Network strategy: one playbook, three chains

Each rail has its own audience, its own reward physics, and its own unwritten rules. Cross-posting identical text across all three is the fastest way to build a bad reputation on all three. This file is the per-rail playbook and the shared rules above it.

Shared rules (all rails)

Tags: one to five, first one is forever. The first tag is the post's permanent category on most frontends. Structure: one umbrella tag (steem / hive / blurt), one or two niche tags (programming, cryptography, tokenomics), optionally one community tag (leofinance, proofofbrain). Tag stuffing gets posts muted by community mods, and mods on these chains are humans with long memories.

Titles carry the click. Keyword near the front, curiosity without deception. "Resource credits explained like the phone plan they are" beats "A Comprehensive Guide to the RC Economic Model on Graphene Blockchains". One of those gets read.

First paragraph is the preview. Every frontend renders it in feeds. Topic plus value in two sentences, no warm-up laps.

Seven-day window, mostly. Steem and Hive pay out after seven days (Blurt settles near-instantly). Early votes compound, the first 48 hours decide most of the outcome, and editing for quality inside that window is legitimate while editing after payout is frowned upon.

Edit culture. Fix errors with a visible edit note at the bottom: "Edit, date: corrected X, the original said Y." Readers here have seen every kind of silent rewrite. The visible correction is a trust signal and it matches the house doctrine: the mistake and the fix are both public.

Never duplicate. Same topic across rails is fine and encouraged. Same text is poison. Change the title, the opener, the examples, the order. Or stagger by three days and reference the earlier post honestly. Near-duplicate bursts are how accounts get flagged as spam farms, and one account's sloppiness stains the whole fleet.

Steem

Audience: the oldest population in this ecosystem. Veterans from 2016 to 2018 who survived the fork and three bear markets. They value consistency and history, and they remember who was here when the price was high and who appeared this week.

What works: long-form with substance, nostalgia handled with respect (not exploitation), engineering and builder content, honest numbers. Smaller audience than Hive's peak, unusually loyal: a good reputation here compounds for years.

What fails: engagement bait, recycled AI slop (this audience has antibodies), anything that reads like it was written for airdrop farmers.

Tag baseline: steem + niche. Communities exist but the open feed still matters more here than on Hive.

Cadence: one strong post per account per day, morning UTC window (07:00 to 10:00 catches EU and the Asian evening, both historically strong on Steem).

Hive

Audience: the largest active content economy of the three. Strong developer pockets, a strong finance pocket (LEO), strong gaming, and the most organized communities. Downvotes exist and governance debates get heated: opinion is fine, tribalism is a reputation tax.

What works: technical depth with real measurements, finance mechanics explained plainly (the LEO crowd rewards this heavily), builder logs, honest postmortems. Hive curators actively hunt for quality newcomers because good content is their business.

Communities worth targeting (join, then post inside): leofinance for money mechanics, proofofbrain for STEM and rigorous thinking, neoxian for general high-quality content. Community posts get curated by whales who are literally paid to find good work.

Tag baseline: hive + leofinance (finance posts) or proofofbrain (technical posts) + one niche tag.

Cadence: mid-day UTC (13:00 to 16:00) overlaps EU evening and US morning, the densest voting window. Comments spread through the day.

Blurt

Audience: smaller, tighter, text-first. The structural difference that changes everything: no downvotes. Nobody can punish a post, so moderation moved to ignoring, and genuine voice is safer here than anywhere.

What works: opinion with a spine, personal essays, sharp observations, serialized content (the loyal audience follows series). Photography and art do fine but text is the native language.

What fails: the same slop that fails everywhere, plus one Blurt-specific trap: because nothing gets downvoted, spam accumulates visibly and readers learned to skip anything that reads mass-produced. Un-punishable is not un-judged.

Reward physics: faster settlement than the seven-day chains, curation dynamics differ. Public research shows meaningful curator earnings here in active periods. Measure with small consistent activity before drawing conclusions; reward curves move with network usage.

Tag baseline: blurt + niche. The first tag must be blurt or the post misses the chain's own feeds.

Cadence: evening UTC (17:00 to 20:00) historically catches the US-heavy Blurt crowd.

LEO Finance (the cross-cutting niche)

Not a chain: a community on Hive with its own token and curation engine, reachable via the leofinance tag or the hive-167922 community. For any post touching money mechanics (batch auctions, wrapped assets, tokenomics comparisons, gas economics), publishing on Hive with leofinance first is the single highest-value routing decision in this kit. Their curators specialize, vote with real weight, and finance-literate content is rarer than their appetite for it.

Fleet-wide hygiene

1. Stagger accounts. Eleven accounts posting in the same hour is a pattern, and patterns get flagged. Spread the day, vary topics per account persona.
2. Persona consistency. An account that posts photography on Monday and gas economics on Tuesday reads as compromised. Each soldier keeps its lane; cross-lane content routes through the account whose lane it fits.
3. Vote honestly. The 20 percent cap is not a suggestion. Full-weight voting on mediocre content burns voting power and trains curators to ignore you.
4. Reply to every reply for the first month. An account that answers its comments early builds the regulars who vote for everything after.
5. Log what worked. Payout per tag, per hour-slot, per format, weekly. The chains give you seven days of free A/B testing per post. Use them.