This post is part of a series I’m building to help beginners on Hive learn the basics. My goal is to help you to get a base to build on your time on the platform.
Covered So Far
In Part 1 I talked about getting an account and the first basic steps and concepts to understand.
In Part 2 I continued to build on the concepts and terms used on the blockchain. This part talks about frontends, communities and the peakd profile page.
In Part 3 I talked about managing expectations, how voting works and the rewards.
The Hive Power Groups on Hive
On Hive the rewards are referred to as the reward pool. We’re the fish swimming through the waters of the blockchain. Our HP size determines which group of fish we are.
There are:
Red Fish - 0 to 499 HP
Minnows - 500 - 4,999 HP
Dolphins - 5,000 - 49,999 HP
Orcas - 50,000 - 499,999 HP
Whales - 500,000 + HP
Nothing changes other than the size of your account to reach those levels. They are nice goals to shoot for.
The numbers given above will shift over time depending on the level of inflation on the chain. Use the numbers as guide for levels like Orca and Whale.
Getting Started Building a Following
As a content creator, you’ll need to build a following of people to support your work. That also means you need to become a supporter of others.
Like any platform, being seen takes time and work.
One of the reasons I’ve suggested you spend some time exploring posts, leaving meaningful comments and following others is it gives you opportunity to connect with others.
A meaningful comment goes beyond general comments.
It will indicate you actually read the post. The post might have sparked a memory, be something you related to within the post, an opinion you want to express etc.
The more thoughtfully you express your ideas, the greater the likelihood a reader will become curious about who you are.
Keep an eye on your notifications and respond when people answer you.
Creating Content
The content you put on the blockchain is largely up to you. You could be a writer, podcaster or vlogger. It’s up to you.
Most of the frontends allow for blogging. More specialized frontends accommodate podcasting and video.
3Speak is setup for video and podcasting.
Aureal is setup for podcasting.
Explore the Communities to find topics of interest to you. You can join more than one community. Be sure to read the rules for each community. Post in the community only within the bounds of the topic of the community.
You are not required to post in a community, you can choose just to post on your own blog.
A benefit of posting in a community is in an active community the admin and mods will be looking through the posted content and you have a better chance of being seen.
Good Post Practices
Original Content
The content you post should be written by you. You’re style and voice is important to establish yourself.
You’re going to be earning, even if at first you earn nothing or almost nothing. You need to be professional and make sure the product you deliver is your original content.
Does your content have to be perfect? No.
All writers develop and improve as they write.
In many ways we’re the original building in public creators. I don’t know of any writer or content creator who doesn’t look back and see some cringe worthy product from their earlier writing.
Don’t worry about that.
What you do need to be careful about is not directly or indirectly using other people’s work.
If you do some research on a topic you’re writing about, be very careful the notes you take are in your own words. Doing so will help to ensure the words you put into your article don’t mirror your source.
Plagiarism and spun content will attract downvotes.
Crossposting
Your content is yours to use as you please.
If you have created content on another platform and you want to share it on Hive, that is okay.
Just be sure to identify you have published the content some where else. If possible, put a note on the original work that it can also be found on Hive.
This verifies the content is in fact yours.
If you’re posting in a Community, make sure there is not a community rule against using unoriginal material.
Images
Placing a relevant image in the header of a post is often a great way to attract attention. Images in your post can often add to the message. Or maybe you’re doing a post with images to tell a story.
It is absolutely vital you have rights to use the image.
Using an image that is not yours to use is stealing. Photographers earn their income from images, if you use them without permission, well do I need to repeat what I said?
Don’t use images from search engines like Google and keep in mind, sites like Pinterest are also search engines. The images are not free to use.
There are many sites where images are uploaded and are free to use like Pixabay or Unsplash. That’s just two examples.
When you use an image from those sites, make sure you identify the source and give a link back.
If you modify the image to make it more original, still give credit to the original source.
I often do this and will state “Original image(s) from Pixabay — modified by author”. I get most of my images from Pixabay.
