I've been back here for a few days now, posting quite a bit as I'm watching a market or have some idea about some post, and trying to curate good content. This place is like a full time job. That's part of why it's not worth more, but what I'm here to talk about is a type of post that I've seen time and time again that frankly annoys me. I'm somewhat guilty myself. I still believe in this asset. It's why I never sold the Hive in my account. But I'm not going to tell you that hive is going to $5 or $50 or might become a top asset. To be frank, there are quite a few issues here.
When Steemit was running things, I had hopes they would fix the issues. I should have realized that was bullshit because they were impossible to communicate with. They acted like they were going to take ideas under advisement and then went absent.
Hive is a lot better. I know many of the people working on hive...somewhat, in the online sense that I've talked to them over chat a few times, not in the personal sense. What I'm saying is that they're approachable. If I found a serious bug, I know that I could talk to a few people and I'd probably be put in touch with someone to deal with it right away. Even if I just needed help with something, many of them would help. Not because I've talked to them once months ago, but because they're invested in here, and are approachable. I could not have said the same about Steemit.
With a few more resources, and the right direction, I don't see a problem with Hive eventually being worth a lot more. I believe in this place and am long on it. But it's just not happening right now. We might see a new ATH with a pump, and quite a few new people showing up, and that might get us there, but as it is now? Nah.
Hive still has some of the same issues as Steem did.
It's too hard!
cue "That's what she said"
Someone gets here, it needs to be easier to onboard them. We need a service to manage keys. Yes, NEED. And the reason we don't currently is risk. Many people do not want to deal with that headache. But if we want to be the crypto Facebook, or MySpace, or LiveJournal, we NEED easier account management and on-boarding.
Maybe not even for big accounts. Maybe once accounts get to a certain size, they have a process where they move to either personal management for a fee, or moving towards handling their own keys.
Image used under CC BY ND (source)
The past of Steemit also looms overhead a bit for those in the crypto sphere. How have they solved those issues? Have they fixed them? Could some asshole take over Hive too? These are questions I've been asking myself this entire time, and it scares me. They might not be the same as many users, but I think they might be nervous if they heard the story.
One of the other issues with on-boarding has a lot to do with communities. For years I kept telling people we needed communities. I was not referring to simply posting groups. What we have is a lot better than Steem was when I joined it, but it's not enough. When I came back here, I had no idea what to do to up my earnings. I am still desperately looking around for how.
One issue is disliking Discord and it's centralization.
I remember I once was a member of a sort of community on Steem. I ended up earning a lot more while I was a member, and getting curated by people there quite a bit. But a part of it really irked me due to a mentality that I had developed in my time there about curation being a sort of noble job. Part of the requirement of that community was to upvote a certain number of people every day. I think it was only like one or two, I don't remember. Normally this wasn't an issue. Some days I had to spend far too long trying to find something worthy of upvoting. Later I found out many members weren't even holding up to this rule, and just no one was checking. Also needed to comment to them and then report that you did on the discord. That was just annoying as someone with mild social anxiety. But these rules did work to ensure everyone in the community earned more.
Now I somewhat regret leaving it, but the anxiety that was building up to go against what I believed was not something I enjoyed. At the time, earning a few more bucks every post was not worth curating people I did not think deserved my upvote, which at that time was quite substantial due to a delegation.
I'm not going to flag a post unless it's crap that's overvalued, or stolen content, but I also am really hesitant to vote for many shit posts.
That community was private invite only. But it comes to mind every time I think about communities.
The solution to this problem, communities that actually encourage engagement and help users, does not have to be a major change to the chain itself. Though there are a few changes that could be done to make communities more involved. The front-ends could just integrate links for communities and maybe FAQ's.
There's a hive chat that's pretty much empty. Because it's just one link in a whole list. I only go there because I was a member of Steem chat. I haven't checked out PeakD's chat yet because when I clicked it, it didn't support the key manager I use, and I didn't feel like bothering to open my keys at the time. So I can't speak for that. But that chat was a major thing for me personally to interact with people on Steem, largely because Discord sucks and I don't like it. But many communities are really successful on Discord.
