A long long time ago before the advent of proper communities on Hive, there were these defacto communities that popped up here and there and were tied together via Discord chats. It was in those groups that I learned one of the lessons about Hive that I still put into practice today.
The communities back then weren't too dissimilar from the ones that are in place today. Like I said, they were more loosely formed, but they usually had a larger curation account, it was a group of like minded people, and they supported each other towards a unified goal or content.
In many cases the requirements for some of these communities were much stricter than what we see today. Some of them required you to apply and meet a certain criteria to be accepted. It wasn't as easy as clicking a "join" button like you see today.
Indeed, Hive was a much different place back then, but some of the skills and lessons from the "old days" are important to carry forward into today.
This key tip I have for you today comes from a group called the SteemEngine. Not to be confused with Hive-Engine or Steem-Engine. This group was in place long before those second layer token solutions ever existed. One of the moderators was a quite particular woman who had very specific ways she wanted content presented. She made a point of hammering that home every time you stepped a little bit outside of the lines.
I can't recall her name now and I don't even know as though she is still around on the platform, but I think people like @tattoodjay and @bigtom13 probably know who I am talking about.
That isn't to say she was a horrible person, she was actually quite lovely, she just had high expectations for the content on this chain. Content that was often tied to her community and thus a representation of what that community stood for.
The tip I am finally going to share with you here is probably the thing that she "nicked" me on the most. If we were getting graded, it wouldn't have been uncommon for me to get an "F" in this subject.
It was so backwards from all of the assumptions I had at the time that it was a hard habit to break.
I can still picture her comments to me in Discord on pretty much a daily basis:
You need to resize your images!
It seems so simple doesn't it? Yet I struggled with it time and again.
My thinking was, I have this beautiful image of a crystal clear lake that I took while I was on vacation. Why wouldn't I want that to come through as crisp and high resolution as possible. It is doing a disservice to the image to cut down the quality. I'd even argue it is a disservice to the reader not being able to see it in all its glory.
Like I said, it took a while for her point to finally sink in with me.
Even back then many people across the world were using Hive on mobile devices. Mobile devices in areas that didn't always have the best wireless or Internet service. The higher resolution image that I put in my post, the longer it is going to take that post to load for them.
Sure, they might wait it out so they can see what I have to say, but on the other hand, they might get frustrated and move on to a post that takes less time to load. Like I said, it took a long time for me wrap my head around this. I don't honestly know why because it makes so much sense now.
It worked though, and to this day, I still resize pretty much all of my photos before I post them into Hive. You would be surprised how much cutting a photo from 4 MB to 400k makes a difference in load time and doesn't really cut down the quality as much as you would think.
I use a free program called Irfanview. I have been using it for decades now and it is super powerful and just as functional as it was the first day I installed it. It even has batch operations so if I want to mass resize a bunch of photos from my last vacation I can do that quite easily. I have found that using a 40% ratio for downsizing your photos is a good sweet spot. It doesn't distort them too much, but it still keeps the size small enough to allow them to load well. It seems like that 200k to 600k range is a great place to be in terms of file size.
You might be thinking, I read through all of that and this is the piece of advice? I get it, it seems to simple to carry so much weight, but that's it. You would be shocked how much of a difference it can make. I can only guess at the number of people who have decided to stick around to read my blog because the images loaded so quickly.
There probably isn't even a way to quantify it, but the if you think about it, I think you will realize it makes a lot of sense. It was one of the first things that I shared with @iikrypticsii when I got him started on Hive. He has been busy lately with college coursework, but you better believe when he writes a post he resizes his images before he posts them.
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. Keep up the fantastic work
