This is a post I have been pondering for a while. I have various conversations on other platforms and he is frustrated by Hive. I have had similar vibes from other people. I will generally defend Hive, but I can empathise with their situation, which is that for what they make it may not be worth their time. If you spend an hour putting a post together with pictures plus nice formatting and it makes you $1.50 that is a poor hourly rate for most of us. Meanwhile they can see others making $50+ on posts that seem no better.

I hope @dickturpin does not mind, but I am going to quote from something he wrote in a reply to me on Mastodon.

You're taking it personally again, and it's not aimed at you!

I cannot help it! I do promote Hive to people and feel I should counter negativity whilst setting realistic expectations. Others will see what he writes and he may be making seem worse than it is. I will not deny Hive has issues and will discuss that below.

it's been going downhill since the split from STEEM. Every hard fork seems designed to fuck the little guy; the problem is, the developers have little choice because if they don't make the rewards harder to obtain, then the big accounts that already earn 5, 6, 7, maybe even ten times what the smaller accounts earn will see their rewards increase to an extent that sees the gap between Rich and Poor 🤣 grow even further and that leaves them open to accusations such as I'm making only impossible to refute.

There have been changes to the basics of Hive, but there were actually bigger changes in the Steem times. Early on there were posts making over $10k if they got whale votes whilst I was lucky to make a few cents. I think at one point I needed at least 1000 SP to give a 1c vote, but the rewards curve made a whale vote worth much more per SP. Now I think it is fairly linear. I did start from nothing as a refugee from Tsu and only knew a few others who came from there. I was really active in commenting (over 54k so far), which got me noticed by some and in 2017 I went to Steemfest in Lisbon where I met more people (and more events since then). Some of those people have been kind enough to put me on their automatic votes. I am not relying on any single supporter for my rewards and nobody has asked be to vote for them in return.

I have seen various people say the whales try to drive people away, but is that really in their interest? Okay, so they can earn nicely from curation and some who post will get good rewards, but as things stand the $HIVE price is way down on what it has been. One thing that would help it is if people stick around and decide to actually invest some money.

What I have seen is big accounts 'adjusting' rewards. Someone may get votes up to $40, but then see a certain account remove a few dollars with no explanation. I assume that is some sort of way to spread rewards, but it does not happen to everyone. I have seen rant posts from people who this happen and it has sometimes led to nasty accusations flying around. I am not surprised such people left when they then got a barrage of downvotes, but attacking members of the community will no go down well.

I was thinking about this last night, and Hive is so hypocritical it's untrue. "You don't earn anything for posting on Twitter." but (Potentially) if I post in the style of Twitter (say 200 characters) on Hive, either of two things happens. The post will be hidden because there's little to no content in it, or HW is all over it like a rash for "Poor content." like I keep moaning: "Why should I spend two hours or more of my valuable time creating a post that doesn't even break the $10 barrier let alone the heady rewards I see of $75 for posts I wouldn't even wipe my backside on.

I accept that there can be negative attitudes to short posts, but we have @dbuzz and now Leofinance Threads. When you are getting automatic votes on every post then doing short posts may be seen as milking rewards. Dbuzz sets a default limit on rewards and Threads go into comments, so they reduce this. Arguments can be had about what any post is worth. The whole idea of this platform is that the community get to decide, but automatic votes do not care about quality. That is one reason I do not use them, apart from adding small votes to what @tenkminnows supports. I appreciate that many people do not have the time to manually curate, but having a big 'pile on' when a big account upvotes something does not help the spread of rewards. I would rather double the rewards of a good post that has only made $1 so far.

He mentions Hivewatchers downvoting 'poor content', but I am not sure that is really their thing unless someone really is mass posting for self-votes or tribe rewards. Other groups such as Hive-DR will go after that. I just do not think it should be vindictive. You may not like some person, but they can post what they like as long as it is not breaking the generally accepted 'rules' of Hive. There is plenty here I do not agree with, but I leave it alone unless they are attacking someone.

I think it's very unfair to give a response of: "Well, leave then!" that just demonstrates that Hive doesn't have the answer or just doesn't care. 🤷‍♂️

I do not want people to leave, but we each have to decide what is worth our time. Time is very valuable to most of us. I would stick around even if I made less as Hive is fun for me. I have previously been very active on other platforms that paid me nothing, but the mix of friends I have made here is great and I get a lot of engagement with my posts. I am sure some people are equally active on Twitter whilst making nothing.

I took this chart from one of the statistics posts by @arcange. Although Hive has a lot of active users I assume most are just playing Splinterlands. The two lines representing curators and authors are not climbing and are way down from early 2018. So it does seem there are factors that are hampering the growth of Hive. I have seen plenty of people join and then give up, but then others get on fine. I think it has a lot to do with engagement. If you just concentrate on rewards then you may be disappointed, but if you find a community of like-minded people then it could be as fun as an equivalent Facebook group, with the possibility of rewards.

There are no magic tricks to success on Hive. You could try chasing whales in hope of a vote, but you could be one of hundreds and their time is limited too. There are only a few whales and some do not even post. The numbers of dolphins and orcas are down on their peaks in Steem times, but slowly climbing now.

You can get noticed if you are seen to be adding something to Hive such as building a community or a dapp. I think it is crucial that we have the sort of quality content that would attract attention from beyond the current community, but that is generally lacking. 'Influencers' will tend to go where the big audience is. I keep saying we need people to take a chance on Hive and bring their followers across, but I have not seen much of that happening. It may be partly down to the perceived complexity of Hive, but tools like Keychain have made it easier and some of my less technical friends seem to cope. If you have a fairly big stake you can claim lots of accounts to give away.

I may be considered to be in a privileged position and out of touch, but I was once one of the 'small fry'. I have bought some crypto, but I mostly got here by sheer persistence. I saw great potential in the platform and wanted to be part of it. I want many more to come along for the ride, but we cannot be blind to the negative experiences some are having.

I think that will do for now. I welcome feedback from anyone with an opinion, even @dickturpin. He and I have different opinions on various things, but we keep on talking anyway.