Ive been looking around the market and thinking about our approach on Hive to "things".
Things being related to what our image we portray outside of our ecosystem is.
The legacy of Steem still weighs heavy on us here on Hive. Its an unfortunate truth but one I think many can agree with.
In the eyes of the wider crypto market, with those that are aware of Hive, in many ways they see it as a continuation of the core principles established by Steemit and the single attribute that defined it. "Social media rewards."
As much as that specific market niche might have re-emerged these last months, due to the utter failure of these new projects like Friend.tech or Star Arena to appear like anything but clown level ponzies, the FOMO lasted only for a short time.
The decentralized, free speech narrative has not been something that brought us any significant results either. Twitter (X) and Elon Musk has stolen the narrative, twisted it and managed to convince wider audiences that he is offering a solid solution with his platform.
Of course, its all a complete lie and nonsense.
All he offered was an excuse for the free speech supporters to self-silence because he promised to share their values. He parroted their narrative and even though he solved nothing, that was enough for them. They are satisfied.
So what do we do?
Firstly I want to address a problem we have with our dapp social media presence. While we have some dapp founders attempting to branch out on Twitter due to the crypto community reliance on it, its simply not enough.
Right now you have 3speak and their weekly show. You have Inleo using Zealy trying to increase our social footprint and affect the algos, but beyond that there is literally nothing.
Not a single Dapp founder is willing to put themselves out there and go talk to people on social media. Unwilling "to go to them".
Ofc, you cant expect anything from those that self fund their projects beyond hoping they see value in it, but from those that use DHF funds we should expect more.
If Im honest I just dont want to support projects like #Peakd in any way whatsoever anymore. I just dont. I just feel theyre content with being a Hive powerhouse, a big fish in a little pond and thats it. DHF funds coming in, they do some Splinterlands work, some opensource stuff.
Im not saying their proposal is not worth it, ill criticize them here and praise them elsewhere, but for a social media platform that is supposed to focus on users I see nothing at all coming from them in that regards. #Ecency same thing.
And even in these two positive cases no one is using one of the easiest ways to promote Hive, Spaces.
Beyond anything, its the easiest way for any of us to attract attention from individuals outside of the Hive echochamber. People are simply unaware of how thick the walls of our echochamber are. ALMOST NOTHING GETS OUT.
And commenting will never beat speaking to people.
But... you need to have something to talk about. What is it that you will present to these guys that they might even care to listen?
I went on a music Space last week to gauge interest in the Openmic idea I had and that idea spread around like fire among the NFT music space. I got probably followers that between them have 200-300k followers just for speaking for 5 minutes.
Anything I write in the future about music, or if the project comes to fruition they will likely see it and if I want to contact them, they will know what its about. What happens when I do it 50 times, a 100 times? What if others do it as well.
And dont get me wrong, theres a 100 other things happening, meetups, conferences, sporting events, the hive car, and other ways we spread the word. Im focusing now on this one thing where we are failing in my eyes..
Then you have an audience of people you can reach that are not on Hive, with you slowly piquing their interest.
Atm im waiting for the website to be built and the guy that will do it has so much other work that hes doing for Hive that I have no idea when it will be ready. But thats beyond the point.
When you have something to say that people are interested in, they will be willing to listen.
Thats I guess number 1.
Number 2 would be the change of focus towards being seen as a up and coming blockchain that wants to attract applications and builders. That is set to compete with the top market players.
Lets rip the bandaid and say that Koinos a few days ago exceeded the Hive marketcap. Yes, that happened.
- Their launch wasnt fair. I was there. I wasnt happy.
- They dont have our community.
- They dont have any established dapps like us.
- No DHF with the amount of funds we have.
- Theyre probably not as decentralized.
But what they are is smart. Andrew Levine is incredibly committed, patient and knows what the hell he is doing.
They push a single narrative of "easy to use, smart contract platform with free transactions and a unique twist that is supposed to compete with Solana, ETH, etc.
And it works. I see degens pop up in my feed all the time talking about it. Always the same thing. There might be nothing built there now, but in the future... who knows. Cardano was vaporware at billion dollars of marketcap. But the hope was there.
That hope is what drives investment. The "what if?"
Where is Hive going?
We need investors to be able to give themselves an open ended answer to that question.
So number 2 would probably be a rebranding of Hive. The second #VSC launches and if it is indeed satisfactory when it comes to smart contracts, we need to start to establish it as a HIVE NORM. A part of the base reality of Hive.
HIVE - Smart contracts platform powered via VSC.
