I've been building things on Hive again lately. A few different projects over the past few months, getting my hands dirty with the chain, putting in the work. And I've noticed something that's been bugging me enough to finally write about it.
Hive feels empty.
Not literally empty. There are still people here. The whales are still doing their thing. Posts are still going up. Votes are still being cast. But the energy is gone. The community that used to make this place feel alive has thinned out in a way that's hard to ignore once you see it.
Remember When This Place Was Fun?
Cast your mind back to 2023. Someone could build a simple dice betting game and people would absolutely lose their minds over it. Not because the game was some technical marvel, but because people were genuinely excited about what was being built on this chain. Splinterlands was thriving. There were dApps popping up left and right. People were using blockchain for actual things beyond just posting and hoping for upvotes.
There was a buzz. A real sense that Hive was a platform where builders could create and users would show up, participate, and care. It wasn't perfect, but it felt like a community rallying around something bigger than individual post payouts.
What Are We Now?
Fast forward to today and I'm looking around wondering what happened. I scroll through my feed and I see project update posts from various Hive projects (and there are a LOT of alternative UIs for Hive, which is a whole other conversation). I see people writing their daily posts. I see the usual suspects doing their thing.
But where are the users? Where are the people who used to get excited about new dApps? Where are the builders who were experimenting with what a blockchain social platform could actually do?
It feels like Hive has settled into being a blogging platform where the primary motivation is earning money from writing. And look, there's nothing inherently wrong with earning from your content. That was always part of the value proposition. But somewhere along the way it feels like that became the only proposition.
Did We Drive Away The Builders?
This is the question that keeps nagging at me. Did Hive's culture shift in a way that pushed out the people who wanted to build things here? When I look at the ecosystem now, I see a lot of content creation tools and not a lot of utility. The chain itself is technically solid. Fast, feeless transactions, custom JSON operations, a built-in governance system. The bones are good.
But are we using any of that to its potential? Or are we just running a blogging platform on infrastructure that could do so much more?
I think part of the problem is that Hive's identity has narrowed. We used to talk about being a decentralised social blockchain with endless possibilities. Now it feels more like we're the blogging blockchain, and even that feels generous some days with the AI slop I regular see here getting ridiculous weighted upvotes (don't get me started). The community aspect, the part where people actually interacted with each other beyond comment-for-upvote exchanges, has faded.
The Uncomfortable Questions
I don't have all the answers, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves about a few things:
Are we okay with Hive just being a place where people post content to earn crypto? Is that enough to sustain a blockchain long term?
Have we created an environment where building something new on Hive isn't worth the effort because the user base isn't there to support it?
Do people even care about blockchain utility anymore, or has the broader market shift toward speculation over substance hit us too?
And maybe the hardest question: is the current state of Hive a temporary lull, or is this just what Hive is now?
I'm Still Here, But...
I'm still building on Hive. I still think the technology is solid and the chain has potential. But potential doesn't mean much if nobody shows up to use what gets built. You can have the best blockchain in the world, but if the community has checked out or condensed down to a small group of people posting and voting in circles, then what's the point?
It's hard to stay motivated when you build something and it just disappears into the void. You spend weeks or months on a project, you ship it, you post about it, and then... nothing. A few upvotes, maybe a comment or two, and then it's buried under the next wave of daily posts. That wears on you after a while.
Builders need feedback. They need users. They need to know that someone out there actually cares about what they're making. Without that, you start questioning why you're building on Hive at all instead of just shipping it somewhere else where people might actually show up and use it.
I'd genuinely love to be wrong about this. Tell me I'm missing the pockets of activity. Tell me there are communities I haven't found yet. Tell me the builders are still here and I'm just not looking in the right places.
Because right now, from where I'm standing, it feels like the lights are on but nobody's home.
What do you think? Has Hive changed, or have I just gotten cynical? Drop a comment and let's talk about it. I'd rather have an honest conversation about where we're at than pretend everything is fine.
I surely got cynical. I log in daily to see the same empty streets. Yes there are some posts and some of them are maybe interesting. Some of them are just regular check-ins and some of those may be automated. The only fresh activity I see is on the short-blogs.
Those here on hive have habits on using Hive. It's hard to change habits so we have to build things that disrupt them, and at the same time it attracts people from the outside.
Can we build something along those lines?
@meno @sagarkothari88 @thecrazygm please gently tell him he's wrong.
With apologies to those I missed.
