However, it feels like the social part used to be a lot more active some years back than it is today.
Every effort shall be made to make my comment not only civil but gentle as well. It seems like we both agree that the STEEM pre-HIVE days were more active, engaging and all around more exciting than the present state of the social media aspect of the blockchain.
There is no python generated pie charts for me to factually and statistically prove my point, yet taking the community and splitting it asunder by approximately 20 self centered individuals that did not want to loose control of their asset printing press might have had something to do with HIVE's present state?
The fork also highlighted the flaws in the PoS governance system and that one would be just as safe leaving their tokens in an exchange wallet as one that the same grubby (approximate) 20 individuals have control to edit upon will. Who would even think of buying HIVE as any kind of crypto investment with that grubby bunch ready to abscond your funds at will?
At best it is a utility token and the social media element will be soon seen (if not already) as just another Dapp, with gaming and other Dapps eventually leaving the social media users in the same light as we might view loyal AOLers. They still exist to this day!
You will find me posting almost daily here, so this is not a hater talking. There are people here that mean as much or more as folks known in RL. But let's call a spade a spade and see this as the failed "experiment" as the creator who walked away from it himself called it.
Anything that brings out meaningful engagement gets my upvote.
Thanks for stopping by; I do remember you from "way back when."
I'm not going to pour energy into railing against what's already in the history books... I can think of a myriad reasons why things have turned out the way they have (from "first mover advantage" to excessive fragmentation), but I am primarily a blogger/writer and not a blockchain politician.
I will say this, though, excess "addiction" to decentralization isn't always ideal because you end losing certain benefits (scale, among them) when you break things into too many bits.
I have never been a huge fan of PoS governance precisely because someone can just buy their way in, if they are stealthy and cunning enough. That said, I am yet to encounter a perfect solution... maybe aside from all of us being sovereign nations of ONE, and that also seems less than ideal, so then it stops being perfect.
You're likely quite right in suggesting this is becoming more of a utility chain, and I'm sort of OK with that, as long as those who build here actually develop some dApps that are of interest to the greater world. Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to compare, but Ethereum is pretty lame and useless *on its own," but what runs on Ethereum is anything but. If we'd bought ETH at $10 when Steem started... we'd be pretty happy today, if we still had it.
As for Dan, I'm not surprised he moved on... because that's his MO. He's a creative genius who creates, but soon gets bored with nurturing his creations. A lot of creative geniuses are; they typically end up with a lot more patents than millions.
I'm not far from 8 years here, myself... and plan to keep plugging along as best I can. Because I just enjoy the "social publishing" aspect of it, and it beats the heck out of places like Medium.
With my disappointment of the HIVE/STEEM fork my tokens were powered down and shifted to ETH, hoping that they may do a better job with the PoS fork they were talking about at the time.
Those grubbies mentioned should be thanked for motivating my powering down. By early July of this year (about 4 years later) those same ETH had 10X'ed. They were cashed out just before ETH's moderate crash against BTC this year. The funds were taken to purchase a 36' blue water Cabot-36 Cutter in Toronto, ON. It was then sailed through Lake Ontario, the Thousand Islands, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to Montreal, Quebec and down the Saint Lawrence River to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, then to Prince Edward Island and at last, 6 or so weeks later, returning to the province where my journey started; Nova Scotia.
Hell yeah it feels pretty happy to me. 🏴☠️
That's pretty awesome how the journey turned out for you! It's always good to hear that crypto "worked out" for someone.
Nice boat!
Only about 22 hours out of Halifax NS, in a small town called Port Hawkesbury, awaiting winds to cool down to finish the trip home. All thanks to HIVE/STEEM in a convoluted way.