Yes, nice to hear from you, too!
I am not active on HIVE anymore, but I just checked out and noticed you are posting regularly again.
Recently even @hagbardceline posted again after a very long time (do you still remember him from the old SteemSTEM days?) because I introduced him to Splinterlands. :)
I hope you are fine concerning your private and also your 'science life'!
Yes, it's true. @jaki01 brought me back to the bright side again. ;-) Good to see that you are still around @lemouth. Are you also into Splinterlands or are you "only" here for the greater glory of science? I'll make sure to check out your recent articles soon.
I am actually only here to have fun with science. As said in the reply to @jaki01, I don't really play online. Feel free to check my blogs and ask questions if needed. I will be super happy to answer them :)
I was busy with a very active life since the beginning of the pandemic. Teaching, research and also helping students and their complicated life in those hard times ate all the time, the small part leftover being dedicated to my family. I managed to finally come back a month and a half ago and now I post again regularly about particle physics research (and I don't touch Splinterlands as I am not very well in online games). I assume there is no chance to see you active anymore?
Yes, I remember @hagbardceline from the good old days (on the Steem chat) :)
To be honest apart from playing chess I have never been a gamer (and still don't consider me being one). Even if Splinterlands is a really nice, well concipated game, at first it's an investment for me which gave me financial freedom (as the very early cards which I bought are rather expensive now).
Never say never, but it's true that the centralization of power in HIVE (in the hands of a few early miners and former bid bot owners) plus all these things behind the scenes (for example like delegating massive stakes and borrowing posting keys to be able to hide one's actions), then, in addition, all these automated upvoting which has nothing to do with curating of quality content (which would mean to seek, actually read, evaluate and manually upvote great posts), really frustrated me.
I think if someone considers himself purely as investor they should be able to just stake HIVE in order to earn interest but shouldn't upvote posts which they didn't read at all. There should be two different reward pools, one for stakers and one for real curators and authors.
Well, I am not optimistic concerning HIVE, but I just 'hibernate' and wait and see what might happen in future.
But since I know that you are active again, at least I will check your very interesting posts from time to time.
Mmmh I see and fully understand you frustration. At least on the personal side, I am reading all posts (written in English or French) curated by STEMsocial and try to engage the authors (the lack of engagement is probably the most frustrating thing IMO). Being able to do that is however related to the fact we form a small community.
All in all, I am probably a bit more optimistic than you about the future. We will see anyways (and thanks in advance for checking my blog once in a while) :D
The funny thing is that in this useless, wrong post now already more interaction (engagement) took place than in the majority of the trendig posts. ;-)
I discussed the engagement issue with @mobbs a few weeks ago. We didn't converge on a good explanation and concluded that this was somewhat random.
My ears are burning!
Yeah but I mean, Engagement has always been an issue since early Steem days. Top trending would get a lot because it would all be either drama with Bernie or something about the blockchain. Anything regarding art or daily life was heavily under-represented. That's just the nature of blogging for money, I suppose - No way around that