I've been looking around at the Hive discussions and it seems while complaining is one of the main purposes of the internet - a whine delivery system if there ever was one - there are some categories that come up time and again.
There are several issues facing Hive right now and the value of the currency is only one of them.
Community Engagement is Low
Even considering seasonal changes, it feels like engagement is dropping. This isn't great for a platform that relies on active users to thrive. What can we do to get more people involved?
Buying and Trading is Hard
For regular folks, getting their hands on HIVE or trading it is a bit of a challenge compared to more popular cryptocurrencies. We need easier ways for people to buy and trade HIVE.
Popular Games are In Trouble
Some of our top games aren't doing so well. If they disappear, our community takes a big hit. These games are a big part of what makes Hive fun and engaging.
Wasteful Spending on Useless Stuff
There's a lot of talk about money being wasted on things that don't really help us. I've heard 'marketing' thrown around a lot, but what specific examples are there? If anyone knows more about this, please share.
Selfish Incentives and Lack of Onboarding
Right now, the incentives seem to encourage selfish behavior. People are motivated to keep the value high for themselves, which doesn't help with bringing in new users. We need to find a way to balance this and make it attractive for new folks to join without feeling like they're just more competition.
How can we address these issues and make Hive a better place for everyone?
Because I do not like throw out problems without offering at least some ideas for solutions, I think we need to look at how people are rewarded for contributing here.
Right now you have one week to get as many high value votes as you can, without causing anyone to counteract those.
Many of these votes are not based on quality of the work. There are mutual voting circles aplenty, and sock puppets/bots too.
Outside of already baked-in votes from friends or self voting, the best way to get high value votes is to rehash already popular topics, and if you can mass-produce them using AI then you can really milk the system while accelerating the demise of the community.
What I would like to see:
- Accept that friend-voting won't go away, and can be entirely innocent, so replace with subscriptions/patreon-style rewards so as not to muddy the vote as "I think this is good"
- Part of the rewards to be based on longer term metrics like readers and page views to reward content that brings people to the sites rather than keeping the community static.
- Less emphasis on crypto. Yeah might seem weird, but people don't go to Reddit because they can get karma points, they go to discuss topics and then they learn about internet points as a secondary thing.
I cant speak for much of this, but I do see a lot of low quality engagement in terms of people leaving comments which shows they haven't taken the time to adequately read and comprehend the post they are trying to farm.
There's also a lot of posts with plenty pictoral content, but little by way of written content, and not many of these are in communities focused on pictorgraphy.
For me, I'll continue to post the content that interests me in the communities which seem to best match. I'll continue to post about HIVE in other places (mainly twitter). And I'll support communities which best align with my preferences by vesting some of my holdings.
Will I support friends? sure. But not if they post terrible content.
I think supporting friends is the most important in Hive, as long as the post not harmful, not plagiat and even a simple post, I still support them. 😊
Yeah see below
I see a lot of gpt-based replies and I am often tempted to do the "ignore previous instructions" thing to see if I can get them to respond with a silly message, but I understand there are non native English speakers who use those systems in an assistive way rather than as fakes, so I can also let some slide.
This is what I think we need if we are going to get past the "minor crypto alt coin" brand and actually be a community that happens to reward activity ... I mean, a bunch of folks might not want that, so perhaps we need to decide if the community is as important as the money?
If I remember correctly there has been page view metrics in the past under every post... but it really highlighted that the autovoted low-quality posts were receiving relatively high rewards with low, sometimes zero, views.
The amount of people milking the rewards system, pumping out multiple posts a day to take advantage and spreading misinformation while they do it does make Hive a pretty unattractive place to spend time. I'd love to see more emphasis on groups trying to reward quality posts.
That is the thing, Hive could easily be a mini Reddit, but the entire emphasis always turns to "how much coin will I generate? what will my high score of influence be?" rather than "Hey I learned something cool" or "that was an interesting story" etc.
