Happy New year everyone! If you're still all hyped up over the start of 2025, I hope you will continue to stay so after you finish reading my post😀 Otherwise I apologise in advance for spoiling your new year.
The Good
The people, the community, HiveFest... Too many good things I can talk about. But I'm going to be selfish and start about myself because it's the new year. My rep on Hive has been hovering at 79.9x for a long time. It doesn't help that I haven't been posting much this year, I mean last year, 98 posts only, that's less than 2 a week. Tbh the rep on Hive doesn't really mean much. If you're a newbie reading this, don't get too hung up with your rep.
On 2024 new years eve I finally tipped over to 80 🎉🎉🎉. Then I noticed my stake was 55 HP short of a nice round number, so I decided to do a little power up even though HPUD hadn't started yet.
Pretty chuffed that I managed to close off 2024 with 80 rep (63 accounts on Hive made this) and 130k HP (ranked 152 on Hive) 🎊🎊🎊
The Bad
I remember back in October I was on holiday in Athens, walking around the city and browsing on Hive at the same time. I noticed something quite odd in my feed. It's not unusual to see abuse content on Hive, but this was unusual. There were a lot of 2 or 3 year old accounts starting to write their first post. I recognise many of these posts were plagiarised. Something smelled bad. It turned out that there were over 18 thousand of these accounts, all created many years ago, and someone had started to use them to scam rewards.
Luckily these spam accounts are easy to recognise, like the one below. Through community effort, most were quickly downvoted or muted but it is still happening. Hive belongs to everyone and we all have a responsibility to make this a cleaner and better place. If you see any spam accounts, please don't upvote them.
The Sad
Two things happened on Hive this year that made me sad. I guess you can call the first one self-inflicted. After 7 years with Pinmapple, I decided to leave the project in summer. It was a difficult decision to make and made me very sad to do it, but I knew it was the best for myself and Pinmapple. Luckily, @worldmappin has carried the baton forward and we continue to have the most awesome travel community and one of the most popular community on Hive.
The second sad thing to happen was from a few days ago. I found out that @beeber had passed away on Christmas day. It was heartbreaking news, not only for me, but for everyone who knew and had interacted with her. I first came across @beeber not long after she joined Hive in 2021, she had entered my Hive PUD Guessing Contest. She was a sweet and lovely lady, and you could feel it even across the virtual world. Despite her relatively short time on Hive, she left a mark on the chain and she will forever be our Hive Angel. ❤️
The Ugly
I'm calling this ugly because I think it really bad optics for an account and Hive. The constant draining of rewards, all take and no give to the community, treating Hive as their person ATM with no regards for others. A lot of newbies come to Hive saying they're here to work. They make multiple meh quality posts a day because there are communities that will blind vote content without checking it.
A person is free to do whatever they want with their rewards, I just question is this the best way to help Hive grow?
We talk about promoting Hive to the outside world and getting more eyes on the chain. But when you look at the feed of the latest posts, it's not exactly the most inspiring.
Yes, I'm ranting now because I don't want to sugar coat things, even on new year's day.
The future
As we start the new year, perhaps we can think about what we want for and from Hive. If you're here to extract, good luck with that. If you're here to help build and grow Hive, welcome to the club. Let's all work together in this.
Happy New Year everyone!!!