! I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on this rollercoaster ride of content creation, community building, and the ups and downs of decentralized social media.
The Early Days: Excitement and Ambition
When I first joined the blockchain (then known as Steem), I was brimming with excitement. I posted frequently, caught up in the wave of enthusiasm that permeated the community. Everyone seemed full of ambition and hope, even as we grappled with the platform's complexities.
My First post on Steemit : https://peakd.com/introduction/@jacuzzi/introducing-myself-to-the-steemit-community
The Hard Fork: A Turning Point
The hard fork from Steem to Hive was a significant moment. In hindsight, it may have been a setback, putting pressure on the growing momentum behind the decentralized community idea. Nevertheless, I chose to stay with Hive, believing it would be my long-term blogging platform. My article about it : https://peakd.com/steem/@jacuzzi/to-be-a-house-fly-on-the-wall-when-j-sun-found-out-the-news-i-bet-it-was-epic
The d.buzz Era: Consistency and Growth
For a considerable period, I worked exclusively with the d.buzz microblogging platform. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I was generating content and media for them daily. It was a time of consistent output and community engagement. Think this is my first post about DBuzz : https://peakd.com/hive-148441/@jacuzzi/do-you-know-what-dbuzz-is
The Downvote Dilemma: A Harsh Lesson
Things took a turn when I faced the harsh reality of the platform's downvoting system. Due to an oversight on my part - not double-checking some content - I found myself downvoted and blacklisted. This experience significantly dampened my enthusiasm for the platform.
Financial Struggles and Disillusionment
The situation worsened when the platform I was working with ran into financial difficulties. I spent a year working without pay - a mistake I now recognize. As I began to power down my funds to cover living expenses, the combination of being on the downvote list and receiving minimal upvotes made blogging here seem futile. My post about it here: https://peakd.com/hive/@jacuzzi/today-i-started-a-59373-powerdown-on-my-account
Persistence Through Adversity
Despite these challenges, I kept posting. DBuzz still owes me around $14,000 USD in back pay, and I never fully recovered my standing in the communities that had ostracized me. However, I continued because I genuinely enjoy sharing my stories and content.
Diverse Initiatives and Community Building
Over these six years, I've been involved in various projects on Hive:
- Attempted to build an NFT game
-- @exiledrealm - Tried to launch a decentralized funding initiative for a community farm project in Vietnam
-- https://peakd.com/me/proposals/251 - Created different tokens
- Launched initiatives to build community
-- https://peakd.com/c/hive-168279 - Established a Vietnamese Hive community
- I made an account for my pup, too!
-- @kooza (*oh God, love that little guy so much)
-- https://peakd.com/c/hive-147058/ - Also onboarded over 45 hive users
While these projects may not have achieved the success I hoped for, they represent my commitment to the platform and its potential.
Looking Forward: Cautious Optimism
As I reflect on these six years, I realize that I've invested a lot of my happiness in using Hive. While the joy isn't quite what it used to be, I'm hopeful it will return. Despite the challenges, I plan to keep posting because it's something I genuinely enjoy.
Happy Anniversary to Me!
So, here's to six years on Hive!
It's been a wild ride with its share of highs and lows.
While it hasn't always been easy, the experience has been invaluable, teaching me about resilience, community, and the ever-evolving world of blockchain technology.
To my fellow Hive users, both old and new, I'd love to hear about your experiences. Have you faced similar challenges? What keeps you posting on the platform? Let's share our stories and continue to build this decentralized community together!
Here's to many more years of content creation, wherever the blockchain journey may take us.
Happy Hive Birthday @jacuzzi
🎉🎈🎂🎉🎈
@tipu curate 👍🏾 happy hive birthday
Thanks @kgakakillerg, you rock!
You are welcome ✌🏾👊🏾 !LUV
@jacuzzi, @kgakakillerg(1/1) sent you LUV. | tools | discord | community | HiveWiki | <>< daily
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 38/48) Liquid rewards.
We seemed to have shared the same excitement when first coming to STEEM. The PoS technology, offering fast and free transactions, was exciting to one who had watched PoW networks grind to a crawl through greater mass adoption.
The community began to slowly win me over and after lurking on the chain for a year the community finally drew me from my shell to begin posting to the chain. This had the effect of genuinely opening me up to sharing previously private activities like my non-professional music activities.
Things seemed to be going so well.... and then the fork arrived.
My position was strongly against the fork. This opinion holds to this day. There seems little need of going into details at this time; yet back then it was an eye opener to the intrinsic governance failures in PoS systems.
Still wanting to believe in PoS technology both my STEEM and HIVE funds were powered down and transferred into ETH with the hope that that community would do PoS right with their own upcoming fork which would shift ETH from PoW to PoS governance.
By the time the realization hit me that Wall St. would be doing to ETH what Mr. Sun planned to do with STEEM, ETH had made its fork and its value had done a 10x.
By this time one could call me a Maximalist and there was no attachment to my 7+ ETH. My ETH were sold off, coincidentally at their latest peak price last summer of $5080CAD and those funds used to buy a 36' blue water vessel which was bought in Toronto, ON. She was then sailed over the end of summer and into early fall through Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence Seaway , down the St. Lawrence River, into the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Prince Edward Island, through the Northumberland Strait to Nova Scotia's Canso Canal where weather has me laid over as of this writing with only 22 more hours out of Halifax and the end of this passage; the manifestation in RL of my STEEM/HIVE experience in the digital world.
Things have come full circle as the adventure of my boat purchase and passage has been documented here on the HIVE blockchain.
HIVE is what it is at this point to me. It does not seem the time or place to propose how the future of HIVE is seen by me, yet it does have a future in my mind as a utility token. Hopefully that future shall have me in it.