RE: Actualización de Fin de Año - Cambios en Aliento, Nuevo Enfoque en Hive, Mudanza y más

Well, that's it for the music. Now let's start with what I wanted to tell you.

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Changes in @aliento and New Focus on Hive

This is the main topic of this post, the rest will be more personal.

This last month has been a time of deep reflection for me. I believe it's been one of the most stressful years I've had with issues related to Hive, and in general, it's been the least enjoyable. I won't lie, the thought of giving it all up and starting something new from scratch crossed my mind. But I talked with Gris, my bosses (Dan and Matt), and my close friends and collaborators on Hive (Eli, Ilaz, Enrique, and Kmilo), and thought things over a bit more.

The first thing I decided was to change the way we were voting on Aliento. The way we had built the curation system didn't allow me a single day off. I couldn't be away from Discord for more than 8 or 10 hours because I had to be attentive to vote on posts before 24 hours passed.

Coupled with other things, this meant that in over three years I hadn't had a single day off. Practically since Hive's inception, there hasn't been a single day where I haven't done something related to Hive. This took its toll, and if you add the dramas that have happened, the toxic individuals in the community, Hive's technical problems, and its apps, I had enough reasons to want to step away from something that no longer gave me any satisfaction.

All this stress, fatigue, and demotivation were already causing problems with Gris and my family. But as I said, I talked it over with close people and reflected. One of the main people who made me realize I needed to change my focus on Hive was Matt (@starkerz). He's someone I've worked very closely with for 3 years, as he's the other co-founder of 3Speak. With him (and many others), I worked shoulder to shoulder to carry out HiveFest in Mexico, which was no easy challenge.

Matt was surprised that I was doing so many things on Hive. He didn't know in detail everything I was doing for curation and how active I was in different marketing and promotion efforts for Hive. In fact, returning from HiveFest, I had a problem with a community leader on Hive, and that's when he found out about all the time I invested and some of the problems I had gotten into.

Matt spoke seriously with me, was surprised that I hadn't taken a single day off in over three years, and told me I should focus more on what really builds up. He said I should stay away from drama, ignore haters, and stop doing all those activities that don't give back and that were only causing me problems at that time. To make a long story short, he told me to focus more on 3Speak, look for more ways to support the project, and consider reducing other activities.

Dan and Matt didn't want me to leave. Dan told me that I've built a good reputation in Hive and that we would find ways to solve the problems. One of these problems is the accumulation of debt. This bear market has been brutal for me. When HIVE was high, I made the mistake of buying many things on interest-free installments, with the (foolish) confidence that I could cover it because I was earning well. But as we all know, HIVE dropped a lot, and this made it impossible for me to reduce my debts and even led me to incur more.

The accumulation of debts was also one of the reasons for the stress and a lot of frustration. I'm not saying it's the main cause, but part of the debts were due to supporting projects that I now regret having supported. And one of the leaders of that project owes me a significant amount of money, and I doubt he can pay me back in full, though he swore he would. I hope I'm wrong.

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What are those aforementioned changes?

Well, that was a lot of context, but I think it's clear that I needed to make radical changes to avoid throwing away nearly 6 years of work.

The main changes are that community leaders will no longer nominate. In Aliento, we have created a team of expert curators, and now we will do the curation according to our criteria.

This was the message we sent out about two weeks ago:

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We have already tested this model since Monday, December 18th, and it has worked very well. I've been less stressed, less anxious, and have had much more free time. More time to focus on other things.

Another change I decided on was to step down from moderating Hive groups on Telegram. I have not been active in the Hive in Spanish group, nor in the Hive.io group, which was the "official" one in English. In these two groups, I had notifications turned on and often was the first to respond to questions, ban spammers, and provide general information.

Now we have decided to have a Telegram group, but for Aliento. We are much fewer, not even 70 users yet, but I think it's better this way.

This is the Telegram group: https://t.me/alientohive

Similarly, I decided to be much less active on MatterMost and even left many Discord servers and Telegram groups where I no longer wish to participate.

In summary, I decided to focus only on two projects within Hive: 3Speak and Aliento. Making this decision helped me regain motivation and love for Hive. There are still some things I dislike; I think the community can be quite toxic. Or rather, some people can be, but this shouldn't affect me so much.

There's a hater asking for me to be downvoted, even though I haven't posted for over 20 days, and this person posts daily, many of which are either low-quality or reposts. They have also been attacking many projects in a very toxic manner just because theirs didn't receive support from the DHF. They claimed they would still do it without financial support but didn't keep their word. While it's not wrong to demand results, the issue is the toxic way in which they do it, and they don't have a significant stake in Hive to act so arrogantly.

If working selflessly for Hive (meaning for free or almost nothing) is only going to bring me stress, attacks, and problems, then it's better to focus only on my projects that benefit Hive in one way or another.

