To me more than anything, Hive means freedom.

Hive is where free people can speak their mind without fear of censorship. Hive means that free people can restart and build a foundation that is done the right way, replacing the bad money (Ned Scott, Justin Sun) with a real development fund to grow the Hive ecosystem. Let’s face, under the direction of one moron, Steemit was doomed. And under the direction of two different morons, Steemit is double doomed.

Ned Scott was like an abusive boyfriend who drags you down everyday. Justin Sun, on the other hand is crypto’s coronavirus, a virus of censorship, oppression, authoritarian control, co-opting, and zero integrity. It appears that Justin’s Sun’s modus operandi is to buy out existing crypto projects and rebrand them into “TRON products”. Instead of building a social media site from scratch himself on TRON, his plan was just to co-opt Steemit, dissolve the Steem blockchain and force all the Steem dApps onto his own platform.

You might ask yourself what such a move would mean, and one trip to tronscan.org https://tronscan.org/#/sr/representatives tells the story of how the Tron blockchain is run: Justin Sun just recently began voting with the genesis stake to choose the SR’s (Super Representatives are the same as Witnesses) plus guess who controls 55.84% of the Tron blockchain? Binance.

His mistake was thinking that buying Steemit would equate to buying the entire Steem ecosystem.

I bet he thought that it would be easy to just port all Steem dApps to the Tron blockchain. And he mistakenly thought that all the developers on Steem would just lie down and submit to his control. Justin Sun was wrong.

He should have bought a different dApp that was searching for a new blockchain home, not a dApp that was literally the first to launch the Steem blockchain.

Anyway, if anyone had any doubts about Justin Sun’s integrity, we now realize that he has none. He has shown through his recent actions that he will resort to any tactic: censorship (the Steem witnesses who created the Steem blockchain are completely censored on Steemit), bribery (there are transactions that show Justin sending money to the exchanges who helped him overthrow Steem governance), and deception (the reward amount of upvotes is now hidden on Steemit’s main page). It’s ugly what he is doing with Steemit.

Hive represents a clean start, with freedom of thought, integrity and decentralized governance as its core philosophy.

While no system is perfect, I think everyone on Hive realizes now we have a rare opportunity to get it right this time around. We have a new energy, that is being generated by a swarm of real human beings who believe that decentralization is not some hollow buzzword, but is something worth fighting for.

We have a lot of work to do now. We cannot become complacent, slothful or misguided by greed. Now is a rare opportunity to do things right. I am actually grateful that Justin Sun came along and ignited this revolution. Without his idiocy, a clean slate without the STINC ninja-mined stake probably would not have happened so quickly.

This is truly a rare opportunity.

Let’s not fuck it up this time.

I’m committed to helping Hive thrive. I, along with @traciyork are running the Hive People Twitter account. Follow us on Twitter and let’s get this Hive party started.

Big shoutout to @cryptofinally for her recent Hive Tweetstorm that really helped the entire Crypto Twitter community realize that Hive is the place to go for real decentralization:

There are a lot of existing crypto influencers on Hive, that could use some exposure, as they are already big on other platforms like Twitter. Some are inactive, others are active. Take a look. We need a crypto influencer project to be supported by the HIve Dev Fund. Here are some very influential crypto influencers that for some reason are not getting the same attention on our platform:

Boxmining: https://peakd.com/@boxmining
Naomi Brockwell: https://peakd.com/@skycorridors
Crypto Tips: https://peakd.com/@heiditravels
Kenneth Bosak: https://peakd.com/@kennethbosak
Crypto Finally: https://peakd.com/@cryptofinally

If we are really going to do things right this time around, we have to support the crypto influencers as named above.

Please add more to this list if you know of any. They are already influential in the wider crypto space, so we need to change our behavior (too much circle jerk voting), and support those who are already popular in crypto. I also want to encourge existing social media influencers to submit proposals to the Hive dev fund system so they can bring new social growth to Hive.

Check out existing proposals here: https://peakd.com/proposals
I might be submitting a proposal to develop the exposure of these already successful crypto influencers. I’m still thinking about this, and the best way to do it.

The way other projects do it: they pay crypto influencers to make videos about their project. This gains the most traction, marketing and eyeballs as they already have a significant follower base. I am seriously considering establishing a Hive Influencer Program whereby successful crypto influencers who have at least 5000 social media followers can apply to get funding to create videos about Hive.

I’m in research mode for existing Influencer Programs, so expect something from me in the coming weeks. I want to wait until Chrome accepts the Keychain extension into its library so that onboarding can be easier. I took a poll on the Hive People Twitter account and most people agree that Hive onboarding is the main problem right now.

I tested out various methods of getting a new Hive account, and the experience was miserable. I know it’s very early, but this should be a priority. I also have my own ideas on how this should be done. There should be a one pager, with pressing a button, instead of all the random text and confusing instructions. This is another area I want to focus on, but right now an Influencer Program is needed to attract the successful crypto influencers to Hive.

Thanks to all the devs who made Hive possible. Let's do this right this time around.

Hive On!

Follow @HivePeople on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HivePeople

What Hive Means To Me: @theycallmedan Writing Contest Entry