If VSC is not it... because again, I cant know... then something else needs to be. With that we can rebrand Hive and point our attention towards our market competitors, those same ones that have the attention of the market even with their title of being, or soon to be "Jailcoins" .
Ultimately that is what I want to see.
1. Dapp owners or their representatives, going to the people.
2. Rebranding of Hive and adjustment towards market requirement.
A bridge as well with enough liquidity.. but I talked about that yesterday. 😉
I don't think any amount of money is going to adopt hive more than it is already. Your user base are your biggest promoters when it comes to applications.
The major issue with hive is the blockchain has fallen behind from once being far ahead of others. There's no smart contracts, its difficult for developers to come in and develop on the platform and we have massive exits of money putting downward pressure on the price of hive.
IMO we need to get smart contracts fired up asap, a real layer two solution and then start brining on developers with hackathons etc to build on hive. The building of those applications and use cases will fuel growth on it's own. Be it a new game, a social front end or whatever else. Most projects on here right now just feel stagnate. We have been waiting forever for a real "shorts" style front end from 3 speak but it's clear their focus is more on centralizing it over UX/UI. InLeo has been having ok pace and the gaming sector on here took a bit of a hit.
DHF should be used as an incubator program and not as a constant exit of funds. PeakD, Ecency etc all need to figure out ways to be self sustainable now and stop asking for 700 HBD daily. It's honestly that simple. Stop the exit flow of HBD to project who are making plenty just off curation alone, get smart contracts in here already, bring in more developers and get the core dev team on building the resources other devs need to continue application growth.
The ONE time Hive took off I firmly believe a vast majority of that came from Splinterlands and nothing else. So yes applications are what are going to power hive and give hive value and layer two tokens are going to have to be self sustaining. That's my vision of what needs to happen but many at the top hate it because it takes away their cushy pay.
The problem with Hive is that the community is on social media platforms native to Hive so theyre not going outside of Hive and when they do that still shuts us in the echochamber we cant escape.
The only way to escape is to do it manually.
Its still the dapp founders that need to promote themselves to audiences.
If you build it they will come, doesnt work.
I talked to a number of devs about this. Not all ofc. No one wanted to help that I talked to.
And at that time Aggroed was hardly silent and had dead social media accounts.
Peakd last 3 posts got 30 views total. And they havent posted on Twitter in 1 month and ecency in 5 months.
They will attract no one in the crypto twitter ecosystem.
If we lost Matt and Dans 3speak, Inleo I dont think that we would have any kind of presence on Twitter besides our Hiveblocks account and Splinterlands.
"If you build it they will come, doesn't work."
This is true and something a application owner can work on with their start up community here on hive to implement referral programs or other incentives to share their application with others.
Also valid points about presence on Twitter (X). It's pretty hard to make anything note worthy for hive since there's honestly just not that much going on in terms of builds. InLeo has pushed pretty heavily and honestly the onboarding there makes the most sense from X being that it's so close to what many are use to.
It's a shame on the smart contracts front but at least it looks like VSC network will be working on this now with funding. I'm eager and interested to see how that turns out and then how we can use it to attract in more development etc.
Big politicians use major networks to spread their word.
Small politicians talk to people on the street and go from door to door. They call them on the phone.
Most our dapps are small. We need their founders to go out there and talk to people.
A Hive rebrand is ok, as long as it keeps the name and the logo. There is nothing wrong with that. What needs priority is to level up the professionalism that's currently underwhelming for many people who first see Hive.io, or any interface.
Compare it to DeSo's website for example. Solana, and so on.
Another thing is that Hive's text-based characteristics is also leveraged too much as being a Immutable Social Media Platform, which puts a limit on expressing Hive on other aspects or capabilities. Hive is immutable with anything text-based that is being build on top of it. Not just social media platforms.
We should zoom out, get back to the basic fundamental traits, identify them, and at least share information about that.
Education is one of the things that could boost this. But before we can actually educate others, we need to educate ourselves, so we can all become proper ambassadors, which we currently aren't. Too vague, too micro, too macro, etc. There is a saying that catches it perfectly: "If you're trying to talk to everyone, you'll end up talking to no one"
We need to start seeing Hive as Hive, and dApps being build on top of it, as the businesses/companies/projects that are being build on top of it. You can replace PeakD easily, but you can't replace Hive easily. PeakD is a valued project build on top of Hive. InLeo is a great example on how things should be done properly by people who build projects on top of Hive.
