It doesn't have to be a rewards pool to reward your users. That's obviously 1 model that I think works pretty well. But there's also other ways. And that's my 2nd point is actually today, November 1st, we're launching something we're calling the evergreens reward contract, which essentially we've got ads on in Leo and we take a percentage of that ad revenue And then pay it back to the authors based on how much impressions their articles have gotten in the past 30 days.
I think there's a ton of different ways to actually reward people on Hive. I don't think it has to come from a rewards pool. Obviously that's a very efficient way to do it and it's a great way to spread stake. I think Hive has spread the stake pretty wide, and, I don't personally see why you need that rewards pool anymore but like I said, I still think there's value in it, so I would also be in favor of having something that kind of tapers off over time and, either a small rewards pool or no rewards pool in say 5, 10 years time I think is not a crazy thing to ask for especially because I just think there's so many different ways for front ends to monetize the user base and give that back to users.
I would add something random to your research and just to echo what Elmer and Khal said which I fully agree with both approaches.
But I will explore as well, How would these affect the governance and witnesses and all of the dynamic aspects of having a reward pool, for example, right now people can have a say in governance by creating value through content creation, but if we remove rewards, how would this affect the governance? Would it be a pay to pay to have a say, maybe as Elmer said, if you want a voice you have to invest, but on the other side, theycallmedan, I will try to emulate what he would say something around the lines of, The more that we spread the token, the stronger the blockchain is, and the more decentralized the decisions will be, so if you have to buy a token, then you're pretty much becoming any other blockchain and any other kind of governance where only money speaks.
I don't know if this is a good thing. I don't know if it's a bad thing. I would just take it into account because right now, every single person who has value or who provides value to the blockchain, on every single way, they can have a way to speak up.
Jarvie:
I have to go here pretty soon, so I wanted to jump in real quick, Nathan. I'll but Khal, I loved what you had to say. And then Eric, yes, with the governance would be the big... Issue right now, right?
Like how do you get the people that are coming in? So we all hope that the people that are in now are much smaller group than what could potentially come in here. And we want them to have a say in the governance and be decentralized, but in other blockchains, the amount that they give out goes down over time, but Bitcoin does go down.
And I'm open to this concept from the PeakD perspective, if that's what you're asking, Rondon, of it going down and lessening. But you also indicated that one of the big problems was the experience from a new user and the concept of downvote. I think from the UI perspective, what I've thought about in the past is kind of switching the, there's certain things that a UI can do to help someone as they post, help educate them that this is what's happening. You are putting your post onto a blockchain, and if you click this button, you are saying, I would like it to go to a community vote. Where people have a yes and no, obviously you're not going to say all of this, but is there a way that you can do this in the UI to say that?
And I often say to people in my Discord, it's you can post it and decline rewards, you don't have to be involved in this reward pool mechanism. That is totally optional. And no one ever considers it optional huh?
You have a controversial article or you have something where maybe it's borderline. It looks like you're trying, you're just robotically putting up posts and it's still something that maybe has value to a small group, but it's it's, it's going to get down voted and just decline rewards or send them to the DAO you can still do that. It's a little bit also what Khal said we should shift the idea now towards getting viewership. That's what all these other communities or other platforms are mostly about is how much influence that often means how many views do you get.
Everyone comes in here looking for, not everyone, but there's so many people coming and looking for money. If we can shift them towards looking for viewership and readership, then they'll look at it way differently. So I, there's definitely people that come in and it's how are you, how do I get successful up in, on Hive?
And I was like, where have you shared your post? Who's your community? How many followers? How many people love to read your posts and just like going down that road and I know that all that they really care about is how much money that they're going to get from the post, but it's just We just need to shift that viewpoint.
I've had thoughts of switching PeakD to this that you have to opt into it or when you opt in it tells them hey, these are some of the things that are going to happen now that you've opted in. anD so now you know there could be downvotes and you don't have to do this.
I don't know, Rondon, those are some of my thoughts.
Rondon:
There's going to be a lot of this stuff that's covered in the post, but this is such a complex topic.
