Today, @littlescribe posted a question prompted from some comments on a post, and I told her to make it a post to the community because its brought about several thought provoking questions about what Hive is/should/could/might be.
"Pay-to-play vs. Proof-of-work -- is this way gone and done with?"We both wanted to hear from the community with regards to her three specific questions so please go leave a response of your own on @littlescribe 's post here:
I wrote a long form comment reply and decided I wanted to put it up as a post of it's own to continue the conversation adjacent to Scribey's and because I wanted to keep my own answer on my blog where I could find it easier later as well. Here it is:
So.. fundamentally this is a blockchain at it's core. Everything else is added on ecosystem to try and give the block chain, and in turn it's associated crypto currencies and tokens some kind of human determined, consensus driven, agreed upon real world value.
With that in mind,
For this blockchain, we have a white paper indicating it is based on two things, proof of stake and proof of brain. They are both used within 2 pages of the opening of the white paper to describe the place. The general take I get, is proof-of-stake drives governance, and proof-of-brain drives rewards.
Are these mutually inclusive or mutually exclusive? Does one begat the other and vice versa?
I think its debatable either way and I could take either sides of the argument. Some chains are about user engagement, some are about recording the shipping manifests of freight haulers. They are not the same. If you are about engagement, then rewarding creators and engagement seems like the best way to grow. YouTube for example.
But if you are about logging transactions immutably as your core functionality, then a chain based Quickbooks would be your kinda thing or a chain like bitcoin. One is about the quality of content and viewer stickness (curation) - youtube - and rewards accordingly with the rev share. One is about reliability and network stability and accuracy (fakebooks, bitcoin), of most importance to the largest stakeholders, and thus they need control of it to ensure their own viability - the chain based accounting app examples, small business has less at stake than big business.
HERE?
I am pretty sure the intention was a new world for both, and these priorities seem to get twisted big time. And are a lot of the reason big expensive marketing plans that are basically poorly defined for EITHER use case have been mostly tilting at windmills in their efforts and outcomes.
And it's why I made my goofy little, but very pointed point-making, contest about the AI advertising. It wasn't about AI, it was about how to create messages that put us forth in a good light for zero cost, and encouraging the community we do have to go out and do more of it for frigging free.
In my opinion, Good Ideas don't have to sell themselves. They sell themselves.
So, back to the spirit of your questions Scribey.
To me, here, on Hive, engagement with each other and promotion of the brightest and most creative among us, is most important. It's a busy world. There's billions of things vying for your attention, millions of copycat card games to play, thousands of people to talk to in niches that union set your own almost precisely.
With that happening, we have to position ourselves as a quality outlet and place to choose to spend your time.
We know you have a choice of airlines to fly, and we're really pleased you chose SouthWest because we are affordable, and entertaining, as opposed to Spirit, which is cheap and broken and doesn't care about your comfort.
We're in a position to still salvage what's left of this place and turn it back "on". But it's up to all of us, and if we aren't rewarding the most passionate and brightest, then as many have over the years already, they will continue to leave to seek greener pastures.
Maybe thats fine with the PoS crowd, but it seems self defeating to not be more meritorious. So yes, I think engagement should be a more utilized metric than it currently is, and it is, just not as much as wallet sizes are.
Is a rich idiots vote on things more valuable than that of a poor genius?
For a guide to how that works in more detail, look what global politicians have done to their countries and how many do NOT have actual geniuses, but who had no money, winning elections... and the state of the world that created for us all.
Sometimes a rich genius chimes in, an Elon type, truthing to the other power, but then again for every one of those there seems to be 10 corrupt, colluding, world destroyers to contend with.
So pollinate the hive far and wide. Make honey for each other with engagement on each others posts, It may not get you to trending, but every post vote, every comment vote, every chance you get to illuminate the proof-of-brains, do it. Do more of it. Raise engaging voices. Engage them back. We can do it by sheer force and inertia.
The search engines will see us, let's put on our best outfit for that school picture.
And go out there and storm area 51 with the news about Hive. Fill it with creators that make quality content, bring them to the light and then bring them to light, they can't stop us all.
So, what's your buzz on this topic, Hive?
@SirCork
@PolleNation co-witness partner
Join the PolleNation Discord
We appreciate your support! Vote @PolleNation as your witness.
Nathanmars started hive/steem twitter and we all did that for free
we have all done a ton for free
we all keep doing a lot for free and have never stopped
we all find our little places we call home on here
there are lots of new ones that pop up each week, but because not everyone knows to reblog a post, not all posts are seen ....well maybe on PeakD, but I don't care for peakD, so maybe it's just me that doesn't see them. IDK
What I do know is that lots of people come back and read posts to check up on old friends here.
