Remember how "The Internet" was a big deal, and people's focus was on "being ON the Internet?" Nobody cares now. It's about what you can DO on the Internet.
Remember how "Facebook" was a big deal, and people's focus was on "being ON Facebook?" Nobody cares now. People join groups and pages and follow hobbies/interests
On YouTube, people subscribe to their favorites... they don't subscribe to "YouTube."
We reach a "tipping point" where a new technology stops driving itself. Instead you focus on what you do with it.
Splinterlands gave me a great deal of hope because its reach went far beyond its roots. Getting a Hive account and needing some Hive tokens was a side effect of being part of Splinterlands. Even our 30-ish gamer son ended up with a Hive account, thanks to his interest in Splinterlands!
What Hive "needs" is more features that can be promoted as features, rather than Hive. I had great hopes for Hive's 2nd layer communities as interest-based gateways to Hive. For example, I get invites to join Facebook communities and pages all the time. The "benefit" is the opportunity to connect with groups of people with similar interests and outlooks. Gardening groups, music groups, art groups, writing groups.
Maybe the direction we need to take is to change the narrative from "Hive," to the individual components of Hive. It's a bit like one of the pieces of narrative I often hear about the Web 3 movement: "Your token isn't your PRODUCT, it's a FEATURE that interacts with your actual product." What are Hive's actual "products?"
I have never done much to promote "Hive." I have tried to promote "a blogging and content creation community similar to early 2000's social blogging" to a niche market of previously very active bloggers I knew, way back when.
Maybe part of our challenge lies in the fact that developers — no matter how visionary and brilliant — typically suck at marketing, and suck at understanding how "real people" use technology.
The other challenge we have — which you perhaps touched on a little with the "creating for rewards" comment — is that we have a huge percentage of users for whom St****t and now Hive is their first and only social media experience. They didn't come here with 50K followers on twitter, IG, YouTube or whatever. And so, when they create accounts on legacy social media, they are just shouting into an echo chamber of people who already have Hive accounts. It might be well meaning, but it's not useful, in any meaningful way.
No easy answers, I'm afraid.
The second part of the article does touch on one feature of Hive. A lacking one that is in the works. Its exactly what you say here.
Promotion of features of hive in the context of the eyes of the wider market. Smart contracts are one of those things.