Heck, I have thought for a long time that we could have member-only walled sections for premium membership too, for example a patreon style membership where you get 3d models every month, or educational ebooks/videos, etc but it is difficult enough to get people to contribute or engage for free
I'm honestly not sure how many content consumers there actually are on Hive. Lots of content creators for sure... but I'm not sure how many people are using Hive to get information, knowledge or entertainment.
Reddit is amazing exactly because people share absolutely incredible insights... and they do so because the eyeballs are there. There's literally no barrier to find something amazing (and comment on it) on Reddit.
The voting will never be ideal as people will support those they know. If it could grow to many more users then the rewards would be spread wider, but that lack of growth is our biggest problem. I've done what I can, but it needs something special for it to take off. It is competing with newer, 'cooler' platforms, but still has a lot to offer. Most people have no idea it exists.
Sadly the people I have told about it are put off because of crypto/NFT stigma, but for me it is a lot more than just a crypto space. The underlying technology actually demonstrates to me what Web3 is actually about rather than digital monkeys, but that is the perception now.
If people were introduced to it as kind of cross between Medium and Reddit, but where the votes are worth something, I think it would be much more active.
Discussions don’t happen here. They are considered “propaganda”.
We are having a discussion here so that is promising :)
Friend voting is how all social media works so thinking that Hive would be any different is pretty naive. With Hive being so relatively small compared to other platforms like Instagram and TikTok it's not surprising that Hive is more community based. People support those that support them and/or those that bring community benefit to Hive. There are a lot of accounts that bring no benefit at all, they produce shit content so they don't attract new users and they cash out every penny they earn so they don't help with the inflationary aspect of Hive. Individuals like that only pad the numbers relating to Hive stats.
Let them complain.
When I had some urgent bills to pay and no other way of doing so, I cashed out too. But I hope that over my time here and before I added enough value that it was ok.
That's my main point, that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and the "I got mine" rugged individuality is fine when there is a truly functioning market, but if we continue on the path we are on I think the "commons" is going to be so toxic there is no coming back from it.
I have seen content here that is as good or better than on sites like Medium or LinkedIn that get no rewards, no comments, and the authors leave. That is a real shame to me, and is why I created my WordPress plugin so those people can at least easily get rewarded OFF of Hive, but that shouldn't even be necessary IMO.
Nothing wrong with cashing out and taking gains, my point was only that some accounts only do that. There are different ways of bringing value to the platform but if they aren't producing good content to attract others, aren't engaging meaningfully and aren't holding anything in their account to help with inflation then I would say that they aren't bringing any value. This does NOT seem to be the case with you.
Regarding good content creators that didn't do well, it's hard to know the circumstances of such cases but I'd say that "good contentent" is subjective and building a following takes a lot of time on any platform so people need to be willing to slug it out for a time. some have unrealistic expectations when they start, thinking that they are going to have a massive following after only being on the platform a few weeks or months and that they will earn a lot on every single post. I think it took me almost a year before I made anything over $2.00 when I started and then it was up and down on each post for a long time afterwards. If a person were to join a new platform like TikTok and start fresh without pulling a following from other accounts they have, how long would it take that person to get 10-30k followers to start making money on the site? It's a similar situation if we consider the relative size of each platform. A person can't join a new site and expect to earn huge in the first year or two (though there are cases where that happens I'm sure).
On the friend part, see my comment below
Less emphasis on crypto for sure makes sense to me. But it also seems to me that we can move away from seeing Hive as a social media platform. It provides much more. There is economy, there is governance, and lots of apps. It seems to me like it has the various aspects of a society, a digital one. Perhaps presenting it to people that way can lead to different perceptions and participation.
A couple of people mentioned that we can't eliminate the friend vote.
I don't actually think there is anything wrong with supporting friends, and often they are friends because of shared interests, I am just trying to think of ways we can make a split between "support" and "vote" if that makes sense?
What I think we need to be careful about is the "I vote for you, you vote for me, regardless of what spam I churn out, the reward is all that matters" because that is a quick way to fill the Hive based sites with poor quality content, driving away any first time visitors (or sincerely active members for that matter)
Yeah, subscription / patreon style of rewards would be interesting. Much better than upvoting without even care about the content 🙂