This article is all about getting started with the new Web 3.0 generation of social media sites that are gaining traction like FB once did over the then indisputable leader MySpace. The difference is, this time users are getting paid for everything they do on social media, and they cannot be banned or censored.
Yes, you can convert the free cryptocurrency you'll get for doing what you're doing on FB now, to Bitcoin. So in essence, you can get your hands on free Bitcoin without paying fiat currency for it, if you want. You missed the boat 10 years ago, don't let that happen again, okay.
First, do you need any skills or money to use these new social media goldmines? The short answer: No. The long answer: Nooooo.
Whatever you're used to do on Facebook is what you'll be doing on these social media networks that runs on blockchain code, with the difference that you're getting paid, and it is as legit as the existence of Bitcoin. Also, you won't have to fork out a dime, you just do what you do anyway on FB that made Mark Zuckerberg so unhealthy wealthy with your private data.
This article here is
- a quick and dirty overview of social media posting & blogging on the blockchain,
- an alternative to SteemIt.com, and
- why scheduling your posts are vital.
I am mainly writing this post for my friends on Facebook that I'm planning to lure away from that spy network over a month when I'm out of FB jail again. Man, the food is bad in here.
They are an intelligent bunch, all my carefully-selected friends are, but I'm going to keep this post simple, so my enemies can understand it too. All newbies, pin up your ears.
SteemIt is a decentralized blockchain. No guy with dead eyes owns it, instead all users do. Magic codes and stuff, that gives the elite a tummy ache at night because they don't know how to control their peasants on decentralized networks that cannot be censored. The minions are getting paid in currencies they cannot control, what a nightmare. (I spoke to my good friend Rothschild just this morning, he says he's eating headache tablets like candy nowadays.)
SteemIt as blockchain (and also as blogging platform) creates value, just like the Bitcoin and Ethereum and a gazillion other blockchains nowadays, and value means money. So you create value, like by saying something interesting or funny or posting a photo, and you get paid for that value in another form of value called money.
SteemIt Inc. as mother company launched its blogging platform SteemIt a handful of years ago to show people one can use the blockchain practically. And that's just one of many possible applications.
Initially, a lot of hiccups. Delays. Posts you crafted on for an hour, not wanting to manifest into pixels on a screen. Slow network. Error codes. And so on.
I was one of those then jumping ship and heading back to other traditional blogging platforms like Blogspot and WordPress and more. Nobody's got time to wait on a slow network. Luckily I kept my SteemIt account, because while I was away I apparently gained some 'Steem Power'.
When I joined around 2018, SteemIt's currency was pretty much worthless, just like Bitcoin was in 2011. Well, since then the currency Steem gained value, and it's not even debatable anymore that owning cryptocurrency will buy big homes this decade already. Or rather, bunkers, as climate change starts rearing its head.
It's a given that many more cryptocurrencies than just Bitcoin will be a goldmine for many this decade. You can carry all of it on a memory stick or even in your head, if you can remember a long number, while you flee a tsunami that washed your island away.
You can already trade Steem on major crypto-exchange platforms for Bitcoin and others, and from there into any fiat currency like dollars, euros, even South African Rand.
(To South Africans: When your very uncivil inevitable civil war breaks out this decade, owning cryptocurrency will save your refugee ass.)
Using blogging blockchain networks almost exactly like you use Facebook now, can enable you to earn enough money to let you do it as a career, while you travel to wherever you want to and when you want to. In fact, many people already do! Surf the site and see for yourself.
To my dismay, I noted that short posts of just a few words by many scribblers earned like 37 American dollars, while my lengthy posts get just 0.02 dollars. You people must work on your attention span, read the roommate agreement, Leonard.
You do enjoy talking smack on FB about politics and other people's nose hair, don't you? Well, come do it on the new Web 3.0 and get paid for it. The better you describe those horse-like bushy nose hair the guy uses to scratch the plaque out from between his two teeth, the more money you'll get for it.
SteemIt did not offer the option to schedule posts (a very important point, I'll get to it in a minute), and some other features like traditional blogging platforms do when I signed up 3 years ago. I'm not even sure if the platform does so by now, I'm barely back seven days on SteemIt after 2 years of absence. But I'm enjoying myself beyond measure anyway now.
Back at the time I joined, clever coders saw the limits of the SteemIt blogging platform — not that of the blockchain; major difference — and so they built a website on top of the SteemIt blockchain, which is exactly what blockchains are about. Creating value by creating different services, see. They called it Busy.org, and it had many more features than the SteemIt blogging platform.
Mind you, SteemIt itself could have easily implemented the same features. My guess is that the guys and gals behind SteemIt just wanted to prove a point by putting up a sustainable blogging platform and then pass on the buck while they focus on the bigger picture.
