Ha ha, well sorry for inspiring that earworm 😂

I had fun writing this poem, despite the slightly dark theme. It was fun working out how to incorporate palindromes into the verse structure, like solving a poetic puzzle. It took 5 re-writes those three lines to be able to get the palindrome in there and it make some type of sense.

> lived through code-block tales-
'better the devil you know' syndrome
echoing nascent whispers

But a worthy poetic quest 🤣

I'm glad you enjoyed the poem Carol.

Hi buddy

> the leofinance people you allude to who post a paragraph of pointless masturbation—"cub is going to the moon, I tell you"—and get a consistent $60+ in upvotes on every post.

Yeah, those particular people are what made me sell all my Leo and all my CUB, at a moderate profit, and never post on leofinance again. As long as that type of cack is allowed to perpetuate hive will never get back it's google ranking... it is as simple as that. 

What you say about whales is true enough as well. I think they're a mixed bunch, and I've certainly met one or two who are very dedicated to this platform being a success, but their is massive confusion over how to bring that about and pretty much all of them believe that the 'old way' of it being a 'blogging or <strike>quality</strike>long form content' won't work. As far as I'm concerned they couldn't be more wrong. It is a simple formula:

1) if they're willing to put in the work - *spread their vote around more evenly, ensuring that it goes to interesting, high quality and varied content.*

2) if they're unwilling to put in the work themselves - *delegate all their stake to curation guilds for a % passive return who have been successfully voting interesting, high quality and varied content for the last 4 years.*
 
It's not rocket science. and I've said all this before and be told I don't understand how it all works by people who quite frankly can't be trusted as they are on heavy-hitter autovote lists. As for those creating `isn't hive or leo great` content constantly, well some are ok writers, but repeating the same shite that no one outside of this platform has the vaguest bit of interest in drives more people away than it attracts. Cryptocurrency is a niche market, Leofinance an even smaller audience. Why are these shill posts rewarded so much? Back room deals would be my guess but I'm by no means certain of that. 

Lol and as to SEO, I know SEO. I written SEO content for commissioned website writing work for years. It makes me laugh when anyone on here writes an article about SEO for hive content as that ship has sailed. They're well intentioned, but it is a pointless exercise at this point. If more varied content of high quality was rewarded and therefor clicked, then google algos would reverse whatever automatic process has caused the low google ranking for hive as a platform. 

Anyway, it is a moot point. No one listens and I don't expect them to start. In fact I can't even be arsed with the insane amount of discussion that would come with 'the great and the good' of the hive politics crew reading and getting in the same old BS debate about it all. What is needed is a change of culture and behavior.

Thanks for reading and commenting though m8, and I'm glad you enjoyed the poem 🙂 

Hi owasco

Thanks for the follow, nice to see you. I'm glad you enjoyed the poem, all be it a little dark. By the way, I don't think that we're all doomed to be subsumed by AIs 😂 it is possible, but not likely. This poem was completely an act of sci-fi speculative fiction in ballad form. 

Love the word roboticization 😍 although I hope I never have to experience it unless it is in a cyberpunk way like I can get robot legs that mean I can jump 50 foot in the air... or more realistically a robot digestive system so that I can live a more normal life 😂

> I was just thinking of you yesterday, wondering why I never see your work, and found that I was not following you!

Well, I also took a long break from hive... nearly a year during 2020/21 before returning in lesser capacity. I basically can't put all the time in behind the scenes with communities etc. But I set myself the goal of trying to post three times a week. 

`Poetry on Monday , 'Life According to Derp' comedy blogs on Wednesday and Friday 'Postcard from the city' photographic posts.

<center><br> <p>@raj808! I sent you a slice of <strong><em>$PIZZA</em></strong> on behalf of @steevc.</p> <p>Learn more about <strong><em>$PIZZA Token</em></strong> at <a href="https://hive.pizza">hive.pizza</a> <sub>(5/10)</sub></p> </center>

Hi Steve. Yeah, this poem is a little dark. By the way, I don't think that we're all doomed to be subsumed by AIs 😂 it is possible, but not likely. This poem was completely an act of sci-fi speculative fiction in ballad form.

> As for the SEO thing, I can find some Hive results fairly high on Google, e.g. for my account name that has been used on lots of platforms and also for my village. So Hive has not been totally 'nerfed' as slobberchops might say.

Hmnnn, well I think that it is nerfed in a substantial way. In fact I'm sure of it. E.g. I know what you're saying about username, raj808 also returns good first page results. 

![Screenshot (383).png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/raj808/23tSzWXZHuXoDV2GxTLtehdWJB6csdCaQmqjpWW2ns9U8mkvHMsqMUnEfjRVgocpeyufT.png)

But how many people in the mainstream world are going to use my, or your, username to search on Google? The big problem is that genuine subject specific search terms are not returning the results that they did 2 years ago. This is a fact! 