I've been thinking about it for well over a year. There is a lot of pieces to this and like I understand. Oh, there's a lot of nuance that goes on with what all this stuff, what all is going to happen by removing the reward pool. This is something that's been around since the inception of this blockchain.
It's a dramatic. It's dramatic. Giant move. So there's a lot of, but I just really mostly I'm concerned about right now the impact to the front ends, because that's really one of the blind spots I have as far as what kind of plans? What kind of visions? Everybody individually has.
And there, is this going to pull off the road from underneath you? You guys have spent hours and, countless hours and tons of money to make a vision happen with the understanding that there's a reward pool there. If that was to be pulled out from underneath your feet, are you going to be left standing or is it going to completely devastate you as a, as a company or an entity?
Jarvie:
Let's do a town hall just on this subject. That's what I have to say about it.
Khal:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Rondon:
Expect maybe another month before I get the post up. I got insane. I was going to do it for a while for a little bit now. And it is something that's burning a hole in my pocket, so to speak.
So maybe a month from now we can do that.
moderator:
Yeah. A hundred percent. We have one schedule, the town halls we're supposed to be going to happen every first of the month. So we can definitely plan this for December, 100%. How Daryl rolls? What's up, man?
Daryll:
In the current state if we lost the reward pool, SkateHive would die. We've been trying for several years to try to get our own token created, the Stoken.
We've had plans about this, and as someone who's not... Super technical. I'm a skateboarder, I'm a community organizer. Crypto just happens to be where I landed, because I know technology better than the average person, but I still don't know…
Vlad:
For me as well, it's a great opportunity. I had a lot of fun this year. From end runners here. I'M from Brazil and I knew Hive like some years ago in the beginning of my blockchain journey, and I was never a coder. I'm basically like learn how to code, trying to create this Hive front end platform called skatehiveapp.
So it's in, it's very beginning, and I will quote someone that said here that I think it's a good idea that work on inches. And I think that's what we're doing. Not everyone needs to understand how a car works, most people just need to ride the car and those are like the basic stuff.
We're trying to make a very good looking car for a skateboarder. Something that like he understands and can board people. And I think that's a great experiment because it's a different niche. Not not necessarily like tech natives, natives people. And as you said, I'm literally like from a garage trying to pull out this.
We were on the community for a long time, and I want to take this opportunity first of all on a more specific topic. We just created the ability of uploading videos into the platform to the IPFS and stuff. We have a gateway, and I love to connect and know what you have to do, the security measures you have to have, so we can have our videos in other, showing up in other front ends.
I'm sorry about the noise in the background. I look forward to having posts that come from SkateHive app to display properly there. In parallel, we are working on the upload to 3Speak feature. It's being tested and worked. We're going to be implementing that soon from the Skate Hive to 3Speak.
And we'd love their posts to look good in the other front ends. And in a more general way as this is like our situations, the circumstances, we do that with zero money zero skills, but much love that got us. To that point that you've managed to have a platform, I'm here also to ask for any help or developers that are interested in helping our open source project or hive users to test it and feedback is a little buggy so far, but it's functional.
You can make a post. You can see posts and votes. We look forward to bringing other features. Would be amazing to have something skateboarding related activity feature. We could help each other to onboard people like a feature. Or anything like that. In any case we are SkateHive, we are still here. We're gonna be here for a while, rewards pool or not. Although it's one of the main selling points for the new user that knows nothing about the blockchain. Please visit our front end. We got a shoutout for PinatuCrew yesterday. It made us cry, almost. And also thanks a lot for all people that helps us in the 3speed discord and hive keychain discord dev chat.
And with all the patience you guys have for our stupid questions we made in the beginning. And yeah, if you're interested in testing, posting, developing, helping us understand iframes to work during the other frontends and the next steps, we'd love that. And thanks for the opportunity of speaking to you.
Nathan:
Yeah, so I just wanted to touch on the reward pool issue and then also the downvotes and upvotes, it's been quite contentious issue on Hive for as long as I can remember, all the way back to early Steem days and I I see both sides of it.
