Why Creators Choose YouTube/TikTok Over HIVE: The Onboarding Problem
TL;DR
HIVE promises to pay creators directly without corporate middlemen - a compelling vision. But when a creator can start earning on YouTube in 5 minutes versus spending hours learning about resource credits and power-ups on HIVE, the choice is obvious. This post explores why HIVE's onboarding friction and tiny audience keep creators away, even when the underlying technology might be superior.
What's Inside:
- The brutal reality of creator onboarding comparison
- Why "no audience" is a dealbreaker for creators
- How complexity kills adoption before it starts
- Some thoughts on what could help
This is Part 1 of a series exploring why HIVE struggles to attract content creators.
The Five-Minute Test
Here's a thought experiment: imagine you're a creator who just heard about a new platform. You want to test it out. How long until you can post your first piece of content and potentially earn something?
YouTube/TikTok:
- Sign up with Google/email: 30 seconds
- Upload video: 2 minutes
- Add title and description: 1 minute
- Publish: Done
- Total time: ~5 minutes
HIVE (via most frontends):
- Find a frontend (PeakD, Ecency, etc.): 2 minutes of research
- Create account: Wait for approval or find someone with account creation tokens
- Learn about keys (posting, active, owner): Confusing
- Understand resource credits: More confusion
- Figure out where to post: Which community? What tags?
- Learn about power-up vs liquid: Why are there different tokens?
- Write and publish: Finally!
- Total time: Hours (if you're persistent)
The comparison is brutal. And I say this as someone who uses HIVE regularly - the onboarding experience is objectively terrible for newcomers.
The Audience Problem (The Real Dealbreaker)
But let's say a creator pushes through all that complexity. They've figured out keys, resource credits, and communities. They post their first video or article.
Then comes the crushing realization: almost nobody will see it.
YouTube has 2+ billion monthly active users. Post a video, and even with zero subscribers, YouTube's algorithm might show it to hundreds or thousands of people if it's engaging. The potential audience is massive.
TikTok is even more aggressive about showing new creator content to test what resonates. Go viral on your first video? Absolutely possible.
HIVE? The entire ecosystem has maybe 10,000-20,000 truly active users on a good day. Post something, and unless you get lucky with a whale's upvote or already have followers, you might get 5 views. Maybe.
For creators, this is the dealbreaker. It doesn't matter how good the tokenomics are or how fair the payment system is if nobody sees your content. Creators need audiences first, monetization second.
The Complexity Tax
Hardfork 28 is bringing light accounts, which should help. But even with easier account creation, HIVE has a "complexity tax" that other platforms simply don't have.
Questions a creator shouldn't need to ask:
- What's the difference between HIVE and HBD?
- Should I power up or stay liquid?
- What are resource credits and why did I run out?
- Which frontend should I use?
- Do I need to understand blockchain to use this?
- Why is my voting power depleting?
- What's a witness and why should I vote for them?
Compare this to YouTube: "Upload video. Add title. Publish." That's it. Everything else is optional.
I get that HIVE's decentralization creates some inherent complexity. But the question is: does a casual content creator need to know any of this to get started? The answer should be no, but currently it's yes.
The "Crypto" Problem
There's another subtle barrier: the moment you tell a creator "it's a blockchain platform," a certain percentage immediately tune out.
Why? Because:
- Scam association - Crypto has a reputation problem. Many creators don't want to be associated with it
- Audience skepticism - Their existing followers might be turned off by crypto content
- Perceived complexity - "Blockchain" sounds technical and intimidating
- Volatility concerns - Earning in a volatile token feels risky compared to dollars
HIVE might be one of the more legitimate blockchain projects, but it carries the baggage of the entire crypto ecosystem's reputation. That's not HIVE's fault, but it's a real barrier.
Some Ideas Worth Exploring
Make Onboarding Invisible
What if new users could post, comment, and engage without ever knowing they're using a blockchain? Light accounts from Hardfork 28 are a step in this direction, but we could go further. Abstract away everything technical until users actively want to learn more.
Seed Initial Audiences
The chicken-and-egg problem is tough. You need creators to attract audiences, but creators won't come without audiences. Maybe HIVE dapps need to focus less on "be everything to everyone" and more on "be the best platform for X specific niche." Dominate one content vertical with an actual audience before expanding.
Simplify the Value Proposition
Instead of "decentralized blockchain social media with cryptocurrency rewards," what if the pitch was simply: "Post content. Earn money. No ads. No corporate control." The blockchain is the how, not the why.
Cross-Posting Tools
Let creators keep their YouTube/TikTok presence while easily mirroring content to HIVE. Don't ask them to choose - let them test HIVE as a secondary platform with zero switching cost.
The Hard Truth
Here's what I've realized: HIVE might be technically superior in many ways, but for creators, it fails the most basic test - it's harder to use and has way fewer viewers than the alternatives.
Light accounts will help. Better UX will help. But even with perfect onboarding, HIVE still faces the audience problem. And I'm not sure there's an easy solution to that without either:
- Massive marketing to bring in users (expensive and hard to sustain)
- Finding a specific niche where HIVE genuinely offers something competitors can't
- Making it so easy to cross-post that creators use HIVE as a bonus platform, not a replacement
I don't have all the answers here. The people building HIVE dapps are working hard on these problems. But I think it's worth being honest about why creators aren't flocking to HIVE despite its advantages.
The promise of "get paid directly for your content" is compelling. But it doesn't matter if nobody sees that content and the platform is too confusing to use.
Next in this series: We'll explore why HIVE's monetization model doesn't work for professional creators, even when they do build an audience.
What do you think? Have you tried to onboard friends or fellow creators to HIVE? What were the biggest barriers? Are there solutions I'm missing? Let me know in the comments.
Another great post from you. I agree with pretty much everything that you wrote. Maybe except for the comparison to YouTube, which I find a little "unfair". I actually think we shouldn't treat Hive as "the platform" but more like the infrastructure. So in order to compare it with YT, we'd have to look at one(or each) of the specific frontends for Hive. And if course there isn't one that's equally easy to use, but the question is whether that's Hive's "fault" or how Hive can contribute for that to change. I think if an app wanted to provide a Web2 familiar onboarding experience, they could do that already (although it wouldn't be easy, and it would cost money / HIVE). So we could be asking: why is nobody doing it? And you've given some of the answers in your post; to me, the most relevant is: what's in for the builders of this app in order for them to take the cost of providing this kind of service to their users? And to me, any good answer to that last question should not be based on (inflation-created) Hive rewards...
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.
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Where did you find this information?
https://peakd.com/hivefest/@detlev/hardfork-28-facts-fun-and-panel-discussion
I think the "light account" they're talking about must be something from the VSC Network (Magi?)... I doubt that will appear anytime soon.