We should be using that to fund (1) development of a stellar developer’s portal / bootcamp and (2) ongoing hackathons or active RFPs aimed at recruiting and funding new dApp developers.
Make a DHF proposal. If it's well made I will support it, because I agree with your characterization of the need. However, the only thing that will 'fix' Hive is the cessation of opinion flagging. Hive is massively censored by DV taxation, and this is the reason Hive languishes despite the enormity of the market for free speech.
I have long been a strong advocate of DV reform. I still steadfastly believe some simple straightforward changes are desperately needed, and that Hive’s advancement as a social media platform will be forever hindered until common sense DV reform is instantiated.
However, about 2 to 2.5 years ago, I came to the realization that the future viability of Hive has less to do with the blockchain’s social media features and is much more dependent on the emergence of a handful (or more) dApps that are each able to consistently reach tens of thousands of new users. Those users don’t even need to know they’re using Hive, btw.
Personally, I think @arcange’s HiveAuth could single-handedly catapult Hive to national prominence, if we could simply get a major website to add it as a method of login/authentication.
In any event, the emergence of a handful of highly successful dApps is itself critically dependent on getting lots and lots of dApp developers dabbling and trying out new ideas, solving novel problems in novel ways.
As I mentioned previously, getting up to speed to start developing on Hive is far more challenging and painful than it should be.
I’ll give it some thought.
@arcange would be a great team member for such an effort. @brianoflondon also, or @nathansenn and the dBuzz team, or @vaultec, or @grampo, or any number of others who have created significant value-adding dApps and know what new-to-Hive devs would most need.
I think we fundamentally disagree about social media. When I look at IRL markets, social media is the driver of the largest sector of finance in the world, and it's only existed for about a decade. It is people posting cat pics and whinging about their in-laws that drives the market for phones, hardware of all kinds, all the networks, all of it is driven by social media and people's need to post.
What they need Hive mostly has already. If we could post video clips without using another app that would be ideal, but we can post pics, and that's the majority anyway. However, people complaining about their mother in law will not tolerate being flagged, and that's why they're not complaining here. They'd love to get $.03 for whinging about the burned steaks. That's the actual leg up Steem had, but the flags were intolerable, and everyone that came for the $.03 left feeling like they'd been scammed.
I'm not sure they weren't, tbh.
We don’t fundamentally disagree. I originally had high hopes for the social media potential of Hive. And I still believe there’s a lot of promise there. It’s just not what the ecosystem needs most at this point, imho.
dApps are unique in that they only succeed if they are solving people’s pain points or giving them delight. That means users will pay for the benefits they are receiving.
Social media worldwide is still stuck in the ad-based free-to-use paradigm. Until that paradigm breaks, Hive’s real potential won’t shine through.
Hive has the structure to utterly dispel free to use with get paid to use. It only fails to do that because of DV's. The idea of a rewards pool and UV's from inflation that don't come out of the voter's wallet is genius, but the misapplication of DV's is moronic. Many blatantly and falsely misstated that DV's aren't censorship, despite the explicit demonstration of how well they work to eradicate spam, scams, and plagiarism. Further every authoritative definition of censorship says it's any suppression of speech, and no better demonstration of financial taxation targeting offensive speakers could exist than Canada seizing the bank accounts of supporters of Freedom Convoy truckers. Many continue to maintain that Hive can't be censored because speech is on the blockchain, but that's a ridiculous standard. What speech that was ever censored no longer exists? Every book ever banned continues to be read today. It is literally impossible to utterly eliminate speech even by double tapping the backs of the heads of the censored.
Their ideas always outlive them.
The outrageous censorship of Hive through DV's needs to end, except where it is necessary to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism. Even the vile plutocratic governance model can be tolerable if we have free speech, and end financial taxation wielded as censorship. Dapps are fine and all, but there are myriad mechanisms that enable people to post and all of them are more or less successful, including Hive. We have had millions of people that took the trouble to onboard and begin using the platform since 2017. The form and mechanism of speaking here isn't the problem.
The censorship drove them away. Fix that censorship problem and demonstrate to the market that it's fixed, and the market will respond. The competition has only gotten worse, censoring ever harder (almost approaching the flag happy on Hive!) and the market for a free speech platform is stronger and larger than ever. The concept of being paid by consumers for posting instead of advertisers surveilling, tracking, and lying to you is compelling. It will draw millions of users, as soon as DV's can't screw the pooch.
Our views on the social media side of things are not all that different.
One issue that I recognized early on with respect to DVs is that if Hive sees some substantial growth as a social media platform before fixing the DV disparities, it could backfire in a major way, making Hive well known but for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve not given up on that fight, but my focus at the moment is more on attracting new Devs than new social media users. That’s mostly an issue with my own limited bandwidth.
That is exactly what happened, albeit before Hive was forked off.
A significant (THE significant) impediment to resolving the matter is that the ~36 whales that control Hive governance see significant growth as the one threat to their governance. It is a sad fact that controlling the pond is more important to profiteers than the size of the pond. It is thus the plutocratic governance of Hive that continues to preclude user retention, and why massive stake is thrown at HW to flag n00bs off the platform, because that maintains the financial dominance of extant oligarchs and that maintains their plutocratic governance which assures they will capture the vast majority of rewards from the pool.
Waivio empowers non-tech users to build sophisticated social websites on the Hive blockchain.
Last year at HiveFest, we introduced social shopping projects (https://CleanGirlLook.com, https://CoffeeShop.Gifts, etc.)
This year, we'll be talking about web3 maps on Hive (https://AcceptCryptoMap.com, https://SpendHBD.Social.Gifts, etc.)
Regarding downvotes, they significantly reduce dopamine levels not only for those who receive them but also for everyone else who observe the drama.
Fairness and equity are fundamental in all higher vertebrates. We've all seen the videos of monkeys outraged when they get cucumber bits and their neighbor gets grapes. Dogs will fight to the death over insignificant tidbits, because it's not the tidbit that matters, it's the social approval they signify that does.
Hive is doing that all wrong with DV's.
I've pointed it out before, but DV's aren't the opposite of upvotes. The opposite of an upvote is no vote. DV's are taxes. Nobody likes paying taxes, because taxes are theft. DV's work to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism because they're onerous. Applying them to opinionated speech is asinine and kills the Hive.