Really appreciate this perspective - you're absolutely right that I should be more careful about treating HIVE as "the platform" vs "the infrastructure."
That's a fair distinction. The blockchain layer is just the foundation, and it's up to dapps to build the user experience on top. So yeah, the comparison should really be "3speak vs YouTube" or "INLEO vs Twitter" rather than "HIVE vs YouTube."
Your question about why nobody's building that seamless Web2 onboarding experience is spot on. Light accounts from HF28 will make it technically easier, but like you said - someone still has to pay for account creation and bear that cost. And if their business model relies on inflation rewards, that's not sustainable.
This actually ties into what I'm exploring in Part 2 (coming Monday) about monetization. If dapp builders can't capture enough value to fund things like free onboarding, better UX, and professional tools, then we're stuck. The reward pool alone isn't enough to fund serious application development.
Do you think there's a viable business model for HIVE dapps that doesn't depend on inflation rewards? Subscriptions? Transaction fees? Advertising? I'm curious what you think could actually work.
Awesome, appreciate all of your perspective here. The question about viable business models on top of Hive is one that's been on my mind since I joined a few months ago. I'm trying to view this from a very abstract perspective in terms of the strengths of Hive and how these can be integrated for added value. However, quite a bunch of these basically come back to creating kind of a closed loop that just piggybacks on inflation to reward users for generating content. Let's have an example (that kinda exists, but I still think it's a good one):
A fitness app integrates Hive to allow users to post their activities and achievements to share them with others; others can upvote those inside the app, and the app uses the Hive logic to reward users in the end. The app displays ads inside of the content feed and uses a significant portion of the extra revenue to buy HIVE so that it can upvote user posts for more rewards. Great. This could actually work. Now the question is how that would perform financially for both users and the developer:
There's a lot more questions regarding the business case for this (is it worth doing that on Hive rather than just a server), how difficult is it to build a solution that masks the complexity of managing blockchain accounts, etc.
One could entirely abstract from a post being valuable content and just create a post or comment anytime a users performs a certain action to make the example a little more extreme, because the question always is what this would do if the respective business would get access purely to the rewards earned from voting within its own economy.