Keep in mind the more original your images are, the better.
Tags
When you’ve written your post and are ready to publish, you’ll need to add some tags. Use up to the first 5 tags as subject tags. On PeakD you can use up to ten tags.
Be sure the tags you use are relevant to your post.
When you’re exploring posts and reading, take note of the tags used on topics of interest to you. Sometimes you’ll be involved in projects on the chain and there will be a tag to use for it.
Using the right tags gives you a better chance of being seen.
I’m part of the DreemPort project for which I use the dreemer tag on my posts. I’m also a member of TheAlliance and I use that tag as well.
Don’t use tags like that unless you are part of the project.
I’ll be talking in a future part about tags you can use to earn tokens in addition to HIVE on your posts.
That’s it for this part.
You could venture into writing a post if you wanted to. It’s not a bad idea to have a post or two up and then do some more exploring and commenting. When people see those awesome comments you’re leaving they will want to know more about you.
If you want to write an introduce yourself post, you could. Use the tag #introduceyourself on the tag. Only use the tag once.
It’s okay to get more of a feel for what it’s like on Hive before writing it. Totally your choice.
NOTES:
- Header Image is the authors
- This is day 26 of 30 in the #HiveBloPoMo Challenge for April.
Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.
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It's good to get this. Really helpful for both newbies and some semi-newbies like myself 😂.
So, I'm still a Minnow. Lol. I've been on that category for way tooooo long. I need to soar high.
I'm glad you started this series.
I'm actually surprised how much I've ended up covering with the series. That's why I've created an Index post and pinned it to the top of my blog.
I have been reading through the series to date this evening, Shadows. Very nicely written. Concise, precise, eloquent, simple - you have made it so easy to follow and understand. Fortunately, I knew most of it already; but I should after nearly 11 months, right? haha... but I will be saving this down to share with newbies down the line, so thank you.
Upvoted on behalf of the VYB Curation Project
thanks .. The Index post I created yesterday will help make it easier to share with others.
Yes i saw that one too and have bookmarked it! !LUV
@samsmith1971(2/5) gave you LUV.
H-E tools | discord | community | <><
HiveBuzz.me NFT for Peace
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This seems like the way to handle images from movies and television as well. Using images from places such as IMDB.com or Netflix can be tricky, especially in a community such as CineTV.
One thing I would suggest for the cover image is to delay sourcing the image until after the first 120 characters of a post.
When people find our content from the search engine they use, the search engine will show the first 120 characters of the post in the search engine results page. It would be a waste of time and effort to produce a high-quality post only for the search engine to display “Original image(s) from Pixabay — modified by author”; that's not what we want the search engines to display.
This is where the Summary field on the Publish page at PeakD is crucial since the search engine will show that text instead. In the case of Ecency or Hive.Blog (or even LeoFinance), the first 120 characters of the text body serve the same purpose as the PeakD Summary field.
I apologize for the length of this comment, but I thought that detail would be useful for bloggers here to know.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I agree. Generally if I need to give credit for images or share links to reference resources they go at the bottom of the post where I will enter NOTES and then list them.
Are images from IMDB and Netflix public domain?
This is where it gets tricky for me, and I don't know the answer. I would say "no" for these reasons:
It's not as people will believe that we are the creators of those images. No one believes you made images for Seven Samurai any more than I made images for Die Hard. For people like us, we would be entitled to "fair use" of images provided we give credit to the "owners" of the pictures or at least state where we found the images we ended up using.
Public domain is a beautiful thing, but it's not the same as "free". Sometimes we need to go with private domain, and this is where it gets tricky.
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Public domain is free as long as the Creative Commons license makes it so. The fair use doctrine for images gets pretty dicey especially when you're earning income on the work. Even giving credit doesn't necessarily cover you.
Fair use for written word is pretty firmly established, for images not so much and for music it's even worse.
When I was researching the use of lyrics for a Christmas Colouring book I was creating about the best advice that could be found short of talking to an IP lawyer was unless a song was in the public domain, don't use anything more than the title on a commercial use.