RE: Visiting Old Writings from my Past
I've actually got a HubPages site but I don't think I've visited it in ages, except to look up a couple of my old recipes. I should go check to see if any of my posts are still featured. hmm...
I've also written on Bubblews; formerly wrote posts for other people through Elance and Textbroker (hated it) - some stutter starts and stops with personal blog pages going back decades.
Though Bubblews closed down about 3 years ago, I still keep in contact with many of the writers there and I'm so frustrated that they won't give Steemit a try! I guess they feel like they'd gotten burned too badly to start on a fresh platform. Add "crypto" to that and they won't give it a second look. It's too bad.
Creating a tribe of people is HARD, especially when you're used to having a decent following and then going back to zero again.
It's one of the things that has always baffled me somewhat... this "easy come, easy go" people seem able to take, and then I realize that most of "them" don't have thousands of hours invested in creating content, so they really don't care.
I poked around on Bubblews for a while, but it just felt like too much of a spam farm, and the way the rewards system was abused pretty much caused its demise. Steemit is faring a little bit better BECAUSE it's crypto, and that's "too difficult" for many of those who would otherwise be withdrawing their earnings every time they hit 25 cents.
HubPages and epinions were the only really good sites I wrote on, long-term. And Squidoo... again, a massive mis-management of attempts by people to rape the rewards system.
Sadly the "default" assumption has to be "People will try to game and rip off the rewards" and NOT "people will try to legitimately earn rewards." Sad state of humanity, that...
But yeah, it's hard to start over from scratch.
I was a little late finding out about Bubblews but it was one of those sites where I immediately saw the writing on the wall; there was no way they could be sustainable with payouts based on revenue from ad shares, plus they were paying in USD, so the $50 I busted my ass for paid for pizza night while that same $50 could practically support a family for a month in India. Despite the spam, I managed to find a really cool core group of people and admittedly took advantage of their broken system while they were still able to pay out. I made sure to save the stories and posts worth saving.
And that segues into why Steemit appeals to me: The ability to save my work on the blockchain and, by all accounts, it will never disappear because the site went down. I am really sick of losing evergreen content! Blockchain is my solution.