I fear that removing the reward pool could negatively impact the economics and governance of Hive. I know a lot of people who. Have large stakes of hype for their voting rights for being able to have the voting power to vote on things. I think that there definitely needs to be a bigger conversation and a more open conversation around upvotes and downvotes. Some different things that I've had conversations with different members of the community about is doing some kind of jury system and having a clear policy of what we're going to support as being downvoted things like plagiarism or content that we don't, want on hive or is spammy or fraud or, there, there needs to be a clear policy. And not just people downvoting out of spite or out of hate and if the downvotes are not justified, that there's some kind of system in place where the person who downvoted that content could be penalized and then it'd be like just going through on Facebook and just flagging everyone's posts as inappropriate is like just to get them banned off of, social media, like mass flagging content, the same issue that we have with downvotes, I would say 95 percent of downvotes are justified downvotes but it's that 5 percent of downvotes that drive valued members of the community away and also gives a bad impression to new members of the platform.
And on Dbuzz, we don't even show downvotes because I feel like it does negatively impact the psychological side of people using it while I understand the need for downvotes, I think that there just needs to be a bigger conversation around the mechanics of the downvote system and what other mechanisms we can put in place to counteract downvote abuse.
moderator:
Uyobong asked: When will we have seamless tools to help non technical users be able to build dApps on Hive? I believe the more apps that are built on Hive and are solving problems, the easier it would be to retain users.
I think I can answer that one, and if anybody else wants to chime in. When someone builds it, when someone builds the tooling maybe a project builds the tooling for more non technical users to be able to build dApps on Hive. Maybe anybody else wants to answer that as well, but I think that pretty much covers it.
Vlad:
We had the Ecency community breakaway community thing being updated for something that you click some buttons and deploy a community on Hive. That's been, like, continuously improving with time, and I think now it got to the point that it's the easiest that it got so far. I think there's still some work there for Clicking and deploying to be, but I think we're very close to something really good.
Chris:
I think the 3Speak team is already doing this with breakaway communities using the Ascensi front end, and I haven't really used it lately, but Dbuzz, we're also planning in 2024 to make it similar to WordPress, where Hive can someday be seen as a WordPress of social media.
And DBuzz would be a theme. That's one of the things I presented in Rosarito, Mexico. And that's one of the things I'm planning on. And I suspect strongly that DBuzz won't be the only one doing this. That once the idea takes hold, every single front end of Credit will probably be adding custom domains to their service.
moderator:
Another question that actually came from Twitter and whoever wants to jump into this can. It's a longer question. It's from E Podcaster. She says, I've noticed the trend of dApps following the DBuzz model of microblogging. Makes sense because CryptoTwitterX is so successful. Are we able to add new features without losing existing features or users? I think is the general question there. Anyone want to take that one?
Khal:
I think when it comes to building out new features, you have this kind of nuanced stance that you have to play because... A lot of times, if you stack a bunch of features on top of your existing UI, it starts to get jumbled together.
Which is a big reason why, over the years, we've basically created three or four different UIs from scratch. Because once you start layering on, layering in all these features. You get this kind of spaghetti mess of code if it doesn't all work seamlessly. I think the real key is to create MVPs of different features that you want to release.
For example, like when we went after creating threads so that people could make, a hundred or a thousand, different microblogs on the chain every day. We went through a bunch of different models trying to figure out how we could do it. And then ultimately, when we found a little bit of product market fit, that's when we took it home and put more effort into it.
I think the way to do it without losing users and without, losing what you've previously built is really to taste and try a bunch of different things. And then when you catch a little product market fit start putting some more effort into it.
Chris:
For DBuzz, what my vision is in order to add new products and services, is that D Buzz will always be a micro blogging platform, first and foremost, and that won't change. But we will have sub features, such as a long form version that we're going to roll out.
But it's got to be minimalistic enough where the advanced features Aren't in your face and distracting and ruining the micro blogging platform that way that people who are interested in using all the extra features they can, but the people who are there for our original use case, which is micro blogging deep buzz will be there and it will be emphasized.
moderator:
Another question from threads. And this is a general question from Tommy Ajax: How do you guys deal with competition amongst yourselves, because it seems Threads is doing the same as Waves and blah, blah, blah, but like, how do you deal with that?
