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Hey there friends, it’s been a while. My name is Spencer and I’ve been watching this community for almost 3 years now. I was an active member on Steem in late 2017 early 2018 and had quite a measure of success there. Since then, I’ve essentially stopped creating content on the blockchain alltogether and moved my efforts to more centralized platforms while watching the community in the shadows. (That sounds really sinister). Fast forward to this present day, I really have no idea where to start. This is my first post here on Hive and so much has changed since the last time I’ve seen you guys. My life has changed a lot, this community has changed a lot. Perhaps we should start with the fact that I’m posting on Hive, not Steem.

You bunch really did it, I’ve been keeping up with the community and all of the news surrounding Steem and Hive and I have to say I’m kind of surprised. When I think back to when my activity was slowing down on Steem, I remember the countless number of gripes I had with everything. It was a wonderful concept, a wonderful idea, with so many flaws. It seems as if it only got worse, and most recently resulted in essentially a revolution into a new fork. And that’s where Hive comes in. Being completely honest, I only recently learned about the airdrop of tokens here. The fact that everyone who had a stake in Steem now has a stake in Hive is amazing. The blockchain never ceases to amaze me. I’m excited to see where Hive goes. I believe a platform is only as strong as it’s community, so if that’s any indication it seems like Hive will be quite the force to be reckoned with.

So what about me? What’s been going on in my life? Well, for starters I have a full time job that I really love. In late 2018 I moved back to my hometown in North Carolina from New York. I started freelancing as a videographer and networking and ended up meeting a wonderful team at a startup marketing agency called Tortuga Marketing. I was initially contracted to work on various video projects but over the past year I worked my way up to being the Creative Director. Now I oversee all of our creative projects, give feedback and guidelines, and still work heavily on video projects. It’s an extremely flexible job, and I work with amazing people. I didn’t think I’d ever find a “job” I love but this definitely fits the bill.

On the social end of things, I ditched my old Instagram account of 35k followers. Well, backing up a bit I started by purging them. I wasn’t getting engagement, people weren’t interested in my stuff. To be fair, when I built that account I built it as an educational Forex niche. When I moved from Forex into photo/video, people didn’t care. So I figured purging the followers might help. I got it down to 25k and noticed almost no difference so I made a decision to start a new account from scratch. I set a goal to be as authentic, and as real as I could be. If I ever got to the point of working with brands again, I wouldn’t take brand deals I wasn’t thrilled about or for products I had no interest in. I slowly started chugging away day by day on that, each day trying to be myself and working around things I loved.

What I didn’t realize is that I was still holding back. As a child, I grew up having a keen interest in technology. Specifically computers. For me though, it always felt like a geeky thing. I didn’t think people were interested so I always tried to fit in. As an adult, photography and video was “cool”. So I always ran with that and suppressed everything else. I started to notice a community on Instagram around tech, computer setups, and electronics. I was intrigued because this was speaking to my core, something I had suppressed for so long. I started to experiment by taking pictures of my desk setup and the community responded heavily. Over the past couple of months I’ve experimented more and more with taking pictures of tech and the community responded really well. Since then I went from 300 followers, to over 4k. And my YouTube channel has also grown from around 200 subscribers to 1.1k. It’s been an incredible experience and it’s brought me a lot of joy knowing that I can be whoever I want to be. I only wish I had known that sooner.

So here I am. On a new journey in my content creation world, and working a job that I love. And all of this brings me to here, Hive. If we’re being honest, I left the community because I was frustrated and upset. It felt wrong to feel this way, after all Steem had a huge part in my success and ultimately allowed me to buy so much of the gear I own today. However it didn’t rid those frustrations I had and I chose to leave. It seems like Hive is on track to be everything Steem couldn’t be. And I’m interested. I’m invested. I want to start creating content here. Starting with this blog. I’ve always wanted to write a blog, and I figure there’s no better opportunity than here or now. I look forward to connecting with all of you again, and I hope you can understand why I was gone in the first place. I look forward to having another outlet to express myself and create content. And I look forward to seeing the community grow, and thrive as it was meant to be!

So, hello again. It’s been a while, and it’s nice to see you all 👋🏼👋🏼