There are lots of us for whom this last year's real life made it impossible to read posts and get to know new people.
People get burned out when people ask others to do things for free while they sit back and do nothing.
This is my happy place.
I don't like fighting and stay as far away from it as possible. I come here to laugh and have a good time, as do a lot of people here. The last thing most people want is to be part of an old fight.
There are people building communities on Hive without help from Hive. Dreemsteem is a perfect example. She has not received handouts and runs a thriving Hive community, which she gives back 100 times to those in it.
The players might have changed, but others have just gotten older and write posts when they have time.
Just my thoughts.......
and I will admit I didn't have time to read your whole post :D But thought my comments were better than Nice Post!
:D
All that is true what you said there.
But a word I haven't used yet in these posts and comments of mine since returning is also something of core importance to all and any of those true things you illuminated having a future to continue happening...
And that word is "cohesion", that's what I feel like might be missing. Sure people can decentralize and do their own thing, but they don't need a singular chain or social media site to do that. What kept this place thriving in the kind of way I am reminiscing about was "cohesion" - an "we're all in this together, let's tell the world" kind of way.
I am a huge consumer of all the major social media outlets, a part-time consumer of many cryptocurrency outlets and have always kept an eye on this specific chain as a consumer and contributor of it's offerings since I discovered it.
But I can tell you for sure, there may be people still out the promoting it from sheer excitement and enthusiasm in the current world, like this example from @raymondspeaks I found and that he posted very currently - in fact, just 5 hours ago today: (associated platform post for any interested rewards givers if you want to go see it: https://peakd.com/pimp/@brofund/if-youre-a-content-creator-try-this-8zt)
And thats the kind of stuff I am talking about, X, Youtube, Facebook, etc. Used to be I could find organic hive promotion all over the place. I don't see it as much anymore.
And that makes me sad a little.
The discords sit static and quiet all day, I'm in a lot of them and always was. Used to be cranking with chatter, humor, supporting each other, encouraging each other, arguing, solving, ... communing. I see mostly quiet discords and niches of long time friends popping in periodically, but its not like it used to just continuously buzzzz in any of them.
Change as I said elsewhere, is inevitable, but I what I see here on my return is just a very small taste of what was once a much more vibrant smorgasbord.
Maybe its just me, but I've spent the last week pretty much scrolling feeds, community sections, bouncing in and out of discords, and I can't find the level of activity we had when I left. Big names taking long breaks between posts, tiny names not loading my feed with new faces. Just sort of a place, that kinda seems stuck in a rut.
But that's just one man's perspective. And one I've had echoed to me by some of the others returning and peeking in that I've been speaking with.
Something, inarticulable, is missing and I'm still writing long words trying to define and describe what I mean, about the lightening in the bottle we had caught, that seems like maybe has escaped a little bit. Maybe a lot.
Can we re-capture that?
little people got tired of being pushed here and there.
Plus, everyone's life cycle changes, and with it, extra time. Then, like you, life cycles will turn, and here you are again.
And yes, I do know what you are talking about.
But again, we keep in touch with those we care about and check up on them, too. When we get time, we write a post so others know we haven't died.
for now, that is all I have to give.
Take what you need, give what you can.
I want to continue to try and fuel the home fires to keep them burning so that everyone can do both of those things to their own needs and desires.
We just need to figure out the following:
A) Whether we are a pay-to-play system, and need to reduce minnow rewards and encourage investing.
B) Or Whether we are at least somewhat of a curation-based system and we need to reward minnows for engagement and curation so as to increase userbase and create a mushpot for investors later.
C) Whether any rogue whales are in the curation-based camp, and could be rallied to put forth their investment into marketing for a platform that grows minnows with the purpose of attracting sponsors for ads, thus an ROI for them.
D) Whether we can incorporate a comment-based / engagement-based reward system into the UI on @PeakD (and other d'apps) without having to get a majority witnesses vote to agree to the concept of a curation-centric platform. A back door, if you will.
E) Whether option D ^^^ would be enough to effect an actual change in the ecosystem so as to increase users, so as to implement option C, or whether it would be immediately squashed by witnesses and whales in some other fashion of the code that removes rewards from comment-curation.
(I'd love an itemized response if possible)
A and B: We're trying to be both, I agree we need to probably pick a lane to optimze either one, but that's probably also not going to happen, based on the design/intent that we would be both as a core premise of the whitepaper and chain overall.
