Thanks for putting this information together! As a user returning from 2021, it's been frustrating seeing how much of the content I find here is about crypto, or Hive itself, when there are so many ways that other communities could form, and be supported by these existing communities.
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It would definitely be nice to have more varied content indeed. I have plans to start a community that has nothing to do with crypto, but lacking the time at the moment. Hopefully soon
I think that's probably a part of the problem, overall: folk who are doing things that aren't crypto, might not be on the computer as much as folk who are, so just, not able to get around to cultivating a community here with the same attention that the crypto communities can.
At least, that's my experience. Personally, I was living off-grid, in a tent, without electric or Internet, for the past year, doing regenerative agroforestry on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the most economically desolate place in the United States. Even checking my email was a big hassle; taking the time to bring my perspectives to someplace like Hive just wasn't possible.
Now, through the winter, I'm someplace with electric and Internet, so looking at what the possibilities are, but am concerned that without the support of the wider Hive community, any attempts to form an ecologically focused community will stagnate, or remain on the margins, like other special interest groups (except crypto) on Hive seem to be.
I'm planning to try it anyway, because I think there's something real and important to synthesize between the decentralized technologies of blockchain and Indigenous-informed land stewardship, but, I expect it to be a learning experience more than anything useful.
I think you are 100% right
My community will probably be a ghost town also but I'll give it a go
Be prepared that it is going to take a lot of and effort before your community will be active. It's also wise to check out whether other people already make posts about the subject you want to create a community for in other communities.
Oh yea, I know for a fact they post about it on other communities. Part of the challenge will be bringing them to my communitie instead
What I did was upvote their post with my community account and reply with a banner and link to the community.
That helped growing mine.
That's a good idea! Thanks for sharing your learnings!
A big problem with a lot of the communities is that the non-crypto/Hive ones just don't have the interest from either posters or curators. No curation means less posters, less posters of course means less curation. A lot of those bigger communities that aren't crypto/Hive related are simply cruising by purely because they're part of bigger curation initiatives people have set up.
It might seem trivial, but I really appreciate this validation. I wrote what I felt was a decent post for what I found as the largest agricultural community on Hive, and as near as I can tell... no one even saw it! (Linking it here because maybe folk can tell me that I did something wrong.)
I simply do not want to contribute my writing to the corporations of Web2. Beyond their inability to have anything but an extractive relationship with content creators, I don't trust them to not end up deleting what I write!
But unless something changes about Hive, I don't see there being a way to retain folk like me. The only engagement I get is if I talk about crypto or Hive stuff, and my interest in that stuff is only because of what it might mean for creators of non-crypto content!
That, combined with other tensions within communities here, and all of this being the same problems I encountered when I was here a few years back, has me worried that Hive is going to end up having its rug pulled by the currently big accounts, as folk get tired of the stagnation.
I have already seen that many of these more niche communities have dried up quite a bit in the past year. A lot less activity than there used to be, both in the number of posters and the weekly rewards being distributed to them. It's normal that with cycles some of the general interest dries up and returns with price action, but I don't seem to be seeing that interest returning. I also noticed a very large chunk of the people I followed had just stopped posting when they were some of the most active people I saw around. I don't think that was necessarily price action but people just leaving for other reasons.
There is a lot of weird stuff on Hive, and it's hard to not notice. You'll see people that never comment or curate any other posts getting supported every single post they make, but then you look at the communities they're posting in and they're a wasteland in which nobody else gets curated. Or you'll see a post that is genuinely incredible and evident of significant effort and they'll barely break a dollar while a post published 5 mins later will get instant rewards. Obviously the rewards side of Hive isn't promised and not every post can be a hit, but there isn't much effort to really even things out in that sense. It's why this place doesn't see really big posts and especially high effort video content.
Hive is a not a place where effort results in rewards. It is purely luck. Some are luckier than others.
My concern isn't really that Hive dries up, people will come and go either way. I have the higher concern that we're all too reliant on Binance and our generally lowish trading volume could spark interest in a delisting. Projects with more volume have already seen that fate.
Also some quick advice for you: keep posting about the things you like. Absolutely do not put too much time and effort into posts since you'll definitely burn out. Keep posting in different communities and find those areas of interest you may have here. Things will pick up over time. Posts with images will also get a bit more attention. You don't have to change what you write about or how you write it, but presentation generally does help gain an eye or two.
One of the problems with other communities is that people don't notice them en post in the general GEMS community.
I'm running a community (Cycling Community) myself and it quite hard to make your community known to your target audience. I've been running my community for long time now and have done some promotion by upvoting cycling posts in other communities and refering to Cycling Community.
A lot of niche communities are in the OCD incubation program and with that support community owners can nominate blogs in their communities that may receive OCD upvotes. So posting in niche communities that have OCD support can get you some nice rewards.
But you do have to check whether the community you are posting in is still active.
Yeah I can imagine something as niche as cycling would be a constant struggle to grow. Especially when a lot of cycling posts are probably quite similar to photography ones and result in people posting in other communities more photography focused.
The OCD stuff is a good idea for giving communities a bit more interest through the curation side of things but it's only really a temporal solution. Get too big and your community is out to which the problem returns as curation dwindles. It's also quite a time and effort extensive concept for a lot of people with all the responsibilities of reading through posts, checking the accounts, nominating, etc.
Things like commentrewarder are a great idea since that doesn't entirely rely on a large group of people doing a ton of things all at once, and it definitely does improve some engagement. I don't think there's a specific solution to any of this though, I don't think it's necessarily a problem of specific groups or individuals not pulling their weight but more just the fact that Hive really is still in its infancy. If niche communities are struggling to chug along then it's usually just a case of low interest. And the low interest of course ripples into things like curation rewards which don't help things. But even if we had 1000 people posting daily in one community, it wouldn't mean much if none of them had the HP to upvote each other. Fatigue would still be inevitable.
OCD is great. It takes a while to grow too big for OCD support though. And in the meantime I keep growing the stake of my community account and gathering delegations to increase the upvotes and curation rewards.
Commentrewarder is also nice, but it needs to be done by the author itself.
I'm playing with the idea to setup a curation service to rewards comments, but I need some time to develop.