A few days ago, my oldest blog had its 20th Anniversary. As you can probably figure out, it has nothing to do with Hive... I have been part of this particular "rodeo" for a very long time.
20 years is pretty much "ancient," in web terms. The blog that just had the anniversary isn't even my first; just the oldest that's still current and active, rather than archived and forgotten.
All in all, I have probably had some 30-odd blogs, some of them quite long lived... and quite a few that died untimely deaths because the hosting venue went belly up. The longevity (lack of) of venues has always been a sore point with me.
Indeed, this early type of content creation wasn't something we got rewarded for, although every now and then Google does send me an Adsense payment. Woo-hoo! I think I might have made $1,200 in 20 years. I've also made a buck here and there from pointing people to relevant books on Amazon.
I say this because (A) I have a lot of gratitude for the existence of Hive and (B) sometimes I think we take rather a lot for granted, around here.
If course, my "HSP Notes" blog is a specialty niche publication — much of the conventional blogging world is a little different from what we do here.
It's also "different" in the sense of the size of its readership. A 20-year old blog with a niche focus enjoys being visited by somewhere on the order of 10,000-15,000 unique sets of eyeballs every month. Imagine being able to pull that sort of readership to your Hive blog! That's going to take a while, alas...
In the end, it's just an example that it takes a lot of time and patience to gain a substantial readership. Why do I do it? Mostly just for the love of writing, and exploring topics I am interested in... in writing.
So why am I even writing about this, here?
Well, in part because I am delving into finding and exploring ways of bringing some of that readership to Hive, in the not too distant future. But it's quite difficult to get people from outside venues to show up for Hive... even if they are dedicated writers, and dedicated followers.
Is Hive a cool deal? Absolutely! The issue at hand is rarely Hive, it's that so many people already are overloaded on social media, so there's a certain amount of resistance to not only taking on one more venue, but to actively keep up with that venue.
In other words, gaining new people is contingent on offering something people really want, not just something we think is super cool. Never forget that YOUR perspective is centered on years of exploring and building the benefits of our community... but that doesn't mean anything to someone else, unless the "catch" is something they really want.
Let me use myself as an example: I am only on Hive (and its predecessor) because I was actively fed up with Facebook at the end of 2016, and I was also waxing nostalgic for the kind of "social blogging" we used to do, some 20 years ago... and what I found here reminded me a lot of just that!
So, getting back to that "pitch" I might make to my old blogging followers, Hive makes no sense unless I can come up with an offer that is both relevant and makes sense to them. Otherwise, I'm "just another greasy marketer with a pitch." And most of us are sick to death of that...
Time will tell what I can come up with.
Thanks for reading... I know this is a bit of a departure from my norm.
How about YOU? Do you create content elsewhere? Were you doing so, before Hive even existed? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220929 23:59 PDT
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Oh yeah, I also have warm memories of the social aspect of blogging. I started blogging in 2003, but by then, I already was a member of the blogging community for years, as a regular commenter who also shared links on a mailing list. We should explain to the Zoomers how that worked, with blog rolls, trackbacks, guest blogs etc. It was more manageable for a sensitive person than checking your notifications every day on social media platforms where the whole world is present.
I wouldn't mind reading more HSP content here. Maybe you could revisit old topics that have become too basic for your readers over there? I bet a high proportion of HSP are very active online and represented in the crypto community.
On your blog, why don't you add Hive to the boilerplate about donation options?
Thanks for the thoughtful comments @edb, appreciate your visit.
I have considered — and still am doing so — putting some HSP related articles here. I wouldn't so much be doing them with the Hive community in mind, but as a way to promote them to my existing external audience as a way of getting people to at least "set foot" on Hive. Or PeakD, more likely.
What I find noteworthy and interesting — as a bit of a related aside — is that Hive has literally thousands of communities, but there seems to be no Psychology or Self-Improvement community... at least not that I have found. I liked the "Natural Medicine" community, but it withered away...
When I find the time, I definitely will add Hive (and crypto) as an option in the "tip jar" area.
