Month 6 no coffee!
During New Years I reported that I had stopped drinking caffeine, and more specifically coffee. I've actually been carrying on this abstinence for pretty much half a year now, which if I'm being honest is surprising. I've tried to kick the habit before and always tend to "relapse" back into it. I've been able to avoid the daily routine of it for so long that I haven't even had any cravings for the stuff in months.
Sure, I'll still drink an ice tea once at a while, but the ritual of waking up in the morning and loading up on black coffee seems to be over. It's a nice cycle to break because my tolerance would just go up and up and I'd just keep drinking more and more until I felt terrible and would inevitably go cold turkey again to restart the process. No longer.
I'm not sure how coffee affects the rest of the world but it's absolutely not even worth drinking on a personal level. It does not wake me up. It does not allow me to focus. It's basically just a compulsive addiction, albeit a very socially acceptable one. Coffee has done me no favors and I'm glad to leave it behind.
Hive rebrand?
I've been seeing some chatter regarding the topic of changing the name of Hive to something that is less ambiguous and easier to find on a search engine. Makes sense I guess. I thought it was weird that the name was chosen so quickly in the first place without any kind of community discussion, but also back then the name itself wasn't exactly the highest priority in that type of emergency situation.
I remember back in those days the name floating around in my brain off the top of my head was Hydra. It made sense to give a decentralized network the title of a many-headed beast that couldn't be killed by chopping off a single head. Hail Hydra! Of course those are also the bad guy Nazis in Captain America so they can't always be winners from every angle!
Still I think this community focuses on things that maybe don't matter as much as we think they do. Something tells me Hive not getting a constant inflow of new users has very little to with branding and a lot more to do with a lack of utility. What's a new user going to do here, especially at a time like this in the middle of a bear market? Start blogging and maybe if they keep at it for a couple years and get lucky they'll be like me and make a good $5-$10 a post? That's not exactly a selling point.
The world is full of people that want to work for a fair wage. That becomes more and more true every year as a lot of the good jobs continue to be automated out of existence, assuming you live in a country that ever had good jobs in the first place. I've said this a dozen times already: but if Hive could pay people even $5/hour this place would have gone viral years ago. Such things are much easier said than done it would seem.
And I'm not even talking about the reward pool right now. The only way to guarantee wages like that is to have a sustainable business model that actually makes more money than it expends. If everyone attempts to make money in the same exact way that job becomes crowded with a yield of forever diminishing returns. I was hoping there's be over a dozen ways to earn money on Hive by now, but there isn't. If there was we certainly would not be on the backfoot by any measure.
The greater market says get ready for more pain.
I've been vocal about the market crashing soon, and it's basically started on the exact day of the New Moon. Another hilarious win for the moon cycles I guess. We are now trading below the MA(25) and testing support at the bottom of the liquidity void. Of course any price above $72k is actually pretty good as I have no complaints when we trade between the averages (bullish). I simply expect more number go down until September.
Again, these bear markets tend to crash three times and we've only done it twice. A similar crash as the one in November or February puts us right around $50k which would make a lot of sense for that type of pico bottom we are accustomed to given the four year cycle. I imagine I'll be looking to x10 long if we manage to be that low at the end of September. Honestly I might through it an x10 no matter what the price is. I'm pretty convinced we only have to suffer a year of this nonsense before blue skies return.
Should I blog less and code more?
I see so many testimonials that claim that AI is insanely good at coding now. I personally haven't tested them out for over a year so it feels like I'm missing out. Psychologically it's difficult for me to break into that kind of work because it's such an overwhelming commitment, but perhaps that's no longer true with all these badass models doing a bunch of the heavy lifting. I'm sure I'm overthinking this way too much and I should just stop thinking and start tinkering. Classic mistake.
It's great if you don't know how to code. If you're already a dev it sort of helps speed up some issues, but it's far from perfect and you have to hold its hand a lot, particularly if you're not building a fresh app and are using legacy code.
Can it whip up a good website quickly? Hell yeah. Can it set up a complex project? Sort of, eventually, if you know how to design it correctly and keep it within those guidelines.
Where it really shines seems to be converting one language to another, debugging, and boilerplate work that just kinda sucks to do.
Caveat being, I'm mostly talking about the AI software regular folks have access to.
Most of this goes out the window if you're using Cursor. That fuckin thing is amazing. Not perfect, but way less of a problem than all the other "leading" coding AI solutions. ...And it costs a small fortune as a result.
First I heard a lot about Sonnet Opus but then that fell off because everyone was using it. Now a lot of people say GPT 5.5 is super good. It seems like all of them have their own fanbase and they all operate differently, which is somewhat surprising.