Another thing I learned is that I must learn to say no. Several experiences have taught me that I can't support everyone, whether with votes, money, or time. So, from now on, I will be a little less available. I won't be online all the time and will choose much more carefully what to support and what not to. This doesn't mean I'll never support again, just that I will think it over better, try to do it more effectively, and where it's also a win-win.

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What Will I Do About the Debts?

Well, you might wonder what my plan is to get out of debt. After talking with Dan and Matt, and deciding to continue on Hive, I had to make some difficult decisions. Over the past two years, I've been accumulating assets (NFTs and tokens) in various projects within Hive. The main one is Splinterlands. In this game, I've been buying and reinvesting as much as possible. There came a point where my Splinterlands account was worth much more than my Hive account. So, to at least get out of some of my debts, I decided to sell a large part of my collection and tokens.

Some things I sold at a loss, but many others I sold at a profit. I sold about 90% of my SPS tokens and roughly 75% of my cards. I decided to keep some that I think I can sell for much more in the future. I moved the remaining cards to another account where they are safer, and currently, they are rented out in the market. Similarly, I have 10K SPS staked and delegated.

Another reason I decided to sell, besides paying off debts, is that I was spending too much time on the game. So, I think that wasn't such a bad decision from that perspective. However, in a month or two, I'll consider delegating everything back to my account (cards and SPS) to see if I can continue playing to make use of those cards and the soulbound ones I have, and maybe rent some cards to complete the teams. But I will take at least a few months off.

I believe I can rebuild my collection in Splinterlands over time. I've done it in the past. Maybe it wasn't ideal to sell now, but it was necessary.

From other games, I also decided to sell and spend less time on them. But the game I decided to keep everything I had accumulated is @HoloZing. I even bought some tokens, and currently, I have more than 150K ZING tokens staked.

I'm not 100% debt-free yet, but I'm closer to that goal. And I believe that not all debt is bad. If it's something that will help you generate more money, it's good debt.

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Moving. A New Stage in Our Lives

Finally, I want to tell you about the new stage we are experiencing. Not directly related to Hive, but everything we've experienced led us to the decision to move house and sell the house we were living in, which is not mine, but my parents', and is a house in which we have invested a lot of time, money, and affection. There are several reasons why we abandoned the dream of living in that house, as at some point the idea was to buy it from my parents.

We realized that although living there had its advantages and good things, not everything was rosy. You might have read in my posts that it was often a great source of stress, all the problems with the pool, the water issues, and also dealing with neighbors. Most of the neighbors became good friends, but there was one who decided not to pay the maintenance and currently owes more than 50,000 Mexican pesos to everyone, of which about 20,000 are owed to me.

The idea is that with the money from the sale of that house, I can advance the payment of my debts, at least a part of them, and the main idea is to use it to build and fix up the house where my parents live. We want to build a space for ourselves there and when it's ready, we'll move back. Also, the idea is to build a space here where we are now, but that will take time and we must look for more sources of income.

Where Did We Move?

We moved to another municipality within the same state called Morelos. We are about an hour and a half away from where my parents live. It's a bit far, but not as much as when we were in Guadalajara. Here we are very close to Gris's family. In fact, it is a house that belongs to them and they are lending us because no one was using it. In the last few weeks, we have been adapting and buying things that were missing. We bought a grill, a water heater, fixed the sink and the kitchen sink.

The move was somewhat heavy as we brought almost all the things we have accumulated in almost 6 years together. We have accumulated more things in the last three years. The heaviest things were the refrigerator, the bed bases, mattresses, computers, the 70-inch TV, the washing machine, video game consoles, among other things.

The advantage is that we didn't have to hire a moving company. Gris's cousin/aunt has a truck with sides where we could load everything in three trips. We also could load some things in the car. Yes, on the way we were a bit scared that the police would stop us and try to extort money.

We also brought Pumi and the cats. For now, Pumi is staying at the other house because here he could get out and at the other house is his friend Adara. But the cats are here with us. The first day they were super confused and disoriented. But little by little they have been getting used to it. The bad thing is that some windows of the house don't have glass or mosquito nets, so they can come and go as they please, and they are quite noisy.

Wera exploring:

Overall we are happy, little by little we have been adapting and although we still have some things to unpack, we are almost done.

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I was going to add here also photos of the Christmas parties and family outings we've done, but I'll leave that for another post.

The cover selfie was taken in a Japanese-style garden we visited recently. Soon Gris will share a video and I will possibly share some photos.

I love you a lot Hiver friends, well, almost all of you. I wish you the best in this upcoming year, well almost all of you, to the haters and toxic people go and listen to this song.

See you in a future post, which will probably not be until next year.

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I invite you to watch the following videos.

This is the latest episode of AlientoCast that @noakmilo and I have been doing. In this episode, in addition to the witness report, we talk about proposals and proxies. You can see the post here.