Curators; You Have A Decision To Make
If you have been on Hive for some time, it is likely that you have read/seen dozens of "how to be successful"-posts in the past. You might have seen hundreds of them. While many of them contain valuable information, most of them are still too difficult for beginners to fully understand.
Newcomers just want to jump in and earn. It has been like that since literally forever. Many of them obviously give up because "The Hive Life" isn't as easy as they imagined, but it's also because newcomers lack experience and knowledge. Hive is difficult for them to understand, and it usually doesn't get any easier when there's dozens of "guides" out there trying to teach them things in a language they can't really understand.
That being said, one of the best, easiest and most straight to the point post I have read is "How to make money blogging on Hive", which basically is a step by step guide to how you become successful on Hive. A superb post that everyone should read.
However, these posts are often trying to teach you ways of how to become a successful author. They tell you to create quality content, that you need to be consistent and many of them will also tell you how to get recognition from whales and larger accounts.
While I agree that people need to learn and understand those things, I also think it's about time to talk about curating. Whenever someone "likes" your content, you earn rewards. It's called an upvote.
I obviously won't go into any details about that, because you should already know. What I will talk about though, is the actual action and what the consequences of an upvote is. Good or bad.
I have often talked about optimization and the importance of organic traffic. I have shared various reports that includes details about keywords, the content that generates the most traffic and I have shared content ideas and other things related to SEO and rankings.
I have also talked about evergreen content, the difference between inward- and outward facing content and I have also tried to explain how important it is for us to have both types of content.
Everyone can agree that Hive would be better off with more users. We have seen a ton of different initiatives and projects to "reach the masses" and we also have dozens of initiatives where the focus is to reward lesser accounts and to "spread the wealth" across the community.
Those things are awesome, but regardless of how effective these initiatives and projects are, we still haven’t seen “the masses” most people have talked about.
We Have A Problem
The truth is that we probably have bunch of problems on Hive, but some are more important to fix than others. Some are probably ignored on purpose and whatever, but that's not the point I am trying to make with this. What I want people to do, is to actually look at themselves and their own actions.
I am not talking about powering down, cashing out or staking this or that token. I am not talking about downvotes either, for whatever reason it might be.
- I am simply talking about WHAT we curate.
Do we care about what we upvote, or are the curation rewards what matters the most?
We have curation-trails and people voting on highly rewarded content. People are often eager to maximize their curation rewards which leads to a certain type of voting-pattern.
The same author gets those fat, juicy whale-votes 7 times per week or someone's best friend, their mom and dog gets most of the upvotes someone hand out. Regardless of the content.
I am not here to talk specifically about my personal voting-patterns, but I want to bring this up to have a discussion. I would love to hear people's reasoning, or perspective on this.
We have been doing things in a certain way for years, and while some will obviously say that it works flawlessly, others might say that it doesn't work as good as it could.
I totally understand why you curate an introduction post for instance. That is extremely important, as we want to show newcomers that we care and that they have a chance to earn something here.
Why do we continue to reward inward facing content instead of reward outward facing content though? - Why are we not focused on rewarding optimized content that brings traffic from outside of this bubble when everyone wants to "bring in the masses"?
We have content that brings hundreds of people to LeoFinance and Hive per month. Those people come from search engines and not from Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, where we seem to spend most of our time to get some exposure for Hive.
- If you think about it, curators holds our future in each upvote.
I bet that you would flip a switch to bring more people to Hive, so why aren't we more focused on curating content that actually brings people here rather than just throwing our upvotes on the same people or the same type of content we've seen for months and years..?
"Quality content matters" or whatever people say. But does it..? Really?
What type of content is in fact quality? Optimized, outward facing content that brings in traffic from search engines, or at least has the potential of doing that doesn't seem to fall under that same "quality" category that people are talking about..
If you have two articles and one of them has potential to bring in new people and the other one is bound to, at best, keep some existing users here.
- Which one would you prefer to reward?
Why do we not care about old content that generates traffic for months and years to come? Why can't we have a system in place to reward authors for their optimization efforts for as long as the content generates traffic..?
- I know something like that would inspire and encourage people to focus more on optimized content, that would lead to more traffic and more optimized content being made as well. Over time, that would definitely boost traffic and eventually, "bring the masses" too.
Also note that I am not trying to point fingers or tell you that one thing is better than the other. I'm just trying to shed some light upon this, and have a nice conversation with people. I personally believe that organic traffic is what will take us to new heights though.