Good day everyone and welcome to the second stage of the Newbies Initiative. Today we will be talking about the "do's and don'ts of hive" which are the unwritten rules but are very important points that if taken for granted might end up causing a user to get downvoted to oblivion here on hive.
Many of us already know some of these rules and many of us don’t. Some of us have even gone against some of this rules and are currently being punished for it. Well hopefully after today’s class, many of us would know the do’s and don’t of hive and will avoid going against them. I will love to begin today’s class with Plagiarism.
PLAGIARISM
According to Google..
Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.
But in lame man terms, Plagiarism is simply stealing. Taking credit for another person’s work and it is highly prohibited here on hive. Anyone caught stealing anyone’s content and passing it as their own would be punished. There are some communities like the Hive Learners community who have put people in place to punish offenders like that and they will do it even before you get caught by the Hive watchers, the people I said will most likely downvote you to oblivion.
And for those who don’t know what downvoting is, it’s simply removing the reward on your post until it gets to a stage where you’re unable to make a post anymore on hive.
So no form of plagiarism is allowed here on hive. We want hundred percent originality and if you’re to take something from the internet that doesn’t belong to you, make sure to state it right in your post that it doesn’t belong to you. In most situations, it’s best you write it in quotes just like I wrote the definition of plagiarism up there in quotes because I got it from Google. Another thing we will be discussing today is Sourcing.
SOURCING
We must have seen a lot of pictures on hive with a link mostly written as “source” right under the picture. Well that’s just a way of the author telling us that the image used in that post doesn’t belong to him or her so therefore, he’s leaving a link that would direct us to where he got that image from.
Sourcing is just as important as plagiarism because if you don’t source your images and they don’t belong to you, it’s the same thing as stealing someone else’s work. So we have to make sure we source our pictures if they don’t belong to us and if they do, we have to state it below that the images used belonged to us.
Just in case we don’t know how to source an image, it’s very simple. After copying the link of the website where you downloaded the picture from, all you have to do is
[Source]( Put the link here)It is necessary to source images where you take it and note, not all images are free some are under copyright. That images are best sourced under the following sites:
https://pixabay.com
https://unsplash.com
https://pexels.com
https://freepiks.com
In these sites, there are free images and stock images. Note that stock images are not free to use and requires you to pay for the image before it can be used.
Note that using a free image doesn't mean you should not source it. Every image that is not yours, have to be sourced.
TAGS
One thing on Hive that Newbies don’t really know is very important are tags. Some of you use the wrong tags on your post because you don’t know that the tags help expose your post to more people.
For an example, you write a fictional story and don’t use the “fiction, story” tag but instead you write “tutorial, life” as your tags, someone searching for fictional stories to curate will search using the tags and will miss your post not because you didn’t write a good story but because you used the wrong tags. So making use of the right tags is a very important part of hive as it helps expose your post to the right people searching for that type of content.
ENGAGEMENT
Most people think Hive is a place where you just come drop a post, leave and expect it to get upvoted by everyone. What they fail to realize is that just like Twitter, Facebook or any other social media you can think of, Hive is a social media too that even does better than all those other social media’s because it pays you even if you’re a newbie and don’t have a lot of followers to make you an influencer.
But just like those other social media that you spend most of your time on engaging with people, you have to engage on hive to, you have to make friends because the truth is, one would mostly upvote their friends first before reading and upvoting the post of a total stranger.
So if you want to have a bright future here on hive, engagement is key. Read other people’s post and make meaningful comments and not just the usual annoying “nice post” comment most newbie do thinking that’s engagement.
VOTE BEGGING
The last on the list today is something that probably has gotten most of you downvoted or muted by some other people on hive. Vote begging is a big no no on hive because there’s a hundred percent possibility that you begging for upvote will only get you downvoted instead. So instead of begging for upvote, put in the work in both engaging, making quality contents and watch yourself do very well.
Also, it would be great to note that tagging a lot of people on your post i.e. people that you don't actually know or may not know you is not healthy. Some people may consider it as vote begging while some people, do not like receiving notifications from people who they do not know. So it is advisable to tag only people that knows you on your blog instead of multiple people, to be safe and not attract numerous downvotes on your post.
QUESTIONS AND TASK TO BE GIVEN ON THIS TUTORIAL
Before any task is given we would like to address every question the newbies would have on this tutorial. So for this, there would be a discord meeting held on the SMILE DISCORD SERVER on Sunday, 27 2022, 6pm GMT where all newbies can bring their questions and paste it in the #help-chat channel which we would provide answers to them via voice or can be pasted in the comments of this post as well.
After the Discord Meeting on Sunday, A task would be given and then be published on the @newbies-hive account with a video of what took place in the meeting. Please do well to bring in your Hive questions in the meeting.
Note: The meeting is not compulsory, but a medium to better communicate with the newbies of the initiative and to answer their questions.