Newbie Guide: Do's and Don'ts

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Recent events highlighted the need for some explanation how things work on the blockchain. The user base is growing day by day and I think it's better to help the new ones start their journey and learn.

Today I'm going to try to explain a few things that I think can create confusion. If you can't find an answer to your question, please ask me in the comment. Also if you think here's something important to add to this guide, feel free to share it in the comment section. They say a community is as strong as the weakest link, so let's help newbies in learning the ropes.

Frontends & Communities

We have a few frontends anyone can use on the hive blockchain. Frontends, or interfaces if you like are not the same as communities.

I'm going to list a few frontends you can use when posting:

So what are these frontends and how can you use them? The last two on the list are for video uploads, the rest is for normal blogging and Leofinance is only for finance and crypto related content, so only use it if your content fits these guidelines.

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Communities, or tribes are groups based on different topics. If you're new and don't have your favorite communities yet, click the link, check out the communities and see which one fits your needs.

Some of the tribes have their own tokes and those that have some value on the internal market are the most abused.

How To Pick The Best Community For Your Post?

This is the most difficult part for many as I see, but also many users are just playing the newbie card hoping to get away with abuse.

The best way to decide what community or tribe to pick for your post is to look at what the majority of your post is about. Let me give you some examples I have seen lately.

There was a post a week ago, about a market. The user visited the market, took some photos and did a post, choosing # leofinance among other tags. I care about the community, so I left a link to the guidelines and asked them to use the tag and community only for finance related topics. I got a reply from another user, arguing that the topic has a lot to do with the community as it's about the biggest market in the country and markets have a lot to do with finance, that can be read between the lines.

Well, posting a few photos about a market and writing about your visit doesn't make it qualify if you don't write about finance. That can be fit for photography or travel or whatever you want. Reading between the lines is not good enough. You have to actually write about it and make sure the majority of your post fits the profile.

Showing a photo about a bunch of coins on the ground in your actifit report doesn't qualify either.

Let me give you another example. Taking a photo about yourself dressed up in football clothes doesn't make it qualify for sports. That is photography. Just as dressing up like Ronaldo doesn't make you the best football player in the world.

Try to think about the community instead of your earning goals. Our future as a community and the value of the blockchain/token depends on what we do here. Let spam and abuse take over and you see that reflected on the price of the token. Just go look at the other chain, forked out of hive or the previous that we forked out of last year. Do we want what is going on there? I don't!

Tag Abuse

Apart from using the wrong tag to milk the reward pool, there are also those who like to list 10 - 20 tags at the bottom of their post body. This is frowned upon, it is considered tag abuse and have consequences.

The most common reaction when people are caught abusing tribe tags is to delete the tag. That helps for nothing as once the post is published, it will be visible in every community, tribe the tag was used for. The beauty of he blockchain is that you can't delete anything.

Don't Beg For Upvotes

Many users after being caught and in some cases blacklisted, go to Discord to beg for upvotes. That is the worst thing you can do! After being caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don't expect people to trust you. Trust has to be earned and after you disrespect those you have been supporting you by abusing he reward pool, you need to work hard to restore your reputation.

Keep in mind that no one owes you anything. We live in he era of entitlement, many think they deserve upvotes. Again, no one owes you anything and begging for attention makes it even worse.

Crossposting

This option is available on our blockchain o allow you share your posts in more than one community. There are no limit regulations set, but that doesn't mean you have to crosspost in every single community. So choose one community you want to share your post with, another for crossposting and that's it. Obviously this is my advice, not some rule set in stone.

Sourcing

Plagiarism is among the most common form of abuse. Copying text from the internet or translating from their native language to English and posting as theirs is happening on a daily bases. These users think they can't be caught and when they do, you see them on Discord saying it was a mistake. Let me not go into details but please note, no one believes these justifications.

Source everything that is not yours! Quotes must be sourced too by the way.

There are a couple of useful links here, please read what you can find here and learn before you get into trouble.

https://peakd.com/about/faq
https://leopedia.io/


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I agree with everything... even though sometimes I feel like some groups take the "plagiarism" rule too far.

I mean... once I was flagged because I said something like "Catherine the Great was Russia's longest-ruling female leader"...

I don't see how a public knowledge fact such as this can be considered plagiarism. It's an Historical Fact. There's no way to source it as it's pretty much impossible to find who said it first. It's a phrase you encounter in lots and lots of History Books and none of the authors felt the need to source it.

Yet, somehow... in this platform such Historical Facts can be considered plagiarism.

Even more absurd, you can protect yourself by referencing something like Wikipedia, even though according to the same logic, Wikipedia plagiarised it too. 🤣

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Flagged for one sentence? I know people who are posting quotes in every post, without sourcing them and no one cares.

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I still haven't been able to wrap my head around cross posting until now, can you explain more of that?

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It has been designed to give users the possibility to share their post in more than one community. At the beginning you could earn 5% with a crosspost, but that option got eliminated, I suppose due to abuse.

So why crossposting? When you do a post, you have the option to choose one community fr your post and the post will also appear in those communities you use the tags of. After posting, you can use the crossposting option to share it in more communities, but without getting any rewards for it. You can also crosspost posts that are not yours.

The problem is when you do it, the post appears in the feed of your followers as many times as you crosspost it. It can get annoying when you see 3 or 4 times the same post.

I've never used it and I don't think I ever will. But that's just me.

I hope I was able to clarify it for you.

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You know I'm sure you meant well in writing this. There really can't be too many guides for newbies especially ones written with some actual empathy and understanding what a confusing path Hive can be for a newbie. There's a lot to learn beginning with the idea that there isn't anyone actually in charge on the chain but there are communities where there are rules. So there's no rules but there are rules, in some areas.

I found it interesting that you used the rather abrasive line that people 'use the newbie card' like they are lying about being newbies. Then you proceed to use an example that involves two people who are actually newbies. Yes, I know who you are referring to, I was part of bringing one of them to Hive about a week ago and have met the other one.

So while you meant well, your lack of understanding what it's like for actual newbies produced a tone that does more to push them away rather than have to brave your judgmental 'help'.

Stuff like this often does more to drive off good writers than to stop the ones who just don't care and will keep doing what they are doing.

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Hello, @erikah! Thank you for giving us such examples! From my point of you the first 2-3 weeks in ecency are the hardest! As I made my profile in ecency Ive started to read. Especially posts which gives advices and examples to newbies. As I was. I have only one question - rod you know if anybody out there in the ecency can check if his own profile was blacklisted or has done something wrong.

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I can't answer that, you need to go to Discord and ask them as I'm not part of the team.

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