Today I decided to check out Busy.org again, because I'm after that scheduling option. Only to see the site is gone! Dead! Vrek!
Let's talk about scheduling for a second.
Why would you want to schedule a post? I mean, on Facebook you just jot down a post, hit publish, and you move on. You can do the same on SteemIt and other blogging platforms too, of course, if you value your time so little like the slave next door.
By scheduling a post to go live at a certain time later, you accomplish a very important goal: Hitting your target market.
Let's say you want to say something that you deem to be very important about the mating habits of the Brazilian flying frog, that you know only Brazilians will be interested in. If you should post it when it's 2 o'clock in Brazil, just 3 people out of 200 million potential readers will see it. That's because they are asleep that time! By the time they wake up, your post got pushed down by newer posts from other people.
But if your post should appear fresh as a daisy between 18h00 and 22h00 when people are at home and spending the most time on social media, they'll see it right there on their news feeds. Meanwhile, you typed it hours before while they were asleep, you just scheduled it to get published when your target market is online, while you yourself may be in Dreamland at the time on the other side of the planet.
Why else are you typing anything on social media, than for people — or at least for your online friends — to see it? You want to reach as many people as possible with your post, right. Especially on crypto-platforms like SteemIt and Hive, where there's money at stake. The more eyes the more action.
A very important point to remember is that your post only has 30 minutes to do its thing on social media and even on blogging platforms with a social component. After that, other posts will have pushed it down and out of sight out of mind.
The more people that gets to see your post that interests them, the more 'likes' (upvotes) and 'shares' (resteems/rehives) you'll get, and if your post gets traction, to go viral all on its own. So you either make money, or your important activism message in favor of giving flying frogs pilot licenses gets seen by more people, or both.
Timing is vital, like with most things in life.
Apart from Busy.org that is vrek now ('vrek' is the word for ‘dead’ in Afrikaans; and Afrikaners appreciate it when you ask them 'Are your parents vrek or still alive?'), I don't know of another blogging platform that runs on the SteemIt platform. Which means I'll have to be up and awake in the middle of the night to publish something on SteemIt that will then appear 6 to 9 hours earlier in America. 😁
That will only make sense to those that know different parts of the world are in different time zones.
(But be glad you're not busy dying from Covid-19 in America, because you'll be dead 12 hours before that in China. LMAO.)
An easy solution: Type in Google 'What time is it in Utopia City now', then you just compare it with the time at wherever you are, to see the difference in hours. Then you can calculate at what time your scheduled post should publish automatically, so it shows up between supper and bedtime for your target audience.
Another solution for the scheduling issue, although I still have to check it out, is to use IFTTT.com (If this than that) or Zapier to see if one can use them in some way. Buffer and other scheduling platforms may also be of help.
Okay, so by now you may be feeling there's just too many hoops and hurdles to publish on SteemIt. That's not true, but hey, perceptions are our biggest blind spot through the window of objectivity.
A great alternative to SteemIt — and superbly better than Facebook! — I discovered a month ago is Hive.io. Hive is a blockchain just like SteemIt, and the similarities are uncanny. However, Hive appears to be vastly more user-friendly, and from what I can gather it's growing like a mighty weed. And quite large already too.
Just like with the SteemIt blockchain, services and applications and websites can also be build on top of the Hive blockchain. And man, did webmasters and coders grabbed that opportunity! Last week I saw a whopping 126 different ones, of which 'only' 14 are social media sites. The rest are websites that offers totally different services, which illustrates why the decentralized blockchain will be the de facto internet this decade. The possibilities are staggering.
When you sign up through any of the sites on the Hive blockchain, you basically sign up to all of them. All free, of course, while all the many sites belong to different companies, they just all run on the same blockchain. So, one password, and you can log into any to do various different things.
Okay, not one password, but something like five, just like with SteemIt. That's the only aspect of blockchain I found a bit annoying initially, that sign-up process and understanding the role of the different, very long passwords.
So, first things first: Head over to LastPass.com, and sign up for a free account, then install their add-on into your browser. LastPass is rated one of the three best password managers on the internet, and I can recommend them. Believe me, once you land in the new Web 3.0 world of crypto and blockchain, you'll need a secure password manager to only remember one master password for LastPass itself. You will have to get into the crypto world now, you saw what happened when you refused that free Bitcoin in 2011.
The different passwords that Hive will give you each have its own role and set of permissions (just like SteemIt's many passwords.) Remember, there's money at stake here, big money. Thousands of wannabe amateur photographers (read: People with a cellphone) are right now earning 200 US dollars just for uploading an ordinary photo they took of the cat sitting like any other cat, onto SteemIt and Hive. You can see their earnings right below the photos they uploaded.
