Got that Friday feeling? It is my tradition to do a #FollowFriday post each week featuring some people who deserve more support on Hive.

#The News

The week was marked by another slump in the HIVE price, but it seems to be back on the way up now.

From @coingecko

I cannot help keeping an eye on the coin of the 'other place'. That seems to maintain value despite a lack of development or genuine community. Over there you will see a few accounts really milking the rewards. Maybe some people still believe in it, but I lost my faith a year ago.

From Hypestat

They seem to have had more of a rollercoaster ride with popularity. Peakd and Hive.blog both have similar curves that have been fairly flat, but tailing off a bit lately. I see from various stats that lots of new accounts are being created, so what is happening with them? Are people grabbing lots to get the cool user names to sell on? Hive really ought to be growing in usage at this stage. The main dapps are well down the rankings on @dappradar and even Splinterlands has fallen out of the top ten.

We cannot be complacent about Hive. There is a lot of competition in the world of crypto and you need to stand out to get noticed. We have a very active community who make a lot of noise on Twitter, but it does not seem to be enough. I know there are efforts to get some proper marketing, so maybe that can help. Good products do not always succeed and lack of marketing can sometimes be the problem.

Friday Follows

As I have been compiling the Brit List I have found some accounts that became active again after some time away. People have various reasons to reduce their activity, but I hope we can welcome them back. Some are included below.

• I met @slayerkm at SF3. He was a very active DTuber with some other members of his family on the blockchain too.
• @newtonclassics looks to be trying out the @exxp Wordpress extension to get posts onto Hive.
• I spotted @dougdigital when looking for Brits. He is brand new here, so I gave him some guidance on getting verified. Hive can be a bit of minefield when you are new, so I think a bit of mentoring goes a long way. Douglas Adams (not that one) is a digital marketing guy.
• @acguitar1 is a guitarist who has been sharing some tips on how he does his recording. Some of us love that kind of thing. Sharing to the Guitar Community can reach the right audience.
  @andrewmusic is another guitarist who loves rocking out.

The Dog House

I am not going to highlight specific offenders this week, but I think we need more appreciation of those who help to find them and deal with them.

@hivewatchers (which I think is mainly one guy) look out for suspicious behaviour such as plagiarism and impersonation. Verifying yourself via their site can avoid some hassle. If you get on their 'naughty list' then you need to prove otherwise. I know they get a lot of grief frompeople who feel they were unfairly downvoted, but it is a lot of work to check things.

@keys-defender does various things, including looking for people accidentally exposing their private keys. Features have been added for reporting various types of abuse.

@hive-dr is the follow-up to @steemflagrewards. This is a community I have been part of for years. We look for abuse and do what we can to make it non-profitable. This is coordinated on Discord, but it is up to each of us what we downvote. I have done plenty of that on spam accounts that try to farm rewards lately. Sometimes this results in retaliation, but we do not directly earn from it. We do it because we care about Hive.

If Hive were to get huge them abuse could become a major issue and it may be viable to have paid organisations to deal with it. In the meantime you can support those who do act even if you do not wish to get directly involved in fighting the scammers.

The End

I hope you have found something of interest in this post. Please support the people I mention. There is also my own @tenkminnows project that supports small accounts. Delegation or vote trail following can help it build their accounts. We desperately need more people getting to minnow and above to spread the rewards. A minnow can give a vote of a couple of cents now.

Hive five!