I was initially going to talk about consistency, which is quite an important factor in the "social media" realm. It's natural that if you aren't consistent, your readers drop off after a while, but I don't think it's as bad on Hive for many reasons, one and the main one I suppose is the "algo".
The algo overlord
There's probably a pun in there I didn't come up with, but I remember when youtube's algo got "leaked" way back in the day and people started noticing that likes were really very important compared to just sharing the video around and getting views. The algo would care a lot more about likes to then take those videos and recommend it to others in relevant feeds, after other videos stopped playing, etc. And what did we get?
An era of content creators quite literally begging their viewers to like the content, frankly to the point where I personally never like any videos ever just because it was so overdone it annoyed me to no end. They knew however that this is what appeased the algo as it could mean new viewers, new subscribers, new future viewers, viewers on older videos, more engagement, more shares, more sponsorships, more adrevenue, more potential future earnings, etc.
We're now seeing some of the same things play out on twitter, where up and coming "creators" if you will, are constantly replying to any comment they get, aren't sharing links in the main tweet, etc, etc, anything to appease the current algo.
Have you noticed how the "for you" section on twitter is the default filter they show you? It's because they want their algo to be the decider in how you view your feed and where you pay attention. And if you go to the "following" filter, they only recently added the "recent" or "popular" list to that filter, so before you had to just rely on popularity of the algo of your own followers or your personalized algo, i.e. based on how often you interact with certain accounts, etc.
There was a lot of drama recently because the "crypto twitter" crowd started to notice that their reach was diminishing and it turned out that this was being done on purpose. They simply altered the algo to "nerf" reach of crypto related tweets by 70% or something.
Can you as a hiver imagine that? If you went to your feed and posts you'd like to engage with that are about Hive or other crypto were simply not there? You'd have to keep scrolling and scrolling to maybe eventually see it.
It's a bit hard to imagine the algo as hivers because the only one we have is "trending" and "hot", which is simply based on total rewards pending by the last 24h or 1h (I believe), other than that you have your personal feed which is always based on when posts were distributed. So if you're looking for a specific author you'd just have to scroll down to the timing when they usually would post and there would be their post, not hidden behind an algo or even downvotes.
On Twitter however this means a lot of different things, because these tweets can literally go hidden from sight to actual demand. It's like hiding something in hopes you forget it exists because you just don't see it that day. You may think maybe my favorite content creator didn't tweet that day but you can't be bothered to go check their profile page out as you're scrolling. Eventually this happens more and more and you may wonder what happened after some time only to notice that your content creator who kept tweeting about crypto has been receiving a fraction of views, likes and shares as they usually would. This is a sole person/team/entity deciding on the reach of the people.
What does consistency do if people can't see you?
What's worse is that we may never know exactly how these algo's work, do they hide certain users/keywords to accounts with a bigger reach more than those with smaller reaches? Do they simply censor some accounts completely if they call the CEO a dummy?
You can say what you will about freedom of speech or how on hive some times some people may not speak out because they're afraid of repercussions but at least nothing gets hidden from view here. Most people who get downvoted to 0 were never on trending anyway so it's not like they're losing out on new subscribers/followers because of that, if anything they're more likely to check out reblogs from relevant readers who wanna place attention to downvoted users because of what they're saying and their posts will always exist on your feed whether downvoted or not.
