Back to Engagement : Cross Culture Questions (CCQ#1)

If you have paid any attention to my blog over the past few years, you may have noticed a pattern; a kind of back and forth. I am constantly experimenting with ways to balance Hive with the rest of my life, my work, my other projects, and my habits.

The goal is to make my Hive life a seamless part of my day that doesn't take away from anything else that I may be busy with but that still makes other think or smile, and to share any inspiration I have, get closer with all the friends I make here, and continue to expand the awesome circle of awesome people that I interact with on a regular basis here.

I don't want it to feel like work. At the same time, I don't want to milk rewards or share anything shallow or uninspired.

My early days at Hive were sharing fiction that got a high payout but little engagement. I need good comments or I get bored.

I've joined prompts and written original essays on a wide variety of topics and found that while I like the latter much more, it's also incredibly time consuming and I like to share something every day. It's a kind of ritual for me already.

I did a lot of stream of consciousness writing and while those were fun, they alienated a lot of people because sometimes they end up being self indulgent and repetitive.

I've launched projects such as the Deadpost Initiative and Cross Culture that have had some level of success in encouraging the kind of content that I want to read and engage with and connecting friends from different backgrounds. The former was way too labor-intense for me to continue, and the latter, while I'd like to do more with, is something that I haven't pushed too hard because I don't want to burn myself out.

I've recently started vlogging more and while I was really happy with the initial response, apparently a vlog a day is too much for most of my friends here. I am too random in the topics I cover and too busy to always reciprocate to guarantee a level of engagement on my vlogs that I'm really happy with.

I don't know why but 5-10 comments per post and a $10-20 payout are the bar that I set, naturally without much though for how I measure a post as a success. I am not trying to maximize my rewards but it feels good to know that I have been deemed worthy of that much of the reward pool and that I can grow my stake to support more great people.

The comments motivate me more than anything though.

I often feel guilty about not reading others work nearly as much as I write and respond to comments on my own work, but a friend tried reassuring me by saying that if someone is to create a profound amount of output, then they can't concern themselves with reciprocating every single thing. Doing your best is enough. I am someone who has a whole lot of things I want to share, so I can only do my best to balance input and output.

That's one of the reasons I don't want to make posts that feel like work, because the easier they are to produce, the more time and energy I have to check out the work of others.

I've said it many times before but I previously hoped to become someone like Hive account@tarazkp at Hive, someone who draws in lots of readers and consistently shows up at the top of the Engagement League. I still aspire to that, but recently I've been thinking back to the initiatives I have started and those I gave up on and thinking about people like Hive account@snook and Hive account@dreemsteem as two other Hive role models.

I'm inspired by the success that Hive account@starstrings01 has had through the initiatives he organized, I mean I basically mentored the guy when he was new here and now he could be mentoring me. He is totally smashing it in keeping people engage and in onboarding (at least whenever he isn't too busy with school/work).

While I am happy with the level of influence that I've had on this platform despite being far from one of it's biggest investors and never really cracking in to the "inner circle" (there is no NFT based on me 🙃), I want to keep looking for better ways to balance.

I've been thinking of getting back to making some casual prompts at least once or twice a month for Cross Culture. They will be based on topics that I want to write about or want to learn about from you. Since I'm still writing two books, trying to set up a business, and studying various things, I want to make sure I'm interested enough to keep it going. For that reason, I need to keep it causal, irregular, and low pressure.

Some prompts will be very clearly related to language and culture and some will be a bit more about getting to know each other better. I'll use this account to announce the topics/prompts, and I won't be making any kind of curation post, or prize pool just a tag that people can find other submissions and I'll drop a vote from my account or from Hive account@crossculture on the best responses.

In addition, I am going to make a point to pay more attention to the initiatives made by the people I mentioned above as well as the weekly or bi-weekly prompts by Hive account@trucklife-family and Hive account@ecoalex, two people at Hive who I don't give nearly as much love as I would like to, and continue contributing to Hive account@cabelindsay's Open Mic community.

I am kind of a lone wolf who likes to create based on however I'm feeling at any given moment, but in the end, it's the relationships that keep me here so I feel it's probably best for me to get back to filling that role as a community organizer, even if I am going to be casual and undisciplined with it.

I also want to support these other initiatives that give people more of a sense of community and chances to get to know each other in more casual posts. Not everything of value has to be a well-thought-out essay that takes hours to write.

These prompts may not all be the same. Sometimes I will ask a single question, sometimes a set of 3-10 questions. Sometimes there will be a task to complete. Sometimes there will be a theme. Sometimes it will be random

As an experiment, let me drop the first prompt and we will see how it goes nuzzled into a long post like this…

Here is the first prompt:

Cross Culture Questions 1

1 What is something that you learned about the world from being on Hive?

2 What is something that you learned about yourself from being on Hive?

3 What are the cultural demographics of your hive relationships

(20% Nigerian, 30% Western European, including Dutch German, etc. )

4 What are the other demographics of your close relationships at Hive?

(hobbies, personality types, communities)

5 Which friend from Hive has taught you the most about another culture?

6 How did you find your favorite people at Hive?

7 Have you had any confusion, difficulty or surprise when talking to someone from another culture on Hive?

8 What community would you like to see grow at Hove?

Rules Suggestions for the prompts

Use the tag #CCQ (for Cross Culture Question). This makes it easy for others to find your responses
Post in the Cross Culture Community
Go deep, tell us something real. Have fun. Engage

That's it.

🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