Hacking via the edit

A bit over a week ago, I posted some Lightroom mobile edits of pictures of my wife I had made, using some pretty harsh masking elements, where I took the exposure down to zero as well as a few other things, to create very strong shadows. When it comes to editing, I generally aim to make the picture more as I saw it, rather than as I captured it, but being able to create images "for occasion" makes them more versatile.

Hive account@apsu, who is a Finnish person and as such, is never happy with anything, at all, ever, commented how he didn't like the edits so much, but one or two of them did work. I am actually of the same mind, but not liking the result, doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried again - so I did, to see if I could create something that perhaps Hive account@apsu will like, as I live to please him.

Lately, I have been raising the shadows of most of my images, so I added two versions, one with lifted shadows and one without, and a third with color, just for giggles.

The image itself was taken in Belgrade, Serbia on a work trip and was the very last image taken before my camera battery died. My hotel was out of the city a few kilometers and I had taken a taxi in for my last few hours before having to depart, but when I needed to get back to the hotel, a strike meant all the taxis were off the meter and I literally had to run for about 5 kilometers with my camera and a laptop bag over my shoulder.

About 500 meters from the hotel, I came across this fine beast who stared me down with a look that could kill - before coming over for a pat and then wanted to follow me the rest of the way. I felt really bad for the dog, but it had a collar and was in good condition, so I hope it was just out for a walk and it was free to roam.

So, the edits are a gradient mask done in Lightroom to take all the light out from the sides, as well as a heavy crop to make it more dramatic. I like the slices of light in images and some might notice that in a lot of my street photography, I look for something to break the image into more distinctive parts, in order to draw the viewer to investigate a little more.

As I have said before, I use my own photos as it makes it more personal and valuable for me, plus it puts more of me into my posts. But, there is more to it than that, as while a picture may tell a thousand words, that is only true when people stop and look at the image itself. If an image isn't bold enough or have features to attract and draw the viewer into its folds, it just gets scrolled by without troubling the scorers.

I believe that this is more important than many might give credit, as being able to slow the speed of consumption of the viewer down, there is the chance to create some space for more thought to creep in. With the high rate of informational flow, most people don't actually think that much about what they are consuming because before they have the chance, the next piece of content is drawing their attention in another direction.

On top of this, there is another factor that many people might not consider that is important for advertising, time on site. This is how long a person spend on a website or page of a website and seconds matter. I wonder what this metric would look like across user accounts on Hive, where some content is sped through in seconds, but something like what I write might attract a smaller audience, but it is an audience that is willing to spend up to 10 minutes reading, a few more thinking and then several more writing a decent response.

I suspect that some of my audience might spend near 30 minutes a day engaging with my content and often, they will then spin some content off from it too, as it has engaged their mind to invest time and effort into something that they now value in some way, even if it is a rebuttal of some kind. This time spent and spinoff thoughts don't factor into any of my metrics on the site, but they are valuable in regards to engagement and retention of users. Sure, there have been a lot of people who have left Hive, but I also have people commenting often who have been around here since the beginning - interesting, eh?

I find it interesting from a social perspective as often there are some accounts that are able to attract a lot of engagement, but it tends to be for short periods of time and often centers around drama. This is good and valuable for the platform, but in general, these people will burnout emotionally and their followers will drop off quite quickly, as they are engaged by the next piece of drama on offer. People who create a lot of drama often find that they get less able to generate it the more they do, as the audience becomes desensitized to it. However, engage people's minds or their sense of humor, not just their emotional response to love and outrage, and they will keep coming back for more.

One of the interesting things about Hive is that audience size doesn't matter as much as who that audience is. Yes, this is true for stake and vote values of course, but it is also true for the level and quality of engagement, something that is a huge factor in retention. I think that a persons ability to connect with the community to the point that they are able to have open and honest conversations is a vital factor in them staying long-term.

On other platform, monetization matters on numbers, which incentivizes and creates a market for buying followers in order to "trick" the algorithms into thinking an account is popular. While this is also an important metric in many respects, the truth is that things can be very valuable without having mass appeal, like the opera. What matters is who is attracted. A lot of the world is now driven by volume alone and this encourages the grind to be for building followership, not quality of content. I believe that this is a social hack performed by the platforms themselves in order to piggy back the distribution of their platform on users wanting to gain attention.

By the way, here is the original photo.

A little different.

Which of the four images do you like the best and why?

So, while you might have come into a photography post and even spent some time looking at the images along the way, maybe you also spent some time thinking about how engagement works on Hive and how there are more forms of it than just comments. Time itself is an engagement factor, even if the person never says a word - so is the development of spinoff content.

You might have also though a bit more about the variations of what is valuable content on the platform, where in some instances, a lot of shares and viewers is ideal, but in others, it might not take that many for the value for the site to add up. For example, How many consumers would it take for a DBuzz post to rack up 100 minutes of time on site and how many for a post such as this? This might not matter at this point of the game, but that doesn't mean it won't later.

There we have it - what did you think Hive account@apsu - does this edit make more sense?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]

I like the lifted version as it gives the sense of it being a pencil drawing. The color one is also quite nice.