Some Pessimistic Thoughts About the State of Hive

in #hive5 months ago (edited)

The Good

These are where I feel Hive excels or at least has had some level of success.

  • Surviving as a project for over 7 years
  • Surviving as a community for over 7 years
  • A whole bunch of people who are really dedicated to the project. You might even say passionately committed to the project.
  • There's a wide range of front ends and applications which continue to run successfully on the chain
  • Fast and reliable transactions
  • Having salvaged the broken HBD and turned it into a genuine, if illiquid stablecoin stationarycoin.
  • HBD genuinely being used as money, and increasingly so, though still at a very small scale.
  • Having a functional DAO which provides the resources to support the most important 'infrastructure' elements of the network, eg. Keychain, Core Developers, HBD stability etc.
  • Avoiding governance capture of exchanges or other actors in the crypto space who are not especially aligned with our interests.

The Bad

These are the problems that seem to just continually persist for Hive. In some cases these issues have gotten worse since the fork away from Steem.

  • Community struggles to collectively prioritize issues and focus on resolving the most pressing and/or persistent problems, ie. level of organization.
  • Insularity of incentives - content is primarily directed inwards to the community, with no sense in pursuing outside traffic to raise awareness of Hive front ends.
  • The wider crypto community appears to be entirely oblivious to Hive
  • Outreach programs such as on Twitter appear to end up having Hivers just promoting Hive to eachother without attaining any meaningful outside reach.
  • Inability to attract capital outside of the luck of having our tokens on UpBit (where people who know almost nothing about Hive continue to speculate, ever increasing the amount of Hive held on that exchange).
  • Difficulty in innovating or improving on our tokenomics - we have no way to collect data on how well a change in the consensus rules will actually work, or if they have even worked in retrospect. We can only speculate on how tokenomics may change things for the chain, but even when a change is applied we have no way to know if it actually improved things or made them worse.
  • User on boarding numbers extremely low - periods of high user growth were not sustained for long.
  • User retention low. New user retention particularly bad and persistently low.
  • User experience is still a long way off of web2
  • Lack of trading volume or speculative interest in the core token puts us at risk of delisting, making us reliant on a small number of exchanges. It's also possible that exchanges will come to view Hive as a security in the future (rightly or wrongly).

Please feel free to comment on my inclusions, or add more positives or negatives that I may have missed.

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  • positive: A very interesting discovery I just made was to type the headline of my last post into the Google search engine: "Why Marriage means freedom" and already appear at number 9 (!) in the list, even scrolling further down to find another hit. This is remarkable and demonstrates the scope and the immensity of peakd's content. (From this result I'd conclude that an interested person who found something by using a search engine might want to land on my page and comment or share.)

This means that the realisation that people are forming the habit of no longer actively typing keywords into the search engines/search fields themselves, but instead only going to the pages recommended by the algorithm. This is something that cannot be blamed on a platform.

If the user gets into the habit of being lazy and no longer wants to research and search for himself, he turns from an active user into a passive consumer. However, this could be helped by making the search field on a platform extremely prominent and encouraging users to think for themselves again. You could provide them with a much more attractive search field than is currently available on Hive (can't speak for peakd). I would describe it as quite pathetic and hope that this offence might have some effect ;)

  • Somewhat in between of negative/positive: Also on Hive the algorithm determines which posts to find (new, hot, trending, muted, payout - with "trending" as a default. I wonder why the "muted" category is being included - gives me a bad taste right away).

But what if you approached searching for content differently? Or did we all give up on the user who wants to look for himself and instead rely on the already strong habit of "being served"? Was this not something where the curious internet user once started and wanted to become other than the average tv-watcher?

The good and bad have been iterated plenty. And I think you covered the important ones. What we need is to turn it around. Ever since I wrote my first post, user growth and retention has been an issue. Many ideas to solve this have been proposed and realized. None had the effect we needed. My hope is on significant developments which add a certain value and through that draws in users and funds. Back in the day Splinterlands was quite a hit for example. What it will be in the future, I don’t know. I’m hoping more use cases for HBD will show us something good

User retention low. New user retention particularly bad and persistently low.
User experience is still a long way off of web2

That's because we still believe in content and even long content. We have not developed something that would just let people not bother about length of content but still be able to participate,e.g. if we do surveys and then reward people for participating in them, then they would happily do so. Same with review apps..

I can agree with most of that. We are failing to bring in new people, although efforts like the rally car ought to have at least got some eyeballs on the brand.

When Musk took over Twitter we had an opportunity to get some of the exiles, but many went to Mastodon instead. I do wonder if any ended up here when looking for Hive Social.

New users need to have a good experience, but that may still be a mess. We need good tutorials to get them started.

Despite all that Hive is still going and will soon be 4 years separate from the old chain.

This post covered some similar ground.

This is a good list. There is also a perception, rightly or wrongly, that Hive is a haven for extreme right-wingers. This is the typical response I get from liberals when I bring up Hive. Frankly, I don't know what they mean, but if a perception persists and people refuse to adopt a platform based on that perception, then it might as well be reality.

We need discussion forums and wiki pages. Most projects here on hive are relying on Discord for their communications and it is just a busy chat room. We need to improve the communities here on hive so that each project has its own forum and wiki pages. We have communities and posts as this is but we need to improve the design to be a forum so that each community has a place to have discussions in a more organized way. php forum example https://www.howardforums.com/forum.php or a improved version of reddit,

exchanges will come to view Hive as a security in the future (rightly or wrongly).

what is a "security" ? i have always had that question.

That's right, some changes are definitely needed here, but the way we see it, the people who are working hard and creating original content here, any big user above their posts. No, and the automatic voting system that is running, votes are cast only on that, so we have seen that people have added each other in the automatic vote, when all the people post, they are voted at the same time and that is the reason. Users who are working hard can never get their posts up.

So many good success hive has recorded and I strongly believe it will continue in years to come more

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