!BBH
I don't know, I'm feeling the cynicism also. I've been here for seven years as a community owner (and thus know what it is to build community). When communitys started on Hive they were exciting, energetic places to be. EAch community would do things to gain folowers and supporters, and build a wallet where they could do that financially also (Natural Medicine nearly had 100k in it's wallet from hard work and delegations) until it shifted towards a more egalatarian approach and community curation posts and efforts were downvoted in the interest of keeping that under control. I'm a bit cynical about this - that's perhaps another conversation.
I turn away from a lot of development and projects as I'm not sure about the merit of any of them. It's a solid build - as you say, the bones are good - what do new projects offer? Is there really anything exciting about the new or is it just dressed up and performative?
The price drops, we all leave the building - that's usual. People don't play unless there's money involved - they feel no personal responsibility toward making it a good place through engagmenet, for example, or more egalatarian voting rather than just 'vote me and I'll vote you because I like you because you are like me and we hang out in Discord together with our cocks out' - sorry not sorry, you're Australian, you get it.
And there isn't hte checkss and balances that prevent bad players - to a reasonable extent, downvotes of course. There's a lot of things here that turn average users off - the kind of users that do see it as a blogging platform. Even for people like me who've been around forever, we get jaded as well.
I tend to agree - but we've been in big fucking lulls before, and we've come back up.
I just wish everyone would see it as not just a place to earn a dollar - but then, we've said that a million times before.
Maybe we need a separate feed that IS just projects - not a community per se but something quite visible whether you opt in or not, so we can see these happenings more visibly. I'd personally like to see decisions about Hive be less weighted to those with bigger wallers, bad players turned invisible once they go past a certain rep (not just 'muted' by the user, but unable to be seen at all, preventing bot comments and other idiocy) and communities disappear if they're not maintained by admin/owners, and more even support of various niches (why do Ladies of Hive and creative writing get less votes by whales, on a whole, than other content? That question I know the answer to, but I would like to be otherwise) But these are all just me via using Hive as a blog, not as a developer. Blogging here has enormous benefits to those who blog.
Fuck I could talk crap for hours but prob none of it answers your questions. I'm just more suprised I haven't met you before - have I? Victorian here.
Nah we haven't met before. Queensland here so not too far off.
I've been around since January 2018 so just passed the 8 years mark myself now. So yeah everything you said about communities getting kneecapped by downvotes when they were actually building something real, that's the kind of thing that makes people walk away and never come back. Natural Medicine having 100k in the wallet from actual hard work and then getting slapped down is a perfect example of why people get cynical. You can't tell people to build and then punish them for succeeding at it.
The voting circle stuff, I mean, we all see it. Everyone knows what's going on. Bros in Discord jerking each other off with upvotes while someone writes a genuinely great piece of creative fiction and gets 40 cents. That's not a mystery, it's just depressing.
I like your projects feed idea honestly. Discoverability is garbage right now. Things get built and die in silence because nobody even knew they existed. Something with more visibility that doesn't require people to go hunting would help.
The rep system doing nothing meaningful against bad actors is another one. Muting is a bandaid on a broken leg. But try getting consensus on anything stronger on a chain where the people with the most stake also have the most say in governance. You see the problem. I get why that other failed fork removed downvotes, they don't do anything and they can be used by whales to silence people far too easily.
Look the bones are good, I genuinely believe that. The tech underneath is solid and undervalued. But the social layer on top has calcified into something that actively repels normal users, and until that changes the tech doesn't matter because nobody's here to use it.
Anyway yeah I could go on about this for hours too. Good to meet someone else who gives enough of a shit to be angry about it. I'm gonna keep building and see what happens, it won't be for a lack of trying, ha.
I was a little worried to come back and read your reply actually - I thought my little rant might fall wrong. It's very nice for my complaints to be recognized if not validated. There's certainly a lot I can say about it but I don't want to dig a hole! The Natural Medicine thing almost broke me. The advent of community was such a heady time - it was honestly the most exciting, vibrant thing to happen post Steem. There was a real sense each community was creating something important that could spill out from Hive into the wider world. I mean, we had business cards made and all. To have that dashed really floored me. Looking at it from a distance now, it's kinda crazy how all that enthusiasm just flopped and there's a lot of fantastic people just have up around then.
I could write a book about those times! Honestly. It's hard to believe it was that long ago now - I remember being in India as covid hit and then in the UK running a community party on Discord and trying not to have a mental breakdown.
I wish we could at get that vibrancy again. I know people have different ways of seeing what's good for this platform, I totally respect that, but as you suggest, it's not fair that many of us who are fully invested emotionally don't have the financial sway to make it happen. State of the world though innit?
You have no idea how this recognition makes me feel. I feel like I'm the only one seeing this most of the time.
It's really nice to finally connect, and I really appreciate being seen and heard more than you could possibly know.