C. Some are doing that already. Some aren't. I think that the incentive would have to be pretty high to motivate someone to spend time or money to make returns, when they can just sit in savings at 20% already.
D. We have that in the form of tokenized tipping and comment bots, you see them in every post's comment section. Am I a fan of how that is currently implemented? In spirit yes, in theory also yes, but in comment spam on my posts from bots? Nah, not so much.
And you've mentioned sponsored ads many times now in your comments, and ive avoided that till now, but what exactly do you even mean? Banners on dapp home pages? The dapps can already sell that real estate if they want to, but nobody has ever wanted us to look like myspace circa 2006 either. So I think that is mostly a non-starter.
We have promoted posts on peakd, and other dapps, thats a form of sponsored advertising for people who want to pay for exposure.
But if you mean hive paying for sponsored ads in the outside world, like a proverbial super bowl commercial, well, that might be a worthy discussion and exploration. Metrics needed, would a 150K spend on a cable tv commercial or youtube ad on popular channel niche videos on youtube bring us more positive attention and onboard new accounts compared to say, spending that 150K on a rally car nobody on Earth gives a rat's ass about or sees that accomplishes nothing and paying for a few elite dolphins to stay in fancy hotels and pitch slidedecks to people who just gom buy more bitcoin and arent the target audience anyway?
Thats up for debate and should be debated! Thats what the proposal system is for, making such pitches to our incumbant community and suggesting an idea like "project to buy a swath of youtube ad time and make a really compelling and polished video to invite new users to sign up and invest and whatever" and put it up and see what the people vote/say about it.
I'd just let it sit honestly, if the ROI was fairly predictable
I just want comments to trigger more views. It should be a thing.
it is fixed and predictable till a witness consensus changes it and that doesn't happen without a lot of public flogging of the idea first.
And yes, yes they should. That's how the real world works. Attention begets more attention.
It's a phenomenon but a predictive one that should be implemented for the sheer game theory of it. If someone likes it, that means other someones will like it. That means we can probably shill it and then generate more interest in it, and then pour some ads in that direction. The end.
A/B: No
C: No
D: Ecency already does this and does it well
E: Ecency is run by a Witness; as far as I know, he hasn't been squashed.
That is all I got. I am not awake.
but I will say this. You are making things way too complicated. If I feel better later will come back and write more.
I just want comments to trigger more views/reposts. It should be a thing. That's all I'm sayin.
I'll answer in the morning. Nighty night all you buzzers.
Would the genius see things differently to you or the same?
Irrelevant how they see things. The metaphor was more along the lines of comparing things like you see depicted in movies, there is a "rich idiot" stereotype and a "poor genius" underdog, usually a nerd, or a poorer person, or something and yet, they are the one with the better plan, the better idea.
It plays out in the movies that the underdog usually wins, but in real life, it tends to play out that the richer but maybe less useful one wins. Not always, but a lot of the time.
So how they see things, is less relevant to me than how passionately they CARE about things that make this a useful place in some fashion or other for everyone, Whether I agree with them or not. Not for just a few wealthy enough to make it their little toy to get money from the pool, regardless of the impact on others.
In this context though, the goal is to care about the health, success and future life of this blockchain, so I'd be rooting for the underdog with vote for the brilliant code suggestion or marketing idea to grow it all for everyone, over the rich one who votes to make sure his own personal cash gets cashier at the expense of the future of the thing's growth and acceptance as a viable place for everyone else.
Yes the story is familiar, For a reason . One side is given an advantage over the other and thus and thus a conflict of fairness and justice arises in the story.
Where the truth is different. Not the story told. The story above is told and generates a cut throat society. That is what we have. Where it appears no one wins. Still there is a puppet master. That everyone like to have there.
The truth is no one wins in RL not the idiot or the genius. They both end working for the same guy.
When confronted with passion. You defend yourself.
When the system that can do the things you say in the last comment, Are the same things you do not hear.
You ask no questions. So there is no answers.
I didn't really understand this bit.
But I don't like puppet masters, or master puppets. And those are the ones I dislike here as well. ESPECIALLY some of the master puppets.
Think we might have found agreement slightly.
There is at least four types.
For arguments. Call number 4 us.
Number 2 and three change according to need and are puppets and muppets.
Puppets show you things, Muppets tell you things.
The one is actually more than just one person. But the one controls the puppets and muppets with ever increasing ease.
No one wants to change that but I.
Act accordingly.
I do not act, that's your game.