Greetings, Fabulous Felines and Hoomans of Hivelandia and surrounding communities! I hope this week has gotten off to a good start for you!

I was actually intending to write about something completely different, but as I was looking around our community earlier — and checking my own posts as well — it struck me that the number of comments on posts seems to have fallen off a good bit over the past few years.

Or maybe it's been longer than that...

I remember a time when we even had an active ENGAGE token on Hive-Engine, and and there was an active @misterengagement account.

The reason I started thinking about all this, is the fact that I come across so many really nice pieces of content that have barely one or two comments and when they do? It's often just some automated response from a tipping token service.

We can bill ourselves as a "social content community to our hearts' content, but that's going to be a tough sell if most people aren't being very social!

I'm willing to entertain the idea that maybe part of the problem is that the price of Hive has been pretty low for a while, which means a greater percentage of Hive's community members don't have sufficient Hive Power to upvote good comments beyond the "Dust Threshold."

But I'm not even sure we have a dust threshold anymore. Didn't that get taken away in a relatively recent hard fork?

Don't get me wrong, I know there are a fair number of users who have strong followings and get considerable engagement on their posts which leads me to another observation.

This may sound painfully obvious, but if you want engagement on your posts, it's a good idea to create engaging content!

In all fairness, a lack of engagement on content is not a problem that is unique to Hive.

I spent many years as a blogger on various other platforms, and getting people to interact and leave a comment was always a considerable challenge. But a good starting point — if all else fails — is to simply end your posts with a question, or a series or questions... or even just by openly inviting people to leave comments.

Again, that might seem painfully obvious to most and there are probably some who are reading this who will say something like "if people feel like leaving comments they will leave comments!"

Experience tells me that's not always true. A lot of times people actually need "permission" — so to speak — to take an action. It's one of the reasons (for example) that such things as contests and "engagement challenges" work rather well: The "expected action" is clearly spelled out.

I also know it's tempting to fall into "habits and grooves" where you only read the feed of those whose content you have been following for years.

I totally get that, and I'm guilty of that as well.

But if we're hoping to really make Hive and her many communities grow, engagement must also grow... a thriving and dynamic community looks more appealing to the world than a sleepy one!

Of course, there *are some bright spots; high levels of engagement within certain communities on Hive, and that's great... we just need it to spread!

Thanks for stopping by — I do appreciate your support!

=^..^=

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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