Nathan:
Yeah, I will just answer that. I don't really see any of the other dApps even, ones that are, like, Leo Threads, which is also doing microblogging as a competitor, I assume more as a partner in the sense that we're all on Hive and the idea is that we, grow the Hive ecosystem.
I don't think that any of us have, hit that, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands to millions of users where, then it, there, there may be some competition there amongst us, we're all still, in that growing phase of getting there. So for me I don't really see, it as a competition.
I see it all more as like a group effort to grow the entire Hive ecosystem.
Khal:
I agree with Nathan. I think a lot of people like to, and you see this across society, in so many different ways, but people love to pit other people up against each other. It's fun public banter but at the end of the day and, this was a big thing at Hivefest when we all met up and I saw a lot of the people on this panel, we all have this collective mission and collective vision about what the world should look like.
That's why we're all here on Hive and building. So at the end of the day, we're all partners in growing this ecosystem. And another thing to echo on Nathan is that none of us have hit mass adoption. It's not like we're like Facebook versus Twitter. We're all at the point of, we've got maybe a couple hundred or a couple thousand users and there's billions of people out there who use social media today. We have not even a drip, a drop in the ocean. In terms of the individual adoption that each of us has.
At the end of the day, are we gonna be competing for the tiny little user pool that's here now?
Or are we gonna be going outside of this space and looking at what's out there and trying to bring people in? So yeah, I don't see it as a competition. And I think when you use a different UI, and I've spoken to a lot of different people that use this, the Hive blockchain in, in different ways.
Each UI has a very unique experience to it. If you want to do very hive centric things. There's no better UI than PeakD in my opinion but if you want to, if you want to micro blog and have a certain experience, Dbuzz and Leo threads, like they each even have their own unique feeling when you're using them.
In my opinion it's really about just building what we individually see as our vision, but, at a broader level, we're all headed in the same direction.
Chris:
I was just going to say that due to the fact that Leo finance or Leo threads now called in Leo and D bus are so similar yet. I think it's very clear that Leo finance is one of their biggest strengths. Is the online community reaching out to web to using things like discord and these Twitter spaces, but our strengths at the buzz where we're more focused on software development and in real life events, especially because you could gather really large crowds in the Philippines.
And I'd be interested in finding some sort of synergy so that we wouldn't have to, do the do. Double the work because if we're doing a software development and then Leo Finance also has this software development And we're all doing the same work twice It might be beneficial someday to not only collaborate but synergize so that more can get done.
@taskmaster4450 (Town Hall):
Hi, everybody I just wanted to jump in and take the question on about competition and I think it's very important that people understand the shift in mindset that has to take place and what Cal said is absolutely correct. We live in a world where competitions fostered in us from an early age.
And 1 thing that I look at hive, I look at Web 3, but I look at anything that you have a situation like this, it's These are cooperatives, and where cooperatives are typically known is like housing cooperatives. And if somebody paints their house in your, in the housing cooperative, does that adversely affect your house?
Or does it improve your house or improve the value of your house because it improves the entire neighborhood. And I look at it as the latter. So if you take any of these applications, active, 50 buzz Leo, it doesn't matter what application. And if they add more features, if they add other things, if they incorporate more things from the base layer of the blockchain if they incorporate the internal exchanges, an example, or parts of the wallet system or whatever it is that only enhances the value, not only of that.
Application, but it answers the value of everything else because of what's been said here before it improves the entire neighborhood. And so this idea of competition. And I know this exists on Hive, and it's ridiculous because, and I think it only exists not because we have a million people, but because we have about 5, 000 people online every day, and everybody's trying to fight over the same 5, 000 people.
If we had a million people on Hive, the people on DBuzz would really not be too concerned what's going on Leo, other than from a technical standpoint and vice versa, because everybody's busy doing their own thing. That's just my two cents.
