It has been a full 182 days since I posted about committing myself to post on Hive for 365 days in a row. I have been planning for a couple of months to write this post, I even made a bookmark in my journal: Write half-year review post on 2 June. To my surprise, I got tagged in a post by HiveBuzz about this exact halfway mark. It thus seems even more fitting to reflect on the half-year progress and to see if I have kept to my goals. Stupid that I was, I did not jot down my stats at the start of the year. It would have been interesting to see how it changed. But I will try and scrape some kind of stats together and see how it changed through the 182 days. In this post, I want to briefly go over my initial intentions and outcomes and see if I kept to my word. So if you are interested in such types of reflections, please join me in reflecting on 182 days of posting every single day.

1. The Quantity-Quality Problem: Half a Year Down the Line

I set out this challenge with my first rule: to never sacrifice quality in the name of quantity. In the very nature of posting every day, quality can suffer significantly if you let it be trumped by quality. I have tried throughout this challenge to never fault this rule, I have made it my first priority to uphold it.

Looking back, I think I have stuck to this rule, especially regarding my photography. In fact, I think my posts have improved quality-wise due to the fact that I have been doing it so much! But ultimately, others should be the judge of this.

2. Engagement: A "Timely" Problem

The second rule was to engage as much as possible with others on their work/posts. I have tried this as best as I could. But I have to admit I am not happy with this one. I have struggled to maintain the engagement as best as I could due to the problem of burnout I mentioned. Others might be better in this department, but I can definitely improve on this.

The first concrete stat I have, thanks to the awesome work of a friend in keeping these stats alive, is my comment count on the 6th of January 2023. At that stage, I had 3 634 comments. At the time of writing this, I have 4 649. That means for the 182 posts I made, I made about 1 000 comments, which is probably not too bad. I want to increase this amount, so in the next 182 days, I will aim to make about 1 500 - 2 000 comments on others' posts. (Just a bit of math to keep me motivated; my first comment rate was about 5 comments a day; I should now up that to about 7-11 a day.)

3. It's Never About the Money - It's About Growing

Money is always a touchy subject. Once you do something for the money, your intentions are not in the right place. Owning your own content adds another layer of complexity to this. Many a time we have seen on this platform how this can quickly make people think they deserve the payouts they get. My goal, and rule number 3, was that it was never about the money or the payouts. I have tried to Powerup, and I even powered up some Hive for @urban.scout to get her motivated to write again. (She actually posted today!)

But this is another concrete stat that I can use to judge the growth over the 182 days. Again, thanks to the friend's diligent work, I see that at the start of the year, my account was on 6 627.653 HP. As of writing this post, I have 9 158.07 HP. That means my account grew via posts and powerups with about 2 500 HP. In the ensuing 180 days, I will try to power up more on PUDs.

4. Helping Others: Good Intentions

I tried to help others get onto the platform. Some did not take the leap; they always look at me with skepticism in their eyes. They do not believe in crypto and they are even more skeptical that you can monetize your own content. Moreover, the one person that took the bite, did not last very long (for whatever reason). The thing is, as I learned from that experience and from others, getting people onto the platform and helping them stay positive is a massive responsibility. Halfway through the challenge, I am skeptical about my own ability to help people at this stage as the time issue and the responsibility factor gets me down. I will, however, still try to get friends to join and help where I can.

5. Judging My Own Progress: Philosophy, Art, Et. Al.

The preceding four rules will still remain; I will thus still keep to them. I also briefly looked at the goals that I set up, and I think I managed to keep to them in terms of content.

In terms of philosophy and the more academic writing, I have succeeded in doing what I wanted to do. I can add a bit more to this, and I will, but for now, I am busy writing an article and a seminar. So those academic writings will slow down a bit until after July.

I have flourished, though, in my creative writing. I posted various poems, and I started with a novella series that will end very soon. I am very proud of this story and I want to rewrite big sections of it and get it into better shape.

I made one sketch in 182 days, which is way too little. I need to focus on this one a bit more as well as I need to hone in on my skills and keep the ones that I have.

In terms of cooking and recipe development, I have slowly been getting into it again. When I get so busy with other projects, cooking slows down as I return to trusted quick recipes which I have already shared in my preferred community.

The herbalism element slowed down a bit as I stay with my girlfriend for most of the time - 1200km away from my garden and in a whole new world herb-wise for me. I will, however, begin to study the local flora and I brought with me some of the seeds that I will grow. I will thus post about this soon again.

And lastly, the element of which I am the proudest is definitely the different photography series I do. I think in the 182 days my skills have drastically improved especially with the help of @urban.scout as my de facto art director.

Postscriptum, or Good Luck with the Rest

I saw so many people who are doing the challenge in the HiveBuzz post. Good luck to them all. It is really something to post every single day and I am sure they have their own reasons for doing it.

I will, again, try to challenge myself in the next 182 days to post good-quality work. I will focus on developing ideas that I left as small nuggets in various posts. All of them are still stuck in my brain, I just need time (and whisky) to develop them more fully. I want to turn some of them into articles. And I will post more ideas shortly that will also hopefully be turned into articles.

I did not know beforehand how hard this year would have been in terms of academic work. I need to finish my Ph.D., these articles, and many other things. And Hive really helped with this in the long run as well. I elaborated on many of my class notes in various philosophy posts, and in writing about 500-1000 words a day on Hive helps so much to get beyond any writing block.

For those who helped along the way, who might never read this post, and will thus never know the big impact they have on me and my writing, thank you so so much. Again, this is so sad, but it is basically a shout into the void in a convoluted lengthy post. This platform has changed my life in ways I could not even imagine, from landing baking jobs to helping me write academic articles due to the nuggets or seeds of the ideas I develop here. Again, thank you so much.

Happy reading and writing. Stay well and safe.

All of the writing is my own. The photographs are also my own, taken with my old Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm lens.