Naturally, hackers want to get to your digital piggy bank. This is why the one password you'll get and use the most (the posting one) cannot open your wallet to withdraw money from there. (You'll get a free digital wallet when you sign up with either SteemIt and Hive.) You simply keep your four other passwords safely tucked away in a secure password manager. Some of them can overrule whatever a hacker tried to do with your account, so it is quite a nifty system the blockchain developers came up with.
Also, side note: Do encrypt your list of passwords with encryption software like VeraCrypt and then upload the encrypted file to a secure cloud service like SpiderOak as well.
If you don't like LastPass for some mysterious reason, three other very good alternatives are Blur by die company Abine, KeePass, and Mozilla Firefox's Lockwise. I tested all of them extensively too out of 30, and can recommend these four. They have great apps for Android and Apple too.
Okay, you want to join Hive. Let's take a shortcut: Instead of signing up at Hive.io, make it easy on yourself and sign up through my invitation link.
One of the social media blogging sites on the Hive network is Ecency, where my link above leads to. Working through my referral link may make the sign-up and approval process easier and faster for you, while you also gets to 'feel' the site, and after sign-up to add me as a friend on there. That way I can help you with advice.
Ecency is absolutely stunning. Nice, easy, user-friendly interface, and they explain what's going on everywhere, and they offer a ton of features for from serious blogging to plain fooling around on social media. Also, scheduling of posts is available, and apps for your phone if you don't want to use your phone's browser.
Of course, after you signed up through Ecency, you'll want to explore not just the site, but the other sites on the Hive network as well. Be warned, you'll be captivated, mystified, intrigued, excited. Mark my words.
After signing up at my referral link, head over to Hive.blog then (do notice the .blog and not .io), which is almost as nice as Ecency. While Hive.io is the master site for the Hive blockchain network, Hive.BLOG is its version of SteemIt's SteemIt. And thereafter, check PeakD.com, which is yet another social media blogging platform on the Hive blockchain. Use the same posting password to log into any of them, since they're all on the same blockchain.
Whenever you post anything on anyone of them, your post will appear on all the others as well. So basically choosing a site all just depends on taste, since they all look a bit different and feel a bit different. Each also offers some features and strengths the others don't have. Posting via Ecency seems to be the easiest.
So what am I saying, that you should ditch SteemIt in favor of Hive? No no no! SteemIt has its own user base and hundreds of thousands of users, and so does Hive. You need to be on both blockchains. Get the currency of both, double your crypto.
Great thing is, you can do a post on one network, then go and copy and paste it at your account on the other network. (Which is where a password manager comes in so handy to log you in automatically.) As long as it's your own work, and you didn't steal your post from someone else, both sites are fine with you being a cross-pollinating little busy bee.
On top of earning crypto from SteemIt and Hive, you can also earn money — in fiat form, dollars and euros, that you don't even need to convert first — in various other ways on these blockchain sites. I'll do a detailed post about how to do that in a future post.
But first, let's get you signed up and familiar with the networks, then add me as a friend after you signed up to stay updated with my future posts. I'll add you back as friend then (my foes excluded!)
1. Bookmark this page first,
2. Then go open an account at LastPass.com (and open a text file on your computer too for notes and to copy the passes as back-up.) Handy tip: Make sure there's no space after any password that you copied, because the blockchain counts it as a character and will refuse to recognize your password,
3. Then sign up at Ecency via this link
4. Then sign up at SteemIt.com (or you can skip SteemIt if you want to be on the Hive platform only):
5. Thereafter, add me as friend (or hit follow when you're on my profile there), and I'll follow you back.
Let those cryptos start rolling in.
**This article first appeared on my SteemIt blog, and I may have revised and/or improved some of it here.
***If you made it all the way to here, this article must have helped or entertained you in some way. How about sharing this article to reward me for my effort in typing all these words? Won't cost you anything but a quick move of your wrist and a ‘Agh why not.’ There's some strange little icons next to each other on this page, and I'm pretty sure the ‘f’
one is nasty. But since it's not a red button, hit it anyway to see
what happens.
Here is a short list of some social media networks running on different blockchains (and they all pay you!) worthy of signing up at:
*(Right-click on a link and select ‘open in new tab’ to check them all out.)*
Ecency - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Read
Noise - kind of like Twitter
Publish0x
SteemIt
DTube - a great alternative to YouTube, and easy to download videos there without extra software.
I also switched from Google Search to PreSearch and you should definitely too. Why?
1. It delivers highly accurate, relevant search results to my queries,
2. is vastly more private without tracking,
3. has a beautiful customizable user interface,
4. and they pay me for every single search :) PreSearch is now a default installation choice on Android phones in the European Union thanks to the above.
TAGS: #howto #facebook #steemit #hive #ecency #peakd #social #media #crypto #currency #money
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