Couldn't have said it better.
moderator:
This question is from Andercino. And I saw this and it's funny because you and I were talking back and forth like this is just a great question to ask. And this, it might sound a little weird because we got all these amazing applications that are built on Hive, but what application, what DAPP do you guys as a whole feel for?
We are missing here on chain and personally for me, I, I'm a fan boy of so many applications on the blockchain. I try to be a product of the product. I try to use this stuff each and every day more than I use any other social media and person for me, I would love to see short form videos.
That's my. Opinion on that, but what are some of the things you guys would like to see here on chain?
Daryll:
Definitely shorts and forum videos that would be Really beneficial to something like a skateboarding community where You know, most people are not going to be worried about, the monopolies of the world and how we change things and they just want to share and connect with their friends.
The one thing I would say though, and this kind of, I had my hand raised earlier, so this kind of, I'm blending these, this question and the previous thoughts together, is one thing that I really find is lacking. As someone who's come here from early Steemit days is a good narrative in the sense that there's no, like you, you land on hive and you're like, Oh, I'm making money.
Oh, there's some cool people here, but there's nowhere that just pops up and says Hey, this is social media, but a cooperative we're in this together. This is not a competition. This is not about trying to make the most money. That's a side effect of the value we share as a community. And like I had to figure out that narrative and then part of what made me, into the position that I am in Skate Hive is that I would go and explain that to people and make it very obvious and clear why Hive has to exist, why it's important and why you should use it, even though it maybe is a little bit more difficult than other platforms.
And yeah that's where it's we have to really paint a clear picture of where we're going with this. And I think that's where we're going to start seeing a bigger mass adoption, much like the early dotcom bubble where they though email's a phase. It's not, it's too hard to use, but some people saw the future value of what it was going to become. And that's what we need to really project to people, I think.
Chris:
On my way flying from the Philippines to Mexico there were actually built in podcasts into the actual touchpad of the airliner, and one of the people who was speaking on the web3 podcast that was ironically on in the airport iPad. It was Amanda cassette, the former CMO of consensus.
She did an amazing job bringing Ethereum to market. And I think she's one of the people that we should study for crafting a narrative where we let decentralized communities sprout up on their own, but then we offer guides for them to follow so that it's not the exact same narrative, but a close narrative.
That's something that I'm interested in having.
moderator:
I don't know how you guys feel. We've been going for about three hours. And it's been amazing, but I do want to respect you guys time and maybe close out with this one last question. And this is for anyone. JohnUko says please, how is generic hive promotion weak?
We talked about this a little earlier. Hive promotion as a general thing is weak because people want to be marketed a specific thing, not a backend for that specific thing. General Motors isn't marketing you the motor that's in their car. They're marketing you the car.
moderator:
I don't think that Hive promotion is weak. I just think that we have to look at ourselves as our blockchain as a company. And then we have to segment our market and our target audience. So promoting Hive and all of the background, all the backend.
And the infrastructure that we have is incredibly attractive and incredibly powerful. When you are talking to a developer or when you are talking to an investor that wants actual foundations for a project, when they want decentralization. When they are comparing, for example, Solana or Ethereum or even Bitcoin against Hive, then you should definitely use Hive as the main value proponent of what you're trying to sell, which in the end is either users, investors, developers.
So the thing is, if you want users, Using hive as the value proposition of what you're trying to bring to the table is not effective because in the end, 99 percent of the users do not care how the internet works. They just want to send emails and look at cat pictures. To answer that question.
It's not weak. It's just that as marketers, we need to consider ourselves marketers of the high blockchain. We need to understand that no not everyone is going to be attracted to the same things. So if you want users, market Liketu, market actifit, market inLeo, market Dbuzz and market threespeak.
If you want investors market, how inflation works, how witnesses secure the blockchain. If you want developers market the feeless transactions, market the block size, market how easy it is to develop when we put out the HAF, the speak network, the VSC layer two, etcetera.
So it's not weak. It's just that maybe we are approaching the topic or the marketing, we could be doing it in a better way, so to speak. Guys, Elmer, Taskmaster, Kyle, Darryl, Vlad, Chris, do you want to add anything before we wrap up? Just raise your hand and we'll pass down the mic to you.
