# A Neutral Take on Farming

Farming on hive usually means an attempt to maximize profit from posts by any means possible. And people go to such astonishing lengths to do just that. They will use unfair means to get votes, analyze the curator's voting pattern and exploit that and use many many accounts to increase the chance of getting votes. And this problem is not hive's own, it is quite universal—if any platform rewards for content, some people will try to exploit that. We see this on every other social media, youtube being the most obvious example. But to exploit youtube, you gotta be smart to some degree. Exploiting hive is really easy. Especially when there are a lot of ways to plagiarize, spinning articles (rewriting something with some words changed or using a tool to do it for you) and low effort multiple posts are some common ways.

This is why the abuse fighters on hive are really wary about farming and farmers. So much so, they will even tag a harmless content creator with genuine intent to create and make money off the content as a farmer if they take money out of HIVE on a regular basis. But as I see it, that shouldn't be the case. If the curation is legit, if your content is legit, so the money you get from curation is yours alone and does not belong to the HIVE community. You should be free to spend it however you wish. And cashing out shouldn't be seen as farming. Do YouTubers get called out for cashing out on their content? Do creators on any other social platform get called out for using *their* hard-earned money? Nope. They certainly don't. This also shouldn't be the case on Hive and you shouldn't be shamed for doing so or feel guilty in any way.

However, HIVE is not like other social media, and for many reasons such as this—it never will become so. Even if you are a legitimate content creator, you are supposed to get more stake on HIVE and keep the money you earn on the platform itself. It's your money alright but frozen in your account. Cashing out is frowned upon. This is the norm on Hive and all creators are supposed to go with the norm. There's a very good reason for this too, the less hive gets sold, the price of hive stays up more. Curators aren't salty without reasons. And with a larger stake, any creator will get benefitted in the long run. Perhaps more than they'd be if they cashed out immediately. I have sold a considerable number of HIVE at $0.11 because I needed the money then but I could sell it at $3+ a few days ago if I still had it. That's 30X profit right there. It needs to be said the lost opportunity still bites me in my sleep, I'm not ashamed of selling hive back then. It enabled me what I wanted to do and that is the most important thing.