Two days ago I wrote a blog about the growing amount of Hive that is being send out through exchanges. Every week there is more Hive being powered down than powered up. That is a trend that isn't very good for the price of Hive as well as for the blockchain as a whole.

If we want Hive to become stronger, we need to stop supporting the people that extract value and support the people who add value by actively building and improving Hive.

Hive 'projects'

Hive is full of people working on projects that are started with the intention to make the platform better. Hive has quite an active community when it comes to initiatives. I've seen a lot of new tools, front ends, communities, promotional activities and other initiatives. I think these initiatives are good for Hive. It shows we are an active community and everyone can contribute to it.

Almost all of these projects operate without support from the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF). They commitment of the people running the project. They often finance a lot themselves and depend on rewards they get on their update posts.
I know from my own experience how difficult it can be to launch a project and keep it running over time.

Topcomment

About a year and a half ago I started the Topcomment curation project. The goal is simple: we reward meaningful comments because we think this is important for Hive. By doing this we hope to stimulate engagement on Hive.
The project is only possible because a group of dedicated curators spend time finding quality and upvoting them. The curators receive a very modest compensation for their work.
Delegations from the community allow us to give away nice upvotes. Without these delegations, the project would simply not exist.
At the same time we try to grow the stake of the topcomment account. We've experienced that delegations can be withdrawn at any moment. Some people leave Hive or simply need their stake for something else. If the topcomment account itself has stake, it would make the project more sustainable and less dependent on delegations.

Unfortunately, that growth is slow. This is mainly our own 'fault'. We have chosen to give back 80% of our curation rewards to our delegators as a way of thanking them for their support. This does result in more delegators, but also causes the stake of the account to grow really slow.

Another challenge is visibility. The @topcomment account itself does not publish many posts. Our focus is on curating rather than self-promotion. As a result, the weekly curation report posts don't get a lot of rewards from upvotes. Rewards we use to grow the account.

(Re)introducing the #hiveproject tag

A couple of months ago I already tried to start an initiative to support Hive related projects. I created a community called Shark Tank where project owners could pitch their projects, creating some more attention for these projects. Unfortunately the Shark Tank community never took off the way I had in mind. And I don't think I will be able to bring it back to life.

But one thing I mentioned in the announcement post of the Shark Tank community is the introduction of the #hiveproject tag.
The idea behind this tag is simple. Projects that contribute to Hive can publish updates using this tag. By using this tag, users that are interested in projects that help the development of Hive can follow this stream easily find and potentially upvote these initiatives.
Using this #hiveproject tag makes it much easier to find projects that deserve attention and support.

If you are running a Hive project and you're posting updates, feel free to start using the #hiveproject

If you like supporting projects, bookmark the #hiveproject tag by clicking the star icon in PeakD.
This will give you a shortcut under favorite topics.

Autovoting

Another way to structurally support one or more projects is to configure autovoting for the account. Autovoting is a recently added feature in the PeakD front-end.

You can enable autovoting for an account by visiting the profile page (in the case below that is @topcomment
When you click the three dots next to interactions, you can select "Add to AutoVote in the dropdown menu.
You can then configure how much, how many times a day and at what voting power you want to upvote this account.
Quite nice when you want to give some projects structural support.
It would be really beneficial for these projects.

Thank you for reading my blog!

If you're building something for Hive, start using the #hiveproject tag in your updates.

If you enjoy supporting people who contribute to Hive, bookmark the #hiveproject tag and check it regularly.

Small votes can make a big difference for community projects.

Reblogging this post will help draw attention to this hashtag!

Friendlymoose