Greetings, Fabulous Felines and Hoomans of Hivelandia! I hope the weekend has been treating you well!

To Follow, and to Read, on Hive!

How much attention do you pay to who you follow on Hive?

Do you just follow somebody because you read one interesting piece of theirs? Do you follow them because they seem to be really popular? Do you follow them because they seem to write about subjects you're interested in? Do you follow them because they're "powerful and influential," and you hope they will follow you back?

What criteria do you use when you decide to follow someone? Or do you even use criteria when it comes to following somebody?

As my years of using Hive have wandered by, I have increasingly come to realize that I am at least as interested in having an enjoyable experience here doing this social blogging thing — both as a content creator and as a reader — as I am in purely earning rewards and building my account.

As such, an increasingly significant part of creating that sense of "having fun on Hive" has to do with ensuring that my feed contains content that I'm actually interested in and authentically interested in looking at and reading.

Sure, I know some people just put their curation on automatic and leave it be, but I don't happen to be one of them.

Being Selective

As far as I'm concerned, it pays to be fairly picky with respect to who you follow.

After all, when you do decide to click that "follow" button it means that you're going to see that individual's posts show up on a regular basis when you look at your feed. And looking at my feed is generally my primary way of finding content I want to read... although I also visit some of the communities I belong to just to see what's new and that's how I find new people to follow... although I do so, sparingly.

Long gone are the days when I would just sit and watch all the new posts that come through. That was an approach I took in my earliest days here and whereas it's the basis for how I built my original of followers, most of whom (sadly) are no longer active.

The Importance of Keeping Current!

I also find that it is important to keep my follower base relatively current.

I primarily use PeakD as my front end to access the Hive community, and one of the things I can do there is click on my "Following" and actually see the last time somebody was active and posting.

With very few exceptions (like KNOWING someone is taking a year-long sabbatical) there's not a lot of point to having a long list of people in your following list that haven't posted in a couple of years or more!

I'm not a stickler on the time frame, though... sometimes people stop posting, but they are still out there commenting and curating — an important reminder that we need content consumers as much as we need content creators on Hive!

A handful I hang onto for purely nostalgic reasons... in the slim hope that maybe they'll return to the community, some day.

I'll finish by adding that I do not choose who to follow based on their wallet size, and hence the size of their potential upvotes. So-called "Whale Chasing" is mostly a pretty futile endeavor on Hive!

And that's about all I have to share on this particular topic. Let's keep in min that this is merely my opinion, and not some clear cut "formula" on how to do things!

Thanks for coming to visit my blog, and have a lovely week ahead!

=^..^=

Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communties!

If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?

These are some of the more active Cat Communities — why not join them ALL? Many of the allow you to share your cat posts, even if you started at a different community!

HiveCats by @curatorcat is a central "gathering place" for cat content on Hive; promoting the use of the #hivecats tag for feline content!

Cat Snaps by @manorvillemike is a place to post pictures of your cats when you don't have a whole lot to say beyond just sharing your cute photos!

Caturday by @saboin is a community where we get to celebrate posts relating to Saturday — aka "Caturday" — our own special day!

Cat Photos by @andrarchy is a "mixed use" cat content community; posts can be just photos or longer, as long as the subject is CATS!

Cats by @captainklaus (and Sissi!) is another "general" cat content community.

There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!

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