There's this Hiver living in Japan as a foreigner who's a one-person self-improvement group and wrote a book about it. I forget his name, I hope you can guess who I mean. Edit: I mean @whatamidoing of course, now active as @selfhelp4trolls
Lol hahahaha thanks! 😆 I'm off in my corner self helping myself and sometimes others pop in to say hi. I thought about offering to keep natural medicine going but I didn't have the time or energy for it. I've been barely managing to keep cross culture afloat, thankfully a few people managed to keep it going in my half absence. If you guys want to get anything going let me know. I will try to light a fire at least, hopefully I won't burn anything down 😆
I just checked your hspnotes blog and wow, you did (and you do) a great job there. I started to blog many years ago but no one of those blogs is active now. When I started I used blogspot and I wrote just in italian language (my mother language). My main objective was to talk about creative works and to exchange experiences with other creative people. Writing just in italian, I had just few exchanges, but it was really an exciting experience. When I started to sell on Etsy, I understood that I needed to use English language to have a larger niche of readers, so I used both languages on my blog and on my socials. It was a not so happy idea, cause it was chaotic. When I started to blog on Steem (before Hive) I started to take care just on it, writing just in English and it was really really like to open a new world for me. ^_^
Hi Silvia! I guess there are quite a few of us here who had a blogging background... I blogged a little in Danish, as well, but that one has also gone, a long time ago.
For me, Steem was a "return" to blogging after having been mostly quiet for a few years.
I've hit that mark on another crypto site in about three years just posting editorial cartoons. I love the editorial cartoons and I think they are pertinent to the building of any blockchain as they will always be there to detail the political atmosphere during a specific time frame for decades to come.
That's one of the things I do like about the blockchain content... it has the potential to serve as a sort of "historical archive" of things people might look back on from a future time...
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A separate comment so you can downvote this one. Have you ever written about the link between HSP and autism? I couldn't find this topic using the search box. And how is it going with scientific recognition of high sensitivity as a personality trait?
I have mixed feelings about the HSP concept, because it filled a gap at a time when autism was underdiagnosed. I feel betrayed by doctors who claimed that autists didn't feel empathy - because I felt too much to do anything useful with it. Nothing made me understand myself better than diagnosing myself as autistic. There are more traits and correlations I recognized than just the diagnostic criteria, from IBS to indifference about certain gender norms.
I read your post differentiating HSP from introversion, shyness and social anxiety. I could write pretty much the same about autism. The medical community moved towards defining one autistic spectrum, where Asperger's isn't seen as a separate condition anymore. High sensitivity could be one end of the spectrum then. I would explain the many different symptoms of autism as unconscious coping strategies for dealing with overstimulation. The main difference I see here within the autistic community is between seeking or avoiding a structured life. Some insensitivity might play a role too, e.g. ignoring social cues, but I think this is overestimated.
Yes, I actually wrote a piece about High Sensitivity and the Autism Spectrum (and Aspergers, in particular) a long time ago, but ended up pulling it down because of the constantly fluid nature of how "The Spectrum" keeps getting redefined. Which is a polite way of saying that I got tired of answering messages from annoyed people saying "That's not what we call it, anymore!"
I do believe there's a high degree of overlapping, and because there are so many formal studies being done now, there's constantly a better understanding coming to light.
Perhaps we also have to consider the tendency of modern society to "medicalize" aspects of the human condition that once upon a time were merely considered to be within the frame of "normal experience," rather than a condition.
Yes, I can imagine the naming debates would get tiring, I even see debates on Twitter about "person with autism" or "autistic person". This is a community which has extreme disagreements about the importance of names, not just about which names to use. And then there are do-gooders or parents of one autistic child who think they can speak for us.
I'm still interested in your perspective, though.
Resisting medicalization is something I also hear from people who'd say "Just act normally!" (not you), so that makes me suspicious. There are real medical issues when you can't stand being touched or when small talk stresses you out, for example. Issues that would be easy to deal with when others accept that you're different. Simply convincing my family that I really can't drink coffee although I'd love to was a struggle that took years.
I do think it's unfeasible for everyone to get a medical diagnosis. Personally, I refuse to go through that process, since it would involve the doctor talking with someone who knows me well about my behavior.
Btw, congrats with 20 years of blogging! That's impressive.