As I mentioned a few times these last few days, I am getting much more involved in Natural Medicine. I am trying to buy up as much Lotus as I can with the hopes of supporting more variety of topic-specific communities through delegation and upvotes.
The benefit of building on a Hive front-end
If you have a specific topic that you post about and feel it doesn't get enough love on Hive, you can consider finding a home for it on one of the front-ends. Then you can buy that token OR find delegation in that token to incentivize people to participate with your upvote.
In doing this you are already helping to stabilize the price of the token. Your demand for the token will help raise the price, and most Hive based tokens have pretty low valuation. If it’s a struggling token, you may want to reach out to the team and see if you can cooperate for the benefit of the platform and your project.
While it would take thousands of dollars to make your upvote powerful in Hive at this point, a few hundred on one of the front end tokens could get you near whale level upvote.
Lotus is a gold mine for community growth
Many people think Natural Medicine is about food and medicine only, but anything that promotes well-being in a way that could be considered natural is welcome on the platform and tag. This includes all kinds of things that might not, at first, be considered medicine, but on second though, may relate to healing and well-being.
#self-help #spirituality #tarot #astrology #lawofattraction #mindfulness #homeschooling, #TCM, #meditation, #diet, #psychedelics #crystals #yoga all come to mind. Feel free to suggest your own.
I would like to be able to delegate to anyone who is looking to retain users around these or other topics, especially those who currently can’t afford to invest themselves but have lots of time to invest. Long term HODLers and slow stackers get priority.
I'm not looking to encourage curation projects necessarily though it won’t be discouraged. I would much rather see more people with responsible voting habits and lots of engagement on topics they love to have a little more weight in Lotus to help get people energized and excited about the platform and keep the standard of quality high. I also hope others will invest their own money to support their own projects.
I'd like to delegate to a few different people in 2 or 3 different topic-specific communities. The only things I ask is that:
1 You feel your posts are at least decent. They can be short or long, but they must be authentic and useful for people interested in the topic.
2 You upvote other content based on quality and authentic engagement. You can adjust your % upvote
3 You yourself are commenting on the posts you are upvoting out of sincere interest.
4 You are interested in the topics in Natural Medicine and plan on using the delegation to keep users at the platform and posting quality content.
Here is an example of what I'm hoping to support:
Tiny communities that need time to grow
Recently I discovered a user who has been leaving some nice comments on my posts. Their posts are about tarot.
Their posts teach people the meaning of individual tarot cards....in general they are very short. They have some quality to them, but for me most posts feel a bit too short to warrant a huge payout. Still, the user doesn’t seem to be mining rewards and seems like a very nice addition to the hive ecosystem. I am guessing their posts are short because they aren't getting many comments or votes.
If I don’t get comments or rewards, my posts get shorter too, especially if I’m engaging already.
I believe there are a lot of users that IF they feel there is a community for them OR people willing to support and encourage that community, they will stay and post more detailed posts and engage even more.
For a user like this, they may have realized how important engagement is for getting more attention on your posts, but because it's such a niche topic, not everyone is interested. I am trying to throw them a few upvotes as a push to keep at it, but to be honest, I don’t know if I am interested enough to follow every day, and I’m very busy already at hive. But if there is no Tarot community and this user doesn't feel a strong enough connected to the Hive/Lotus community, we really can't expect them to want to stay.
I want to change this by helping users in these niche topics support each other with their own efforts and my Lotus delegations. I see 
It may be much easier for this kind of community to form around Lotus token than around Hive, due to the wide variety of topics on Hive and how there aren't many big holders interested in building up these topics (or maybe they just have too many topics to support). Lotus is different.
I am personally trying to get in to Lotus and other front-end tokens early so that I can help these communities flourish and help push Natural Medicine forward to becoming one of the pioneer front-end/tokenized communities at Hive.
Getting medium-sized communities more involved and energized at Natural Medicine
Some tags like #homeedders has a decent amount of posts and engagements in their community and may find even more support at NM. I see @minismallholdings, 
If you want to post in another community on hive.blog or peakd.com or 3speak.co and are still interested in NM, this is no problem. You can still use #naturalmedicine as a tag and it will show up on the naturalmedicine.io front-end. You can still reply to comments and browse posts on the NM front-end, invest in and stake Lotus and spread the word to support the NM community and the value of the Lotus token.
Anyone mentioned here or anyone else looking to incentivize the growth of a tag through Lotus rewards, please let me know. I can't wait to delegate to a bunch of different users. I'll also be giving delegation to NM users who encourage good onboarding to NM. :-D
If you have a community that doesn’t fit on NM, you can replicate my strategy for building something on sportstalksocial, stem, the mancave, build-it, or another front-end with a relatively low priced token.