Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!
Today is Saturday and if you follow my blog regularly, you know that Saturday was always reserved for my upvote giveaway series. For almost 4 years actually. But not anymore. I have decided to make some changes to my content here on Hive and since I have always felt responsibility towards you guys, my friends and followers, I would like to explain my motives in this post.
I had a little private conversation the other day with a very respected member of our community, someone who I personally hold in a very high esteem and consider a friend at the same time. We talked about various things and as usually, the conversation was very valuable for me. There was one thing in particular, however, that made me think about it again. A friendly reminder or observation if you will that my regular series that I host here on Hive may look like low-effort template posts to some. I thanked for this comment and said I would think about it, which I actually did. Here is what I found out about this matter. We will take a look at all 3 series that I have been hosting here.
Saturday Upvote Giveaway
Logo of my Saturday Upvote Giveaway
I came up with the idea for this series almost 4 years ago and have been hosting it until now. The purpose was to look for and reward undervalued posts. The giveaway post itself did feel like a template post indeed, I admit. The only thing that I always changed were the supported nominated posts in each round and their authors. But here comes the not so template part. I would get quite a lot of nominations in most rounds and just like I mentioned in the giveaway posts, I always made sure to read them all. I never just blindly upvoted what showed up in there. I always read the nominated posts, even though many of them, naturally, came from areas and topics that I was not interested in or experienced with. But I didn´t want to disappoint those who nominated the posts as well as those who actually wrote them.
I have got a lot of positive feedback about this giveaway from a number of people (especially newbies and little accounts) over the years, which is actually also why I kept it alive for so long, even though it was not always fun for me, especially with the deadlines and everything. It would be much easier and more comfortable for me to just spend the time that I dedicated to the giveaway by browsing and manually curating in communities and tags that I´m really interested in, without worrying about any deadlines, and it would actually be more profitable for me too because in the giveaway, I very often upvoted posts that were already several days old, meaning that my curation rewards from them were significantly lower than they would be with fresh posts.
The original idea of the giveaway was to do something good for the community and I hope that most people saw it that way. I think it was a great series and it was a pleasure to read and support many (but not all as I said) of those hundreds of posts that got nominated there over the years and I would like to say a big thank you to the contributors and participants of this series.
But for the reasons mentioned above, combined with what probably can be called a burnout, I decided to quit this series. So no more Saturday upvote giveaway here on my blog from now on but that doesn´t mean that I won´t be looking for undervalued posts anymore of course. I won´t host this official giveaway anymore but will be still happy to help out where help is needed and deserved so please feel free to hit me up in the comments under any of my posts, on Discord etc. whenever you come across an undervalued post that you think should get more support and I will be happy to check it out. Thank you ;)
Appreciate Beauty of Nature
My cover photo for one of the recent rounds
My weekly photography challenge. I have been hosting it for almost 3 years now. I remember I came up with this idea when I was stuck on the Azorean Islands during the first covid wave lockdown when appreciating the beauty of nature was really difficult and I was missing it so much... The introduction to these contest posts is always the same, it includes the rules etc. So yeah, we can talk about a template post again but I always make sure to provide my own fresh natural photo for each round with a bit of text, basically to show others what the entries should look like.
With this challenge, I don´t feel any burnout at all. As a lifelong nature lover and outdoor enthusiast, I really enjoy taking photos for this challenge most of the time and I also enjoy checking out the entries from the participants. Over the years, I must have received more than a thousand of amazing entries from many different countries, places and continents in this challenge. What also made me super happy were the comments where people said they actually started to go out to nature regularly because of this challenge :) So nice to hear that. Just like seeing individual participants engaging with each other, commenting each other´s entries etc. Very nice. I love it.
Right now it´s the winter season here in Central Europe where I´m currently based and that makes taking decent fresh natural photos much more difficult as it´s very often just dull gray everywhere out there in nature and it´s even less enjoyable to be out there photo shooting when it´s freezing or raining and you don´t feel well (actually happened to me in the last round when I was out in the forest to capture something for the challenge while my body was burning with a fever, yeah, that was not a good idea, don´t do this guys :D) but again, I don´t want to disappoint my participants so I have been doing my best to never skip a round and never cheat by using an older photo.
So yeah, hosting this challenge is not always fun either but generally speaking, I still love it and I would like to keep it alive but for some reasons, the participation in some of the last rounds was unusually low and if this trend continues, I will have to think about quitting it too I guess. But that would hurt and I hope I will not have to do it. Time will tell.
Monday Tipping Contest
Logo of my Monday Tipping Contest
My oldest series. I have been hosting it for some 4 years now. Simple rules, easy to participate. Price prediction game where the winner of each round takes five Hive as the prize. This series is still very popular and I usually get dozens of entries (guesses) in every round. The contest post is a template post, yes, but honestly, I don´t know what else should I possibly change in every round except the dates, prices and winners. As simple as the concept is, it took a long time before most participants got used to it so I would hate to change anything about it. The contest has been fun, people seem to enjoy the competition, they like to check their position in the ranking that I update after every round.
That´s also the only regular series that I share with the Leo community (because it´s about price prediction) and they never complained about it so I guess it´s fine with them. With that being said, I don´t plan to quit or change this series but if you have any suggestions as to how to improve it or make it more attractive for the participants, I would love to hear it of course.
Conclusion
As you can see, there is quite a lot "invisible" work, effort and stress behind what may look like easy, repetitive template posts. Then, there is also this constant pressure that is always related to anything regular. I mean all of these 3 series have their own deadlines for entries, their scheduled times of publishing etc. and it´s often very challenging and difficult to keep everything on time, as planned, as promised. Especially when you get unexpectedly busy in real life, when you struggle with technical problems (hello unrealiable internet connection in so many places around the world) or when you become ill.
Doing something regularly and responsibly simply takes discipline and consistency but even that, it can be still hindered by "external factors" that you cannot really influence and then it can actually get pretty frustrating. By the way, talking about frustration, I haven´t mentioned another thing that I have been dealing with in almost every single round of each of these series. Ignorance. Ignorance to read the (few simple basic) rules of the series and follow them. If you want to host a contest, just be sure there will always be someone who just don´t read the rules and submit invalid entries. Always. Yeah, this can get very frustrating too. Especially when it´s the same people ignoring the same rules over and over again. And I´m not even talking about scammers that you always have to be on the lookout for...
So this was my little (rantish) update on my regular series. I hope that now that I came with this little insight into the background of my series, people will understand that I have been hosting them because I wanted to do something for our community and not as a regular and easy way to autovotes and nice payouts. I´m sure if I just posted pictures on Liketu or something like this, I would earn more and with much less effort and stress than what I have put into these series.
In fact, quitting all of them would give me so much extra time and comfort to curate where I really want to curate, to engage where I really want to engage and to work on my own, decent posts that I have been meaning to write for so long but somehow never found the time for that. Simply put, my life on Hive would be easier without the series but as I already said, I do consider them a part of my contribution to the community and it would feel weird and kind of sad to quit them all now. But one of them is already gone and we will see what happens with the other two in future. Nothing lasts forever.
Thanks for your attention guys and please, leave an honest feedback. I would really love to know what you think about all of this. It may have a great influence on what I decide to do with my series in future. Thank you. Oh and sorry this post got so lengthy...