It sure doesn't feel like we are heading in the right direction. Congrats on your quitting coffee. Best of luck keeping it up. It's probably one of the less serious vices you could have, but vices are vices nonetheless.
This is sorta true. However, were Hive (or Hydra, or some other label) to enable and support free speech in a world increasingly censored and permissioned, that is an essential - actually existentially necessary to life in an increasingly dangerous world - utility that will overcome any clunky UI, onboarding mechanisms, and even the stench of censorship Steem earned, and Hive inherited from it. To this day creators here on Hive are being DV'd on every post and comment despite those posts and comments not being any kind of spam, scam, or harm. Almost all of these authors are strong advocates of free speech, yet because they advocate policies or beliefs disapproved by powerful stakeholders, they are censored by the mechanism of being debanked on Hive.
I choose 5 such accounts to designate as beneficiaries on all my posts, and have done so ever since I discovered Peakd enabled me to do this, because tips cannot be flagged away. I alone can do little, but were more of us to do a little for accounts being censored, we could together do a lot.
This is the real issue that has caused the execrable user retention on this platform, and it is easy to ascertain that for yourself, by simply inquiring of influential people that once had accounts on Steem (and less so on Hive, because so few influential people have joined Hive) why they don't have accounts active here now. Because these people are influential in their markets, the censorship they suffered penetrates the markets for social media platforms that follow them, and today Hive gets very few new users because our reputation as censorious and ruled by corrupt profiteers precedes us.
A rebrand might help, but it would only help bring in folks so unaware of the market as to not realize Hydra was simply a new name for Hive, and that's not the strongest base of authors in the free speech market. If the rebrand were preceded by a strong reform of the code that presently directs >90% of inflation to the few dozen whales that now extract it to creators, an alluring aroma of upwards mobility would counteract the vile stench of censorship and profiteering that Hive reeks of today.
There are dozens of ways to make money on Hive today. However, most of them aren't earning money, but profiteering and rentier income. So, what you really mean is honest ways of making money, not rentier extraction parasitizing the work of others, which is how the vast majority of Hive inflation is today extracted from the rewards pool. Curation rewards are a prime example of rentier income on Hive, and this is why they have serially been increased across the history of hard forks, because those accounts that would most profit from increasing curation rewards are those accounts with the most substantial stake. Conversely author rewards have consistently declined, and rewards from posting comments - the engagement that is critically important to a free speech focused social media platform - have almost been eliminated. That's because rewards for posting require work, and profiteers and rentiers do not want rewards to be apportioned for work, because they don't want to work for their supper. The rewards that are paid to 'the help' come out of their profits, as they see it.
This is the fundamental flaw of stake weighted governance: them with the gold decide who gets the gold. Absent a different metric for governing the platform, or some miraculous reform of the profiteers that have been governing the platform since 2016, we're going to keep being parasitized into the grave, just as the US Congress keeps sucking the life out of the middle class in America while voting themselves ever greater benefits, and preventing the graft and corruption that is their most obvious skill and source of income from being justly adjudicated and penalized by law. The fox being in charge of the henhouse does not create the most egg production.
I suspect a trap. KYC biometric digital ID for access to digital devices is a glaringly obvious means of turning surveillance into economic control and it's coming. TIA (total information awareness) managed by AI algorithms using social credit scores will create absolute and complete enslavement, turning every letter you type, every syllable you speak, into groveling to your masters - or weapons that will be used against you. Today every AI prompt is a window into your soul that is surveilled and analyzed by creepy stalkers for nefarious purposes, so I don't use AI for anything.
Most of us are ignoring this, and most of us will be trapped. Traps are made by trappers to take wealth from the trapped. As a child I learned about fur trapping in Alaska, and I aim not to die like a furbearer in a trap, helpless to deliver my fury and delivering my fur instead. I may get skinned, but it is far harder to skin a fox on the loose than it is to skin one in a trap, and I'll make it as hard as possible. Another thing I've learned is that no furbearer is in as much danger as a fox in a henhouse. The more financial assets you have the more trappers want to skin you, and if you're eating their lunch in their henhouse, you'll be their top priority. I've learned the best way to protect your assets is to appear not to have any.
An ancient dragon guarding a hoard of gold in a deep, dark cavern isn't fabulously wealthy, but impoverished by their utter isolation from everyone but thieves that have learned their secret. The only company they get are their enemies, their only interactions violence and bloodshed. The same will be true about billionaires in bunkers, that do not understand the good company of good people is the only thing that makes life worth living, and the only thing that makes assets valuable. I hope the good will earned doing good work for good people in good faith will keep you in good company as the dividend of your good investments all your days.
Thanks!