Here we have a chat that's easy to enter for Hive members, and no one in it because it's not really prominently displayed. PeakD's chat also uses your Hive keys, so that may be easy for people to join. Many people use Discord, so that may be easy for people since they're used to it, but their current accounts may be for another purpose, and they may need to setup a new one just for Hive. You still have the same issue as well, where no one new knows about your Discord.
These barriers for entry as an issue.
Things need to be easier.
People don't need to earn $50 a post from the begining, but they need to see a way to make progress. Right now you get here, there seems even less help than Steem, and you gotta figure things out, and as you try to blog maybe you make a few cents, and you have no idea what you're doing and it feels like there's no clear path forward. That loses users.
There are more issues here, but many of them boil down to the same basic concept, we need to make it easier. Right now this place was obviously designed by a coder. We need someone to translate this place to the layman and make it easier to start.
Until this happens, forget your dreams of $5 hive. Unless you plan on convincing Reddit to pump this place. Even then you probably won't see $5 Hive, because we have tons of people every day getting paid in Hive with "paper hands" selling massive amounts of the cryptocurrency. That's the final thing that I know we need to get Hive to be worth more, more reasons to hold. This one is actually being well taken care of by devs here from what I see though. Lots of people want to build up the Hive they're holding, and sell it for alts to hold as well.
But this is all just my opinion. What do you think?
You touch on a lot of issues here, and you've put them out in a way that impels me to answer you.
I, like yourself was a big Steemit fan, and benefitted greatly from the site. I too saw issues that I thought would get fixed eventually as they ironed out this brand new concept. However I saw a reluctance from Steemit Inc to invest the millions they were making to market the site and get people using us while we were on a hot streak and being mentioned in various mainstream media titles. Unfortunately this has not changed, and in fact this is less likely to happen for one major reason, there is now a hell of a lot less organisation.
We all beat the drum of decentralisation, but the plain simple fact of the matter is, you cannot have true direction without some sort of centralised organisation making decisions. Let's not forget that Communities actually started out on Steemit. As piss-poor as Ned was at organising, he still managed some organisation.
The next problem is that the site is run by programmers and not savvy business people, this means that they get excited about things that normal users don't care about. This is easily confirmed by looking at any random announcement by the Hive team, it's full of technical jargon that only other developers understand or care about. You will see this by reading the comments, there are so many that basically say "I don't understand this, but I guess if you're excited about it, it must be good"
Next we have to look to good old fashioned economics as to why Hive isn't worth more. Possibly the oldest rule of an economic system is you have to have supply and demand. If you have an infinite supply of something for which there is a limited demand, the price for that thing will be low. The Hive elephant in the room is that this site creates millions of Hive every single day, over a billion per year, to be honest it's remarkable Hive is worth anything at all.
Then if we look at it from a creator's point of view, as you yourself opined, unless you have direct Whale assistance, or you yourself are a Whale, then earning a living wage from Hive is impossible. Even if you are in that exalted position, making a living is still pretty difficult as the 7 day payout model hampers you from making like you would on other platforms like Youtube.
If you make a video on Youtube, you could potentially earn from that video in 5 years time, on Hive you could have an article viewed by a million people, but if only fifty Hive users click on it, you'll earn a few bucks. Plus of course any advertising on Hive doesn't go to the creator.
Will we ever see a $5 Hive? Maybe if millions of people start using Hive, but that won't happen because the only way to find out about Hive at the moment, is to have someone who already uses it, telling you about it. Maybe you'll click an article link, but in that scenario a user is more interested in the content of the link than the platform it has shared to. For instance I have clicked a story this morning about Facebook blocking Australian users. I clicked it from Twitter, and whilst I could tell you the contents of the article, I have absolutely no idea what platform it was on.
For me Hive is just a place to keep practicing my writing (not that I have done that lately) and a good place to find out about what's going on in the world of crypto.