We may not have a team, are VC funded, or whatever thing that makes it difficult to pump money in Hive: We do have a Hive fund that should finance Hive's roadmap onward. I have worked with HiveCreators, Valueplan, and I absolutely am grateful for all of this, I have learned a lot along the way. But, there's always a but, there are some difficulties when it comes down to hiring people, or putting the right people on the job. We have talent, but we need to pay for that talent as well, and we need to outsource talent if we dont have it. Like, what you did with the movie Freechain, it's a great example, and as a bonus we got Jovan here on Hive now as well, who brings his expertise, talent-pool, skills, and knowledge to the chain.
Last thing, Hive has the capabilities to change the way we pay people, we have a built-in savings account, we have zero-fees. We should leverage the DHF with these capabilities. Invest in the right people. Allocate funds, and build a strong foundation.
My two cents, plus interest. :D
A rebrand in messaging which ties into what you said below that if you try to talk to everyone you talk to no one.
A concise message created focused on wider crypto markets and established niches is needed once we have the features for it.
Yeah, we first need to look inward, get the narrative straight. It is too niche, and too broad/vague at the moment. Once we get the message straight back from the fundamentals, we can talk to anyone. Just with different coatings.
If wer doing smart contracts and they work. It should be smart contracts because it has the biggest market share and people are actively seeking alternatives with potential to grow.
If they dont work. We do stablecoins. If SOFI reemerges we do that.
What we choose, since wer doing it anyway needs to be whats relevant at any point in time.
And then people from the community need to go speak on spaces. The community push the tags. From there they get direct connection to whales and relevant minds in the ecosystem.
Thats how you do it.
Is Smart Contracts a L1 thing, or initiated by a project? That's the whole thing IMO. There were some individuals that thought; hey, let's make a Social Media Platform, or, lets make Twitter/Instagram/Reddit/YouTube, etc., which then evolved to games, nfts, defi, and so on.
Hive is capable of all these things. That is the narrative. The branding of all these projects is the responsibility of those who initiated it. Hive could serve as a incubator, or a kickstarter, sure, but the people who initiated the project should start being more professional about their project(s). Leo is doing just that IMO. Ecency has nice UI, but it's getting outdated in terms of UI/UX compared to 2024 design trends.
Sure. But we are in a space where everything was initiated by someone and those guys are pushing their blockchains. Who is going to push Hive if community leaders dont?
For LEO, Peakd, Ecency, Splinterlands what you said is absolutely true but that is part of what I wrote in part 1. The second part was more related to Hive itself.
For example, I am not trying to sell Freechain to a movie theatre, right? You are. That's the way to go. It fails? Shit happens. It succeeds? Boom; there you go. Of course, Freechain has the Hive branding all over it, but that's why its being funded by the DHF. It's just a great example of a (IMO successful) use case of the DHF, and how projects like Freechain, take full responsibility to take it to the next level, taking Hive along.
I'm not seeing PeakD doing marketing for their platform. I might be sleeping, but I do have heard the roar of the rebranding of InLeo, who is doing exactly what you are doing, but within their own branch. This is what we need more of, projects taking their responsibility, instead of milking the DHF simply because users do not have a better alternative.
I dont think peakd is doing much at all when it comes to promoting their platform. i might be wrong when it comes other venues, but on web2 social media, where the users we want are, theyre doing nothing. Havent posted in X in 1 month.
DHF is a double edge sword, many projects are working for the DHF, to please the DHF, not the users or attract new users. All that matters is the funding from the DHF, it feels like a subsidy, not as providing a service users would pay for by themselves, organically. Ideally we would support projects by the DHF that would become self-sustainable or at least develop something as open-source rather than close-source. Open-source should be a requirement for every DHF project.
This is very well put and I agree completely.
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.
The projects may not be posting much, but we have the @town-hall shows where they are at least talking to each other. I think Hive has branding issues. Some say we should promote the dapps rather than the blockchain, but I think they need an overall brand so that people realise that joining one gives them access to all. We have Splinterlands getting hundreds of thousands of users, but there is hardly a mention of Hive on their site so many will not know they could be being social with it.
I am not a marketing guy, but we have people here who know about that. It can be an expensive exercise, so we need to target the spending. I think we should work to get particular niche interests more active here, such as music. We can build from that.
You nailed it with this... They talk with EACH OTHER... While the talks with ordinary HIvians don't exist... Except for posts like this, where "ordinary" Hivians talk with EACH OTHER... I remember the times when whales were talking with us, simple plebs...
I sense a deep gap between these two "entities" that is getting deeper and deeper...
