This may be a weird question to ask and I'm sure for many of you it'll just be regular active social media users - which is fine and great, but I'd also wanna point out some things I deem valuable when looking at certain accounts that sway me to wanna curate them more or throw more inflation their way one way or another. Thus I thought maybe writing this post and seeing what others respond with might nudge certain users in the right direction if they've either been negligent or just didn't know any better as to how they can improve their odds of earning rewards here in case they aren't.
Naturally this is quite a subjective question and the answers can vary widely as well, but I think that there's a certain extra people have to provide to the chain to be more rewarded. This doesn't mean that curation is perfect, some times you may not get rewarded even though you should and similarly some may get rewarded even though they probably shouldn't, but we can improve it if many of us come to terms on what we agree is valuable and attempt to strive for it.
When I look at regular users, the main "give" they have is usually to create content, whether short content like actifit, splinterlands battles, etc, or medium length content or longform content, that's primiarly the effort we can see that they've brought forth. Something to keep in mind however is that content in and of itself isn't that valuable if it's not bringing any eyeballs to them, of course this is also difficult to always verify, but if there's barely any users ever commenting or curating your content with (what we may distinguish to be manual votes) one can assume that the content isn't being consumed much if at all.
This is unfortunately all many curators care about at times it feels like, which causes a lot of authors to become content with the way they use hive and they fail to strive for more. Such as being active, looking for the crowd that shares the same interests as you so they can connect with you and engage with your posts as you engage with theirs. There's ton of posts that sit at $5-10+ in rewards with no consumption or proof that anyone consumed them while the authors are also barely engaging anywhere and if they do all they say is "thanks" or similarly short, low effort engagement primiarly directed at comments on their own posts, when they get them. As regular users, and by regular users I mean those without a huge voice outside of hive that could technically bring more value to the chain by advertising their presence here there, it kind of feels like they take things for granted and assume that just creating content and landing on people's autovotes/blind votes is enough and that's going to last forever. What's worse is some who really rely on the rewards on Hive do the same thing, like, if you really need the rewards this much, how are you not bothering spending a bit extra time to grow your audience? How is it that the only time you make a fuss about things is when someone eventually adjusts the rewards down a bit through downvotes, it's kind of baffling to me.
Another step would be to integrate yourself with communities and initiatives. We see many go the extra mile, there may even be some that don't even post but are generating rewards by actively engaging or participating in diverse events that attempt to bring value to the chain. If I know certain authors are also curators, helping moderate certain communities, helping out certain dapps/front-ends, etc, I'm way more likely to wanna throw votes their way than those doing the bare minimum which is posting solely.
Now a quick talk about irregular users, which we don't have many of these days, but if new ones were to join who do have an "influence" and a larger following/voice outside of hive, naturally these would easily get a lot of votes thrown their way and that's great. One thing however is when some of these don't do anything after a certain time has expired other than copypaste their content to hive to get those extra rewards along their web2 ad revenue. We've seen this happen over time many times as well, they get used to the rewards and either fail to understand why hive is different or don't bother to actually strengthen the network and "giving back" any value by attempting to bring their following over here. Which is kind of crazy considering they can easily curate and reward their following through comments and delegations if they wanted, something they can't do on web2 in any easy way, but they choose not to. Instead they choose to keep their hive presence hidden, in some cases for years upon years while getting autovotes and blind votes while the content they share here barely even gets any consumption from people here let alone outsiders since they consume it on web2. At some point we gotta put our foot down in those cases and ask them to do a bit more, but instead they finally use their voice outside of hive to talk shit about the platform cause they may receive some downvotes after years of rewards flying their way that could've rather gone to some users spending way more time and effort here, even if they're not that influential outside of hive.
Either way, without going off-track too much. Do you put more effort/time into hive other than just posting? Do you make an effort to engage or curate (even if those votes may not be worth much) as well? What other ways do you attempt to bring value to the chain that maybe curators aren't noticing or you feel should get better rewarded?
Keep in mind I'm ignoring a few things on purpose here, I don't care about users' KE score or if their content is stuff not many care about, I'm simply asking about what more they do on Hive that they feel brings value to the chain in one way or another.
and I hope that we can slowly turn the tide where users not putting in a bit more effort aren't getting freebie rewards forever as that may cause quite a harsh reality check down the line.
Thanks for reading.