The reason I chose 'my sibo story' as a search and example in this analysis is because it shows exactly the problem I'm talking about. SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) is the chronic gut condition I've been suffering from for over 4 years. I've been through a tone of treatments to try and heal but unfortunately none have helped. 

In regards to the SEO thing though, here is the impressions on that post on medium.

![Screenshot (385).png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/raj808/23tSzWXZGntTuXRS5kizaqoys2us3m1LXJFLRXxcSxmtx3xizjfGNeSYtzRZzfAGfzT95.png)

'My sibo story' or 'my sibo experience' or 'sibo treatments' are all very well searched terms. Because this is a relatively newly recognized condition, with a low instance of successful treatment from traditional medicine it has loads of literature, blogs and articles around alternative medicine as well as anecdotal stories online. Basically there are a tone of people around the world suffering from SIBO desperately looking for answers. That's part of why I have 1.2k views on that article on medium (1.1k from google searches), because it shows up 2nd on the first page of google search. But since my hive/steem version disappeared from 1st page google it is highly unlikely that anyone is now drawn to my hive account to read the article where it was originally published. Here is the hive version in case you want to take a look at it.

https://peakd.com/health/@raj808/my-sibo-story-part-1-what-is-sibo-and-how-it-has-effected-me

That post is comprehensive, with a lot of research, medical facts (properly sourced to research studies) about the condition and the story of my treatment up until that point, as well as some opinion about the problems I'd had with medical professionals fighting against me getting further treatment. It was written with SEO in mind, and it had a lot of knowledge and relevance for anyone with this condition. The fact that a well SEO optimized article like that can show up on page one for both platforms two years ago, and now only shows up the medium version means something has changed in how Google's algorithms categorize Hive posts. There is no other possibility as they are identical text, images, metadata etc.

> We need creative people using it as a primary location for what they do, but they need to act as pioneers.

I get that, but we had that in many people who were driven away from hive for exactly the point I made in this post - this platform becoming saturated with hive-centric content. I left for nearly a year for two reasons, first that I was getting much sicker trying to manage the community I built 'The Ink Well' which I was promoting outside hive on twitter and other creative writers groups and also I saw that despite things being a little better without bidbots etc, there was still massive circle jerks going on, and the straw that broke the camels back was watching a few real shitpost shoddy writers on leofinance getting absolute crap boosted up to $400+ in leo and $100 in hive. To be honest that doesn't sit well when you're busting your ass keeping some of the best fiction writers on hive by gaining OCD and curie vote for your community to try to retain them, yet these 3 paragraph shitposts are earning $500+ in value. And the best fiction writers left, despite getting $40-$50 payouts on their best stories thanks to me curating them to OCD and hitting them with the curie community vote. I'm pretty certain they left because rewards ain't everything, audience and peer review is what kept them here in the past. Other decent fiction writers who would read and feedback on their stories and in return they'd visit other great short stories, read and comment. But the truth is that in regards to fiction I know why their was a vibrant talented growing community of fiction writers in 2017/18, partly rewards but mainly people being drawn in by finding out about steem/hive from google and also places like reddit. I spoke to 3 very talented writers about why they left and they all said the main reason was lack of community and visibility. 

I know many people do well on hive with various types of content, but the truth is that the only ones who consistently do well are those who've been around for a long time, and/or have stake. 90% of newbies get a few of their posts hit with whale votes then nothing. But mainly what I've seen that gets me down is just no one commenting on newbies after the first 2-3 posts most. I'm not saying newbies should all get constant support, but I am pointing out one simple fact; when high quality writing across a wide range of subjects is consistently rewarded to the higher levels on here, as it was by curie and other curation guilds back in 2017/18, then the network effect is much more pronounced and the google algorithms place hive higher as there is more content with good SEO. 

There seems to be an unwritten rule around hive/steem for years that people shouldn't point out where the fault lies for most of the negative behaviors that have restricted hive's growth, but I can't bite my tongue on these types of issues 🤣 especially when they're right there in front of everyone's faces.

Anyway, it is something I'm passionate about because I see the potential in hive, but like anything else in this world nothing will ever change without challenging the status quo.

P.s. this isn't about my post rewards, I do ok and I'm happy about that, but I want to see hive do at least as well as steem was in 2017. We're around the midway point of this bull run, by this time in the last cycle the network effect was fully in effect and the token value much higher against BTC. I want to see everyone do well through the growth of the platform and token value. But circle jerks and boosting shoddy insular content ensures that only a relatively small group benefit by cornering a large part of the reward pool by having a small pool of people who get the big votes and this is compounded because they all benefit more from curation piling in on the same posts. But the token value is kept relatively suppressed as the issues with user retention and google visibility continue to get worse. 

Those are my thoughts anyway. Lol, I think this comment might be longer than the post 😂