Looks like another Leo Power-Up day (LPUD) has rolled around. Let's talk about my power-up and a bit about what LeoFinance is currently doing. Some interesting things are going on. Ready to jump in? Let's go!

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I powered up 150, which I think is the minimum amount to make LPUD. A portion of that came from post payout and the rest was bought for the day. While I don't have a hope of catching up with @dagger212 at this rate, any little bit helps, eh? Maybe if you Leo folks start upvoting my Leo posts more, I'll have more Leo to power up! 😜

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I remain a little unsure of the direction of LeoFinance, but they do have a lot of interesting things in the works, two of which I'll talk about in a moment. Also, they have very kindly sponsored a poetry group I run ([Blockchain Poets](https://peakd.com/c/hive-161465/created)), and a power-up is the least I can do for the good faith they've shown me, for which I'm extremely grateful. 

Speaking of which...

## Author of the Week

If you haven't seen these, they are a series of contests LeoFinance is sponsoring in several communities, not just Blockchain Poets but many others. They ask each community to vote on a person and post for author of the week, then they upvote that post for a pretty big value, most of which goes to the winner. This effort is being headed by @anomadsoul and it is really a tremendous thing for Hive. 

One of the problems of Hive that we all know of is it's really hard to get the ball rolling for new users, and most make next to nothing for quite a while regardless of the quality of their posts. There are several curation projects around Hive that seek to help this problem, and they do a great job, but there is always room for more help. This new effort from LeoFinance is great for sharing some of the Hive wealth and helping out these users who may be writing excellent content but don't yet have the support network built up. 

They are calling this "decentralized curation" and that's a pretty good name for it. Not only that, but LeoFinance will be promoting these posts on Twitter, which will not only benefit the author of the week, but Hive in general. 

Awesome job @khaleelakzi in approving this effort and @anomadsoul for doing a great job running it!

Go read more about it in the [announcement post](https://peakd.com/ocd/@weeklytops/hive-author-of-the-week).

## Threads

Another cool thing LeoFinance has been doing lately is Threads. I know Threads has been around for awhile, but they recently gave it a new interface that really supercharged it and shown us even more clearly what they are going for with this service. 

If you like Twitter, Threads is Twitter on Hive! How cool is that? I mean we have dbuzz for short-form content and that's been fun, but with Threads we have an actual Twitter clone. One advantage of Threads over dbuzz besides the great interface is that the threads (ie "tweets") don't count as Hive posts, so you won't screw up your autovoting list or your SBI votes by using it. 

It's still in alpha so there is a ways to go, but they are making great progress. Now I still do think the biggest problem getting new users on Hive is the complexity of the key system, which is easy for most of us but incredibly difficult for non-crypto people to understand—just do the "grandma test", a test which Hive fails big time at. So we need to figure out how to solve that problem before we can expect mass adoption. That said, Threads is a huge step to attracting people to Hive. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Threads has the potential to be even more popular that the long-form content part of Hive. If that sounds like crazy talk, just look on the net in general where long-form blogging is far less popular than short-form services like Twitter or Mastodon. 

[Go use Threads now](https://alpha.leofinance.io/threads)!

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Well, we'll stop there. I don't want to sound like a LeoFinance shill. I'm not. I'm not telling anyone to ape in on Leo or anything. But I do think these two efforts are really exciting and bear watching. One benefits Hive right now and they other has pretty big potential. 



[divider]: https://images.hive.blog/0x0/https://images.ecency.com/DQmR3iwCn9yvwXDXfuNjmMX6FrjAvFfYQWgA4QRckpens1j/external_content.duckduckgo.png

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<td><img src="http://68.media.tumblr.com/9ed59bcbc3d0c81b382b0df883f91773/tumblr_inline_ni2uuza1ku1qz4uph.jpg" alt="Hi there!"></td>
<td><a href="https://hive.blog/about/@dbooster/about-david-laspina-v1-2">David LaSpina</a> is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.</td>
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