I hope this article gets more than the current $1.00 it's on, it deserves it!
Cg
You make some really good points. I think they stand on their own, but it's a bit rude to not reply.
I believe Leo is using their advertising revenue to reward users with, and I believe that more front-ends should do something similar. Facebook tried to pretend they didn't care about advertising for years. We see how that worked out. I think we should establish rules and precedent for the types of advertising that's acceptable for different front-ends now, and use the income, with tracking statistics, to tip users that continue to use the block-chain and encourage people to use particular front-ends. That is one potential solution to the continued revenue issue.
I think that particular issue may require an actual rethinking of the chain itself though, to allow for Hive income beyond just one week. The advertising model may work, but I think it may be necessary to consider a change to the actual payment model.
You're right that it's run by programmers, and it's obvious. Eventually we man solve these issues and my post may mean nothing in time. Maybe some of the other commenters are right that some of the efforts underway will on-board users. But I wouldn't have posted this if I don't think these issues are actually a big deal. We should be thinking about not just on-boarding new users, but what might keep them from staying. Perhaps Leo will solve these issues enough to on-board many new users, but it may also be that they onboard a ton of new users that abandon their accounts in weeks or months.
Of course they may come back in months or years to an account that's now worth hundreds of dollars. Hopefully they saved their keys.
I think what might really help onboard users is a way to somehow allow easy comments even from those not on the blockchain. Then they may comment on a post and get engaged. But we still need to make it easier to use, for once they create a real account.
But key to doing that would be to do it right. Many sites offer you easy comments with a login from FB or Google, but then it's your real name displayed. I'd do it with a quick AJAX signup with some kind of temp account, and an email to signup for a real one with detailed instructions.
It's not worth more because it is less than one year old and has a small user base. In 5 years it will be worth a lot more.
It's a lot easier to use now than when I started but still has a long way to go.
The new Leo project will be a big addition for raising awareness and bringing in users with aggroed and 3speak working on similar issues. There are great things happening but we are not there yet and not big enough to attract the attention of the market.
Too many tokens, too little buy pressure. It will happen gradually over time and that's OK.
That's not accurate to say Hive is only a year old, because it was forked off due to an extreme controversy that saw a large portion of the Steem base move to here.
Many people are taking efforts of various types, and maybe some of them will work, especially if they make it easier, but I was blogging as to the current state, not a theoretical state based on efforts of various users.
It is a year old and the community that branched off is a lot smaller than what was there before the fork. A lot of people stated there too or left due to the controversy.
What is here now is a solid base of hardcore enthusiasts. People that will put the time and effort to helping hive grow rather than just taking like on steem.
So much has been done to make it better over the past year that if they keep building at this rate for 2 more, what we have now will be unrecognisable in the future.
You can give out about what we have now and a lot of your points are valid but not that relevant. For year 1 blocktrades have been optimising the technical side of the chain. Year two they will begin to upgrade it. Them and many others.
When the tools are there to bring in more users without all of the extra steps there now we will see more growth and with more users we will see a higher price. Leo are dropping a new project at the end of the month with mass adoption and ease of use at the forefront. It's not theoretical, it's happening in real time. The only problem is that developing in real time isn't instant and we are looking at it in real time not just finding the finished product like the next generation of users will.
I agree with a lot of what you said. Mainly...it’s still too confusing for the average user.
I think the idea of a key managing service sounds terrifying.
I don't want anyone to know my keys but me, and if I can't handle them it's no one's fault but my own if I suffer.
That's just me.
It's bloody terrifying if you have real money in the account, but if you're just starting out, to make it easier, it's not so bad.
Banks handle far more than most have in their accounts here every day...and screw it up too, without them making a big fuss.
To be honest I'd wouldn't want to keep much in the account either, I agree.
Much rather park it in Bitcoin.
Hard to say, Steemit had caused it's own share of the problems and now Hive has to kind of start from beginning as a name, but has to carry some of the positive and negative things from Steem-period. So people can easily ignore Hive seeing it just "another shitcoin".