And I believe the complicated nature of tribes is keeping new members away.
I recently convinced my girlfriend @pandatome to sign up to Hive in order to start earning from the content and data she gifts to platforms like Instagram for free. Plus I haven't stopped banging on about it for the entire year so I think she agreed to join just to make me shut up about it.
Confusing tribes
The first difficult question was while trying to create an account.
"If we're signing up for Hive, what's Ecency? What's Peakd? What's Steem?" I've been using Hive for a year now and don't really know how to answer that question. In my mind Hive is a building, all the content is stored in that one building but it has several windows. Each tribe (Ecency, peakd, etc) is a different window and let's you view the content inside in a slightly different way.
On paper this could be useful, in reality it's as if each window is covered in bright, flashing, neon lights trying to attract you to their window while hiding the fact it's all the same bloody content inside.
That's my understanding of it at least.
To a newcomer this is unbelievably complicated. The front pages of these tribes make them look like totally different platforms. Some barely even mention Hive.
For example let's look at Ecency.
It could easily be a dating app with that logo.
Peakd is a lot more obvious about its link to Hive, but doesn't really explain the why. Something I wasn't able to explain to panda. Why are there so many front ends with little to no difference in UI? I have no idea. Hopefully someone in the comments can enlighten me.
Account creation
I don't mean to single out Ecency to shit on, it just happened to be very visible in the first roadblock to joining Hive.
Our first attempt failed completely as each free site was out of account creation tickets. Not off to a good start, and not a good look for Hive.
I say each free site because Blocktrades, inji and Hivewallet require $3+ to create an account.
Good luck with that I guess.
We left it for a week and were able to create an account through Ecency. Which brings us to the next problem.
Keys
The most important step in protecting your Hive account. Safely storing your keys and knowing how important they are. Something that wasn't explained to Panda at any point in the account creation process.
As far as I'm aware the only place these are viewable is hive.wallet, but this isn't made obvious which is odd considering how important this step is.
Profile and cover photo
Something that isn't going to give new members much faith in your platform is when things simply don't work. It took way too much effort to just set a profile picture.
This was Hive.blogs error message. Not a clue what it means
This was the Ecency app error message, even less info
Leofinance was even less useful, it didn't even show an error, it just did nothing
In the end the Ecency app let us set the profile picture after signing into Hivesigner. Was it a coincidence? Who knows!
We got there in the end
It was a struggle but we got to a point where she could write her introduction post.
I haven't begun to explain curation trails and complexities of automating the use of your staked Hive. let's face it, that will probably be another article in a few weeks.
To sum up the whole experience, Panda provided me with this quote. "If you hadn't been here to talk me through it, I would have given up a long time ago. You shouldn't need a computer science degree to be able to blog."
It's definitely not easy to bring in a total noob. As with everything - this will get better with time. Leofinance is pushing hard for this. Facebook and Twitter logins are going to change this.
Posted using LeoFinance Mobile
I'm hopeful the improvements that the Leo team develops will find their way to Hive. I love Leo but I need subjects other than finance sometimes.
Look on your profile in PeakD
Click Account Actions -> Keys and Permissions
But yes I wholeheartedly agree, the process of trying to get everything set up is not user friendly in the slightest. To all the 'devs' and experienced users, it all makes sense. to the new users, its a complete mess.
Out of all the people I know, I have only invited 3 people to join Hive (people who are looking for something new and actually have something to add to the community). One person (@dawnsart) joined, posted intermittently, and then stopped. The other two both looked at it at and couldn't work out what was going on.
Dawn only managed it as I was sat next to her while she went through the sign-up and explained everything the best I could.
I set up my profile pic via ecency, and my cover image via hive.blog and both things took so long to do that I've not been bothered to change either of them since
Knowing someone that posts amazing content on Hive but loses interest/motivation is so frustrating.
I'm going to go down a bit of a conspiracy rabbit hole here but I think that it has something to do with mainstream platforms researching so heavily in what causes that dopamine hit when people use it, that most people would chase that hit for a few hundred likes on Instagram rather than literal dollar value upvotes on Hive. I think it's a lot more complicated than ease of use, but it's the first step in being anywhere near competitive with the giants.
Omg absolutely! There are so many things I found so difficult and still do find difficult when setting up my blog. I don't understand half of it but am still sort of muddling through.
https://peakd.com/hive/@steevc/a-guide-to-hive-from-my-experience
This article from steevc explains pretty much everything. It's been a huge help for me.
This is so useful thank you!