Some of the whales hardly post, but others will engage. They may just be busy, possibly building new stuff on Hive, but they ought to let us know their news. I've met a few of them and they are smart people.
I can say from witnessing what is happening to Koinos atm that X presence is pretty much everything to grow a chain. They have been posting non stop about their chain and have finally attracted influences and get now posts with tens of thousands of views. The thing is, Hive is not sexy. We are the old ones and the new chains is where all the hype is. I think we need to rebrand ourselves and/or get the presence of the dapps out there. We need to organize and fund someone or a group to establish a much bigger web2 presence imo.
That is not entirely wrong. But we can rebrand ourselves, shouldnt be too hard. First you change the view of Hive reality in the eyes of Hivers, then go outwards.
Bitcoin was supposed to be used to transact daily, to be used by everyone. When they saw its terrible at that they started calling it digital gold.
Agree with you, we have to do more to promote HIVE. Especialy within Web2 Like X. I share quitt regularly Hive Post on my X Account and got some good resultsmlike this https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@borsengelaber/good-resonance-to-yesterday-s
But as you said that is Not enough,we Need the big guys Like devs or people leading big DApps to Go out and promote too. Like we saw it 2021 with the Splinterlands Team. They wherr everywhere and promoted the Game.
And it worked. I want people to tell Peakd, Ecency founders: "Wer paying for your dapps" we expect MORE from you."
I think, sometimes back a project like Hive Ambassadors started, but did not see much afterwards. We should now support some funding from DHF for people doing the marketing, and spreading it.
Decentralized efforts are very tricky and hard to quantify its positive effects in particular.
Hive is not stagnating, but "crawling very slow in all direction", this looks we are not moving at all.
I do agree, it is just perspective, and the efforts of everybody should not be undermined.
We need more stretching, and WHO will do it?
Who or what will catapult this jumpstarting, again?
Again we are a true community, so independent to each others efforts, that we can only rally so much to one direction, but still will persist on our "own strategies".
So what is my suggestion?
Anybody with bright ideas (developers, project proponents, investors, anybody) can do please put that on the table, push these ideas as much as you can, and (still) let anybody follow your lead.
Lead us. The bees will surely follow.
I propose a few simple things here. The second one is in motion right now.
The first one is something that is avoided massively by those that should be doing it.
🤔🤔🤔
Rebranding HIVE might bring us new consistent members
There’s plenty of ideas that can make Hive go viral. Ask the community!
#hive #posh
Few more years Steem will be forgotten. Only remembered because people keep bringing it up.
Dapps are not a solution. They are but one pixel on a large widescreen tv.
Peakd is good for new users, Friendly to use. However I think a new front end made by another should focus on selected content and create a news front or sport front, That only permits content aligned with its role.
For success, A greater demand is needed.
Rebranding will divide.
The future of Hive is dependant on finance. Hive is a financial blockchain. How much the finance it generates is worth is key in a discussion like this.
You could say, the future of the chain is dependant on its value.
I will say this. Those with the power have made all of the choices. This is where we are now. Have we got good leadership?
5 years ago I told today was coming. Where other interests begin to make laws and restrictions to your ability to transact using a crypto as currency. Bittrex and Binance I hear now under threat.
Too much self centred know better than the rest is the problem. Too many not willing to share power for fear of losing control, Or fear another will hold control over them. Yet they will yield their power over others without conscience.
The answer is in what Hive will invest. So far all investment has gone to those who already have. The costs of repair only increase with time.
Holy shit @xiko. I wonder if upvoting your lucid comment I could make it more visible so that everyone could see it and read it easier without having to make any extra clicks?
Upvoting crazies, are you bolos. 😂
Hahaha yes, I like crazies & free thinkers who talk even when no one is supposed to see them.
Haha. You should read his other comments. 😅
You do know he didnt watch the film and theres no way he knows whats in it.
Some people possibly didnt like it, like with any film, even though that wasnt the impression we got from the cheers and the tears that happened at the premiere.
But fabricating a fantasy and pushing it shows for a crazy person. Free thinkers, hardly. Mental patients, more likely. He needs help, not encouragement.
Hey! perhaps he has his professional secret tools or something, right? 😅
It all depends bro. It all depends, because everything is always according to the color of the glass you are looking thru. };)
I really want to know what happens in Avatar 3.
Not really. Theres facts, theres opinions. Plenty of my opinions in this post.
But if I went on and said that Peakd isnt promoting their platform because I know theyre spending their funds on crack cocaine, that would make me a crazy person.
That what this guy is doing. Claiming things he has no way to know in as negative way as possible.
"Your".