RE: Seis Años en Hive - Un viaje de construcción y deconstrucción

The Beginning

As I said, I won't go into much detail, but in the first days of January 2018, I learned about Steem and Steemit.com through ads on Facebook and after some thought, I decided to join as I had nothing to lose. I sent the request to create my account on January 3rd, which just happened to be the ATH of STEEM and also Bitcoin's birthday.

On January 4, 2018, my account was created in block 18,688,366 of the chain. That block was signed by @riverhead, a witness who has not been active since June 2021. I'm not sure if he was in the top 20 at the time.

Interestingly, back then, Steemit Inc, who created most of the accounts, not only gave you an initial delegation of 15 SP (Steem Power), but also gave you 0.500 coins in stake, meaning you started with 15 SP (now HP). I understand that in the early days of Steem, this amount was even higher. The delegation was automatically reduced as you earned your own SP. This took me several months.

I started alone, with no one to guide or personally help me. My "mentors" were dozens of posts I read, and initially, the frequently asked questions on steemit.com helped a lot. Now hive.blog, peakd.com, and ecency.com have their own versions, and in my opinion, they are good places to learn the basics of the chain. We also recommend this post by @victoriabsb.

What motivated me to continue was a combination of interest in learning, the discipline of self-teaching, and some incentives in my first posts. For me, this was a dream come true, and really, at that moment, as I mentioned, I didn't have any other activities, so I decided to dedicate as much time as possible to it.

In early January, Gris and I also started our relationship. That's why I say that six years ago my life changed in many ways. Since the end of December 2017, we started talking all the time and on January 8th we met for the first time after many years and decided not to waste time and become boyfriend and girlfriend that same day. Plus, Gris told me she wouldn't kiss me if we weren't dating.

Poor Gris, with all the enthusiasm I had about Steem at the time, it was almost all I talked about, and I think I bored her. At first, she didn't have much confidence in the project, partly because she didn't fully understand it and partly because she saw that I was dedicating a lot of time to it and really wasn't getting substantial results, at least at the time.

Well, the first month was very good. I remember that my posts did very well, partly because the price of the coin was very high, and consequently, the value of the votes was high. I think I earned about $150, which at that time was really good for me and motivated me a lot. I had the support of @cervantes in some of my posts, but in general, my subsequent posts didn't do very well. I had many, many posts with just a few cents, but I didn't give up.

At that time, it was not frowned upon to make a post in English and another in Spanish. Additionally, the posts were not identical.

As you can see in the following screenshot, it didn't even take a month before I started using a different interface than steemit.com. At the time, busy.org was the best interface that Steem had, until steempeak.com appeared, which is now peakd.com.

I remember the first big vote I received, which was from @dlive. At that time, it was a very popular app on Steem where you could do live broadcasts, and they had a huge delegation from Steemit Inc. The vote was only 4%, but it was worth $38. I just saw that perhaps there was also the first downvote I received.

Also, at that time, as now, the SBD (the equivalent of HBD in Steem) was not pegged. That is, it was not worth $1.00, it was much higher. This caused different problems, one of them being that you earned much less SP, and another was that the SBD stopped being printed, and in the author rewards, you only earned STEEM. In theory, this meant that you could earn quite well, but in the long run, this was bad for the chain. It's a problem that Steem still has to this day and that Hive has been able to solve with the HBD Stabilizer algorithm.

So Months and Then Years Passed

During the first two years, everything was about content creation. There was minimal participation in some projects (like @repollo), but it wasn't something that really made a difference. It wasn't until Hive was born, in March 2020, that I decided to dedicate myself fully to this, improve the quality of my publications, and where I actively sought to collaborate in the building of Hive. It was also there that I began to work formally with @TheyCallMeDan and later joined the team of @threespeak (3Speak.tv)

Acknowledgments

I want to thank all the Hivers who have collaborated with me in one way or another.

First, I want to thank @grisvisa for giving me her unconditional support and for trusting me despite the decision to dedicate myself fully to Hive seeming very risky. Also thanks to my mom, @dagmardeeke, for all the support she has given us.

I want to thank @enrique89, @dimeilaz, and @victoriabsb for being some of my first Hiver friends. With them, we organized several events for the Hispanic community in the early years of Hive's life. Without them, my participation in Hive would not have been the same. Other key collaborators have been @jonsnow1983, @samgiset, @josegrech, @desic, @edmundochauran, among many others.

Someone who has become the voice of my conscience and who throws sandals at everyone, even me, is @elizabeths14. Eli has become a very important part of @aliento and although we can sometimes disagree on some things, we have always talked things out and reached good agreements. Along with @jcrodriguez and @josecarreg, they have taught me a lot about curation on Hive, and I have learned a lot from them.

I also want to thank @noakmilo, one of the newest members of the @aliento team, and thanks to all the work he has done, we have managed to give a new life and image to the project, and we are very excited about everything that is to come. Similarly, we thank @ajolote, the mascot of Aliento, who helps us welcome new users and also comments on many of the posts shared in the community.

I am also very grateful to @ritch, with whom I founded the @HiveMexico community and who has also given me a lot of support inside and outside Hive. Likewise, I thank @shadowmyst and @gr33nm4ster, other Mexican Hivers that I have had the opportunity to meet in person and who are very cool.

Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to @theycallmedan and @starkerz for all the support and for the opportunity to collaborate with them. I have learned a lot from both of them and will continue to prepare to do a better job at 3Speak and SPK Network. I believe that without them, I possibly would not be as active in Hive, as I probably would have had to look for a job outside of Hive.

There are many more people I want to thank. For the most part, the community is great, there are some rotten apples out there, but overall, the Hive community is cool, often intense, but cool.

Our End of Year and First Days of 2024

Lastly, in this part of the post, I want to talk about what we did in the last days of 2023 and what we have done in the first days of 2024. As I mentioned in my last post, we recently moved house which was tiring, but also a new change, although I miss my parents.

Visit to Jardines de México

On December 28th, we visited a floral garden which is said to be the largest in the world, a fact I need to verify, but that's what they said. It's called "Jardines de México" and is located about an hour and a half from Mexico City. It's near the Lake of Tequesquitengo, a place I visited for the first time with Gris and her family 5 years ago.

I had heard a lot about Jardines de México, as they are in the same state where I've lived practically all my life. I knew there were various types of gardens and that it was a place where there was a lot to do, just see the flowers, plants, and enjoy the landscapes. My point is that kids might get bored because there are no mechanical games, swimming pools, or anything like that. Most of the people who go are an older audience, but something that caught my attention is that it's pet friendly, meaning you can take your dog.

It's also a place where concerts by famous artists have been held. There are several venues, some for medium-sized events and others for massive events, like the one I'll share next.

Searching a bit on the internet, and to make the ladies go crazy, I found this video of a Chayanne concert.