COMMUNITIES ON HIVE! DO THEY ADD VALUE? LET'S TALK ABOUT IT!

Those of us who have been here long enough will remember a time when communities did not exist on this blockchain. Instead we had topic tags and a fairly random assortment of posts assigned to these topics. No one could really control who posted on them, and there was no real way to bring together groups or to even know who was a part of any particular group. I can remember back then even trying to police our tag and often writing comments to people who were posting non relevant posts using it. We wanted to see posts that were relevant and specific to the tags, else things were just haphazard and hard to sift through. I can remember waiting, and waiting for a couple of years for communities features to be programmed in to the blockchain code, until finally one day it happened!

It was great day when communities arrived and we could all finally see what features were implemented and start to see how we could use them. There were many new features, and most of them so important and useful for us to be able to bring our communities together and see what was going on. Having a subscriber count was revolutionary, as well as seeing the amount of interactions in our communities. Also it was very nice to see who had subscribed as prior to that we had no idea who was reading our posts without them posting themselves. It was also good to see some other features such as muting, which we could use for people who persisted in posting non relevant posts, or were being abusive or misusing the system.

One of my favourite features, albeit so simple, is the ability to PIN posts to our community page. This has allowed us to launch weekly community challenges and competitions and for everyone to find these posts easily and for them to get noticed. The QUESTION OF THE WEEK is one such weekly event that i have been leading for 4 years now, and am always very pleased to see the great engagement and many interactions that come with it. Without the communities features these events would be much harder to launch and manage.

With all that said, it is fair to say that since the communities started, community leaders have been working harder and more diligently to help them grow, find great authors and reward the right people who post to the many communities on Hive. Today there are so many communities it is hard to keep up, i think we have a community now for just about every topic! Some communities are bigger than others, with a few having thousands of subscribers and so much content to curate that it is hard to keep up! I for one have been working almost full time, and sometimes more than that since 2017 doing what i can to help my community grow and to increase the support and awareness around certain key topics.. In my case, the ecoTrain community pays particular attention to topics relating to sustainability, homesteading, community, climate change, as well as many other things such as health and holistic living. Let me just say it has been an amazing experience being a part of this great experiment, and watching Hive grow and evolve. We have come a long way, and looking at the trending page today it is apparent that things have improved so much due to the great changes and improvements made to the system itself as well as the continuous curation happening mostly by a handful of people who work seemingly non-stop to curate what they think are the best posts.

Things seems to be working very well, and Hive is still here and growing, and communities are also continuing to grow which is great news! Now, having said all of this there is one thing that i do not understand and I would really like to initiate a conversation around it. It is my desire to at least just understand why certain things are so, and potentially to inspire some changes around these issues if others agree that it would be a good idea and help make this blockchain even better.

So, the main question i have, in a nutshell is... WHY do communities on Hive receive so little support (in general) from those holding the most HP? I would like to speak very personally about this because I can only be sure of the facts relating to my own experiences here, but i know that many other people who have run communities here also must surely have the same experience and thoughts. I think its fair to say that those of us who do run communities work very hard often 7 days a week to ensure that curation continues. Also, since we do have a specific page that we are responsible for, we are compelled to really look through all of the posts in our communities to ensure that we don’t ignore and miss certain people out. This is an added pressure that curators who do not lead communities do not have to deal with. There are many other great things communities do and i have personally given thousands of dollars of prizes away in the past few months to encourage and reward people who post great content.

I would like to really understand why there are SO little delegations made from large accounts to support many popular communities on Hive. I don't think it is a reflection on me personally since it is not just me who has been running a community for so long with very little recognition or support! Until now the only projects i have seen that have really attempted to support communities is @ocd, who have launched many different initiatives to help communities grow and to reward great content. That being said, i don’t think any of these initiatives have really managed to reward the people who hold all of this together. Simply put, i don’t believe that community leaders are incentified to work as hard as they do, and that is reflected in the demise of many communities that were very popular and a source of great connection for many people on Hive.

What i would like to understand is why the balance is SO much in the favour of potential projects (i am referring to the hive.fund account) , whilst the core 'bread and butter' of Hive, that is still going strong after many years seems (at least in my perspective) to be sorely neglected. Surely those who run communities and bring new users and old together have a bit more value to this ecosystem than is currently being recognised?

I would really like to hear your opinions and understand why this is so. Maybe there are plans to start to reward the top 50 or 100 communities so that we can continue to do our work and receive a fair reward for what i have to say is very hard work and more than a full time job. Maybe no one has really thought about it before, which is also why i am writing this post, because I think a discussion is needed to see if something can be done to bring awareness around this issue and perhaps find a way to bring some much needed support to communities and community leaders. If we have more delegations we are able to reward posts and improve the quality of these posts, as well as get some compensation for the continuous hard work that we perform. Potentially it could also then get some help, which in my 5 years on Hive has been SO very hard to get.

If you are a community leader I would also love to hear from you in the comments, or privately if you prefer. It would be good to know if its just me who feels this way, or if this really is something that many of us feel and needs addressing. If you would like to message me privately I am on telegram (@ecoalex).

If you are a witness and have more understanding of this i would very much appreciate if you are able to take some time out to explain it to me, and others in the comments. Perhaps there is something i am missing and i would be very happy to be more informed.

I have decided to write this today because it dawned on me that almost to the day, i have spent around 10% of my 48 years on this earth on Hive. That is an incredible percentage of my time, and i have reached the point when i really do wonder if it is appreciated, valued or even needed or wanted here. I am looking for some understanding on this, because due to the lack of support (except from one or two notable exceptions!) it has come to the point where i feel i may well run out of passion and desire to keep going.. What is the point of spending SO MUCH time here if its not really valued by the ecosystem as a whole. I KNOW that many users appreciate and value the communities, but that is not enough because those people are not able to give back, and many are not even able to comment due to resource limitations etc.

Thank you in advance to anyone who takes to time to comment and help me and others understand this situation. If nothing else i will be happy to be more informed, and of course if this discussion does lead to some changes then i will be very happy indeed. If you think that most communities are not really useful or important then please do share your perspective. I am not looking for anything more than the simple truth.

In my opinion we have placed a lot of hope and resources toward new projects that may or may not lead to Hive expanding in great ways, but are really ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room, which is the fact that the blogging aspect is still going strong, and the need for it is increasing every day. Our mainstream social networks have been completely devastated by centralised systems and people are leaving them in droves. This could well be the time when Hive truly becomes a viable alternative for free speech and social networking well beyond anything Facebook ever achieved. I believe there is so much potential still for the blogging side of this platform, we only have to look at the current situation with Ukraine to see that. The ability of Hive to allow us to post and share about whatever is going on is a rare and treasured freedom that is becoming very hard to find anywhere else! Thank you for your time!