If you are a new user you are probably scrounging for all the HIVE/HP that you can find. Without it you can't post and the RC you get from a basic username isn't going to let you do much.
The giftgiver.com site is awesome and I would recommend it for those first few precious slivers of hive. Of course posting is the mainstay of getting rewards. Curating gets you rewards .. but only after you have enough HP for your vote to count. Delegating but useless for new users.
But here is a little trick to get just a little sliver of HP
😁
Have you ever heard of the Hive Witnesses?
My guess is probably not. However, they are super important! The witnesses are the men and women who run the servers and computers that process every transaction on Hive.
NO Witnesses = NO Hive
That means that the Witnesses are SUPER IMPORTANT
In return for being a Witness the Witnesses get a hive reward regularly. The Hive reward helps them pay for for all the expenses involved in making Hive run. Electricity, Computers, Internet connection....the list goes on. So, running a Hive Witness is kind of like a way to print money. However, not everyone who is a witness gets paid.
Every user of the HIVE blockchain gets their choice in who the Witness computers will be! If you have a Hive Account you have a say in who the Witnesses are. That's important! The witnesses set things like Interest rates on HBD among other things. The witnesses keep our accounts and the network safe. Having reliable people as witnesses is important.
And YOU have a say in who gets to be a witness!
I'm going to single out ONE but I'll also show a list of the top 4 Witnesses
When I voted for @arcange I got this nice little message:
A little bit of HP to add to my stash and I got to support a class act to be Witness for HIVE!
Now I believe people should vote for their leaders. The Witnesses are the leaders of Hive and I believe that the best people should be Witnesses. I've looked through arcange's profile and what I see leads me to believe they are a class act who should be in charge.
I also know that steempeak / peakd are also classy people.
Do any of you Hive Learner people know who else we should be supporting to run our blockchain? Do any of the other Witnesses offer a little thank-you bonus?
That's it for this post but I will throw in one more little tidbit.
The top 20 witnesses are the ones that do the majority of the work and get the majority of the block rewards. All the other people on the list are backup witnesses. So, if some of the top 20 flake out then there are other people sitting in the wings ready to take over!
@enginewitty and @c0ff33a are names I know from the Alliance so I'm also voting for them even though they aren't in the top 20.