The fact you're still here despite how bleak and uncertain things have become goes to show you haven't given up and I think the universe has a way eventually rewarding that kind of optimism. Even if it feels like it takes forever to get it, haha. Now the overall crypto market is in a negative space, we are about to see who was really here for the money and who was here because they believed in the tech, community and potential of Hive (same for a lot of other projects, but especially Hive).
Thanks for making me feel better. Its hard to imagine a life without Hive.
I'm still building, daily, I may not post as often as I did (seasonal depression always slows me down in winter) but I still work on my projects daily.
@meno just built snappie, and it seems to be doing very well and even bringing in new users.
That's good to hear and I genuinely hope seasonal depression eases up for you soon. Respect for showing up and building every day even when it's hard.
I hadn't heard about Snappie, I'll check it out. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about though. When someone builds something that actually brings in new users, that's worth celebrating and supporting way more than we currently do. The fact that I didn't even know about it kind of proves the point of the post. Discovery on Hive is broken. Good projects get buried under the feed and unless you happen to stumble across them or someone tells you, they just exist in a vacuum.
What are you working on if you don't mind me asking?
Most of the time I spend trying to keep my nectar fork of beem tidy. But also 10k other useless tools and scripts most of them here: https://tools.crypto-dreamr.com and my github which is a mess of randomness.
I am still building.
Just to highlight that, I am not going away, I am putting extra time for posting updates on top of continuous development.
We just published Distriator App on AppStore
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/distriator/id6758208375
It's also available on Google Play Store.
You can follow me for more dev updates.
@keithtaylo thank you for tag.
Congrats on getting Distriator on the App Store. That's not a trivial thing, Apple's review process alone is enough to make most people give up. Having it on both stores is a big deal.
And I want to be clear, my post wasn't saying there are zero builders left. People like you are still here grinding. The problem is more about the ratio. For every person like you who's actively shipping and posting updates, there used to be ten more. And the community energy around new projects used to be way louder than it is now.
The fact that you have to put in extra time just to post updates on top of actually building tells me something is off with the incentive structure. Building should be the thing that gets rewarded, not the marketing of the building. But right now if you don't post about it, nobody knows it exists.
I'll give you a follow. Keep shipping
Well things I do, never did for funding.
These are 2 projects which I built without any funding.
Only passion & love.
There are more, I just need to set proper DNS settings. Projects like HiveDonate, HiveWitnessVote, HiFind - are built - just needs redeployment. I'll do soon.
I do publish updates every now & then.
That's great. But I think passion and love isn't sustainable for anything overly long-term that has operating costs. If your apps are cheap to run, then it's probably not a big deal. But if you're running apps that have unpredictable or ramping costs, sadly passion & love don't pay server bills.
But I am the same. I've never earned a cent from anything I do, it's just my time and absorbing the server costs myself. But I do think if the Hive community were more supportive of the cool and unique apps/tools here, it would create a better environment and attract other creators too.
There is so much fight for getting DHF.
And once you get funding, you attract so much discussions & of course those are valid ones most of the time, but at the same time such discussions are demotivating as well. People start throwing abuses.
So, for now, I keep building without DHF because I like ideas. If expenditures are growing exponentially, I'll re-evaluate & see what can be done.
DHF - I keep it for last resort 🤣
with hReplier
For some people they don't have to fight very hard because they know they can easily get DHF funding, which is a huge flaw. And the state of crypto right now and dire liquidity situation of Hive, there really should be a mechanism to suspend Hive funding if I am being honest. We shouldn't be funding anything right now. The recent proposal to fund Claude Code for people to build on Hive really triggered me, to be honest, it seems like such a waste of money.
I love building for Hive, but man... it's saddening to see this place constantly shoot itself in the face with bad decisions, lack of transparency (which is ironic for a blockchain).
I will keep building on Hive for the love of it (I've never been compensated for anything I've done) and maybe one day that might materialise into some support. But this is definitely not the ecosystem if any dev is looking to be compensated for doing honest work. We only seem to compensated vague grifters who wow people with complex magical sounding ideas that don't go anywhere and do dishonest work.
It is what it is.
Yes. I know & I can also say - it is what it is.
but it doesn't stop me from trying.
Right now, This Bhagwad Gita's Verse, keep me going.
It simply means that focus on your action and not on the byproduct.
Which is more important – Results or Actions?
Obviously, actions, because if you want good results, first we work on our actions.
Focus on the sure (actions), not on the unsure (results).
Because if the results are not as per your expectations, pain is unavoidable.
=====
Just hopeful for best, and keep doing best.
with hReplier
Do you mind if i ask you to share what you've build so far?
May be, one day, we can work together - who knows!
with hReplier
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