Brief History
I joined hive in July 2017, so in just 3 months time I will be 5 years on this platform. Although it's fair to say I've been active for only about 3 years. From July 2017 to somewhere around June 2018, then little to no activity until I got back in April 2021. Then from April 2021 to today.
I learnt about hive after joining a literature lovers group in my university called Nwokike Literary Club. We actually met and discussed literature once every week. One of the main reasons I joined the group, apart from my love for literature and socializing with like minds, was because I knew literature groups were usually filled with writers and writing jobs/opportunities would surely be announced in the group for the benefit of the writers. Just two months or so after I joined, someone told us about hive/the-old-blockchain. This guy: 
It sounded like one of the greatest opportunities ever! I now had a place for for write-ups, an international platform and I could make some straightforward money for my write-ups too!
Something Hit Me Hard After Joining
Like many of us, I also thought that there would be many eyes on my content, that if I'm truly good (as I thought I was) I can have a lot of people reading me and loving the hell out of me.
But as time went by I found out people didn't really care much, most of us wanted to post and not really read other posts, people were more interested in content creation than in content consumption. Many of my well written topical posts had very few and sometimes zero comments or upvotes on them, as good and revolutionary as some of them were.
It was such a hard pill to swallow but this was all understandable, because:
• Making posts and running your blog is more of a natural focus on platforms like these than looking around for posts to read and engage with.
• Platforms like these attracts more of creators than consumers, people on hearing about a platform where you can earn for content are usually more interested if they are content creators or at least think they can create content.
• There's a lot of content here and all over the net and on TV battling for people's attention, so it's only natural you fail to win over attention most times and it's not like people don't have other real life engagements/work.
• Lack of a valuable upvote to give out to engagers.
I realized it was all quite normal, even I myself found out I wasn't always able to read other people's posts, enjoy and engage like I wanted them to do to mine.
So What Did I Do?
As Regards My Engagement
I decided to do better at also being a consumer, I know a lot of people get really creative and come up with great stuff on here and I've always loved to consume great stuff (I'm a literature lover, remember?), so I decided I should look around for some of it and enjoy myself, make hive somewhere I scroll around for fun the same way I scroll around other social media. Also I can get paid!
As Regards Content Creation
At first, before I came to terms with the fact that it was all natural and normal, I was getting quite discouraged, but with time I accepted it and started to find and hold on to new reasons why I should keep creating. The reasons I held on to were these simple ones:
• I love to write and create stuff. Most creative people would agree that it gives them a lot of joy to make something and have a finished piece. They'll also agree that a lot of ideas and thoughts flow into a creative person's head everyday, usually more thoughts/ideas than you can ever work on in two lifetimes and it's a painful waste to not bring them to life as frequently as you can. Hive affords me the opportunity to bring so many of these creative thoughts to life. This helps me live with myself and the weight of my creativity.
I read a lot of books, get a lot of information, insight and inspiration. There are so many things I want to talk about, so many things I want to give my perspective on, so many things I want to say in some different way, so many theories I want to explore with my creativity, too many things! Life without somewhere or someway to let myself flow would have been less bearable.
• I need these pieces I make here to speak for me a lot of times. Like while applying for a job I've given the link to my blog a lot of times. During an argument or discussion I've sent people links to things I've written here. I've also sent links to my too many humour posts to people who've complained to me of boredom or whom I wanted to have a taste of some craze.
• Honing my writing/creation skills
• I plan to write a lot of books, go into animation and movie making, many of the things I've written here would serve as material for me to add to my works or develop into something bigger.
• For posterity: I wrote my first book last year and it should be published sometime this year, posterity should not have to depend on my writing books (books usually take time and one might only be able to make really few of them in a lifetime) to benefit from whatever value I have, these blog write-ups can really go a long way.
• I still manage to make a few bucks an accumulation of which goes a long way sometimes for me.
In Conclusion
You can probably learn from what I've decided to do about my engagement and the reasons why I create content/how I look at continued creation. Maybe some of those reasons would work for you too, the last one is too obvious, I agree 😀. Expect me to keep writing and making content here on hive. Cheers!👍
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