It's My Hive Birthday!
8 YEARS!
It's my Hive Birthday today! I've been on here, apparently, for 8 years! Funny thing is, I'm sat at the same spot I was when I first signed up for an account. I can't believe 8 years have flown by so fast.
Having said that, a LOT has happened since then, including the global pandemic bang in the middle of it all. In the early days I did a tour of the Canada and the United States when I wrote two of my best posts on here, in my opinion. I wrote one about my journey from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyons in Arizona, stoping at epic places like the great Hoover Dam and some Indian reservations. The second post was about Banff in Alberta, Canada. I'd have to search for the posts if I can find them and add a link at the end. Sadly some of the embedded photos and videos no longer exist as they fell victim to some of the platforms closing down or culling content due to politics and the collapse of Steemit.
I actually found the platform in two ways. I was looking for a YouTube alternative at the time and found DTube. In order to use DTube, though, I had to sign up for a Steemit account. The rest is history. I would actually have joined much earlier, having heard the likes of David Pakman speak about the platform on his YouTube channel, but I procrastinated.
In eight years, nearly a decade, I've made a lot of friends (and money) on this platform. I've also lost a fair bit too. I've been in receipt of the wrath of the largest whale on the platform when he downvoted all my votes to zero for 6 months straight. I kept posting, of course, and he eventually gave up. I think he used to downvote me manually as well, which made it quite personal haha. I think he finally relented when we moved across to Hive and other things became more important to him. Having said that he did so a clean out of my rewards for a week or so on Hive as well before giving up.
I missed the all time high of the token by a few weeks. I also, apparently, just missed the golden era of the insane upvotes that made people dolphins with one post. I remember seeing random people with accounts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars after just a few months of posting. Those were crazy days.
MY FIRST VIDEO ON DTUBE
The above was the first video I uploaded onto DTube and got exactly zero upvotes. haha. I couldn't understand why I got no votes while others uploaded 10 second selfie clips saying "Oh My God! Look at the price of Steem!" and received over $100 worth of upvotes. Of course it all made sense after 2 weeks of deep diving into the platform and wrapping my head around it all. At that point, sadly, after I decided to invest heavily into the platform by buying myself into dolphinhood, the price began a massive nose-dive. Bear Market.
Ironically my best time on the platform was spent in crypto winter. I think it gave me a chance to get to know the platform without too much emphasis on the money. Don't get me wrong, the money was still good but I was in deep loss, about -90%, the whole time. When the following bull run inevitably came, I reaped the benefit of all the time spent.
I wonder if we'll ever see those days again on here. Honestly I thought community was dead on Hive until I met some Hivians recently who showed me their community. It reminded me of those early days and gave me lots of hope for Hive. Community is definitely not dead here.
I actually didn't mean to type this much. I just noticed the badge and decided to post sometime as a tribute to myself haha. Long live Hive!
Peace & Love,
Adé