Task, do you want to close with something?
Taskmaster:
Yeah I think just to close with an overall sentiment I think this was a very productive session. Three hours is a long time to go, but I don't think anybody was put to sleep by it. We covered some very important topics, and this is exactly why we put together this Town Hall not this session itself, but the whole town hall initiative is you have a bunch of application project leaders who are on this call here and their focus on their specific applications, which they should be. And the message that I got coming through is they also have to be focusing on all aspects of it, not only to development, but the marketing, the user retention and all this other stuff.
The problem is when you have people who are doing that a lot of stuff falls through the crack on the governance side, on the Hive side, and that's where Town Hall was put together so we could put these sessions together to talk about things that are not necessarily app specific, but Hive, important to Hive as it relates to the apps, as it relates to users, as it relates to community members, as it relates to economics, as it relates to all this stuff. And we are doing this on a monthly basis. Then also every Friday I do a space called This Week in Hive, which is the same type of maybe a microcosm of this.
We just go over stuff that happened on Hive. If you're an app developer, if you have a game, if you have a project, if you're a user, show up. It's at 1 p. m. Eastern Time. And again, same thing as this. If you just, request to speak, you can come on, tell us what's going on with your app or your project.
And it's another way to get information out there and to communicate with the rest of the community.
moderator:
Go follow everyone here in the panel, go follow all of the dApps, support them on Twitter, on X, when they post.
Try to create this snowball effect. Whenever you see someone from Hive, reply to them. Give them more visibility the more presence that we have on X, the more users we will bring organically. If you see a tap with an initiative, throw them a reblog, throw them a reply. The replies are gold on X.
And in the end does just check the last governance town hall. This was last month, get involved in governance help the taps get more visibility just be the Hiver that you would like to see everywhere. Thank you very much guys.
Elmer:
Oh, yes elder. Let's go final thoughts yeah, and I would just like to add on top of that Obviously X is a really great place for the crypto side of things but let's not forget that we also have massive networks outside of X as well tiktok and YouTube and Instagram etc And I think it's important that we tap into non crypto native audiences as well.
When the mobile phone first came out it's easy to sell to people who didn't have a mobile phone. And there are lots of people on other platforms that are not so crypto natives that we can have a really good conversation with. I think, just to add that, X isn't everything. It's actually one of the smaller ones of the big ones.
moderator:
So yeah, 100 percent and actually the rally car, the Lord butterfly, and Damir and Slaven, the driver, they put out a lot of TikTok videos and Instagram videos, and we also pushed those. I do agree. We need to focus in, their places and actually Elmer, you have more knowledge about the image based platforms.
So I would. Throw this out to anyone and everyone of the founders here. And I will also send a message to the founders who are not here with us anymore.
Let's try to come up with some initiatives. I think that we would have a lot more reach If we as dApps, as frontends, we told our users, *Hey it's a hundred of us here in discord, or it's a hundred of us here in, in the community on Hive. Let's just go here and watch this video, or let's just go here and share this video. If we do this together as front ends, it doesn't matter what the topic is we could resonate with a lot of people out there in web 2, not only X, but also Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts.
So yeah, man, and Chris, if you're also interested in this, let's just get something together. We are seven, eight main front ends. Imagine what we would do if all of us pushed a video about, I don't know, actifit on YouTube or a gallery on Instagram about Liketu, I don't know there's so much we could do together.
We could push the whole blockchain into doing social activities, Zealy is trying to do that but imagine what we can achieve if all of us with all of our pool tried to spread this. Yeah, guys, um, thank you very much. It's already been three hours. We're actually at three hours.
Guys, this has been amazing, thank you very much for being here, both to the founders and the audience. You are actually what are making this worth our while. Thank you to the speaker panel, my co hosts, Nifty, Jongo.
See you on December 1st.
We might be speaking about reward pools. We might be speaking about downvotes.
I would like to bring in some game founders as well.
But yeah, this has been amazing. Thank you everyone. See you in December 1st.
Be the Hiver you want to see. I don't know who said that, but we'll leave you with that.
Thanks for tuning in guys.