Does Short-Form Content Have A Future On Hive?

in LeoFinance4 years ago

This is a question that makes us think about the direction of Hive going forward.

There was an announcement post that I saw this morning put up by the team behind @quello. This is a new question and answer application similar to Quora. Users simply post a question they have which allows the community to provide answers. Yahoo also has a similar service.

It is essentially the epitome of using the hive-mind on the Internet.

quello.png

This is not the first attempt at a project of this nature to take place on Hive/Steem. Of course, projects can fail for many reasons, thus we cannot simply conclude that the previous failure was due to being short-form content.

It does go without saying that the quality aspect of the content does not equate to what one would expect from blogging. Naturally, they are two different services, catering to different audiences.

One of the advantages to something like this is the number of people who utilize it. Quora has a strong Alexa ranking at #251. It also boasts over 300 million monthly active users.


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That is obviously a huge market to target. Even Yahoo Answers still boasts millions of users a month.

We saw a similar question arise with the introduction of @dbuzz. This is an application that was modeled after Twitter. That is a platform that boasts roughly 330 million users globally. Of course, to really compete in that arena requires a mobile application since more than 80% of all tweets are done that way.


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Dbuzz initially wanted to cross post Tweets to the Hive blockchain. After some resistance, the model was altered, abandoning that idea. Now, I presume, Dbuzz is going to operate similar to Twitter, where people can send out short-form (also called microblogging) content.

From the numbers, we can see there is obviously a market for it. The question is whether there is a place on Hive for applications such as these?

If we go back to our roots, we saw the first application was Steemit. In reading what went into the formation of Steem, one of the ideas was to model Reddit. It is interesting to think about this since Reddit is basically a link posting site. Few write posts on there. Instead, most post a link to an outside article and conversations stem from there.

This is obviously not what took place on Steem (and now Hive). Essentially, this is still a blogging platform, similar to Wordpress or Medium. The idea of posting a link is vigorously attacking and flamed as sh*t posting. Thus, we know this is nothing like Reddit.


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Which brings us back to the short-form posts: where do they fit in, if at all?

Obviously, at the core of all this is the reward pool. Few care what is posted on Reddit as long as it fits into the community that it is going in. Upvotes move content to the front yet do little financially. There are now a couple sub-reddits that are being tokenized so we will see how that alters things.

That said, the Proof of Brain model present on Hive determines the payouts for posts. Short-form content is rarely going to match long-form in quality. Thus, is the reward pool is focusing upon quality, which was the intention from the start, then we see a clash taking place.

Dbuzz also ran into problems with the auto-voters. Many people use those for curation, giving a daily vote to authors they follow and trust. Many post on Hive at a certain level and seek to maintain it. Others do not adhere to that same belief system, thus putting up what could be considered to be sub-standard.

The challenge here is if an author suddenly starts "buzzing", this could affect the auto votes. The platform did address this in their re-engineering of the system so we will see if a satisfactory conclusion was reached.

Obviously, most everyone on HIve wants to see it grow and succeed. Is that possible if we do not go after the true social media markets? The reality is most of what is posted on the Internet is pretty dopey. Good thing it is virtual because it would be a waste of space if on paper. Nevertheless, this is the interest of people. YouTube hit a homerun with cat videos. Facebook is known for a lot of things, quality content is not one of them.


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Personally, I felt for a long time that the solution occurs when the different applications are tokenized and users focus more on the application token as compared to the HIVE currency. For instance, imagine the day where a strong user of 3Speak earns 10x each day in "Speak" tokens as compared to HIVE. In this situation, Hive is really an afterthought.

We saw something similar with CryptoKitties when it had its mania run on Ethereum. Many got involved in that game and were not concerned about the blockchain it was on (until the system was overloaded). The users were only interested in the Kitties they were accumulating in the game.

To me, this provides a path where both short and long-form content can coexist with reward pools. It would provide for expansion of the entire Hive ecosystem while allowing us to tap into some powerful markets.

Here is the announcement post about Quello:

https://peakd.com/hive/@quello/introducting-quello-io-quello-is-ready-for-your-questions


If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and rehive.

gif by @doze

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I think if there is an effective and efficient way for interfaces to filter contents. Then perhaps any form of content will have a place on Hive, including short-form content.

@tipu curate

Filtering and search are two things that need improvement on Hive.

I agree, filtering out content to give users choices to what they see is vital.

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Good article. I agree with your points.

I think there needs to be a way for both long and short-form content to coexist in order to "go big".

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Within a day or two I hope to announce a twitter-like project I've been working on. As a proof of concept initially, but could be more if the people want more.

I look forward to see that. It will be interest to learn what you can up with @revo.

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If it showed up on my blog as a second or third tab, I would be very willing to use it. I would probably even use it to "talk" to (at) other hives users. If it would live amongst my blog, I would probably use it sparingly, if at all.

I look forward to seeing what you have come up with.

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What it does is create one post on your blog initially (a 'seed' post), and from then on all your tweets are comments on that one post. So it won't fill up your blog with tweets, and your followers won't get spammed. ;)

That sounds like a good idea. How often would a seed post get started?

Let me know if you have a post that I could check out.

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It's online here - https://d-hiver.herokuapp.com/. It's only a free server for testing, so it won't take any heavy load of users. I'll upgrade to a proper server when I release later today(?). You can see my 'seed' post here. There will only ever need to be one seed post per user.

Nice! i look forward to using the service

I think , if we can create a second layer login to hive we are going to be more successful. We need to attract new user and will new user like to place himself in myraid of keys before asking a question?
Let allow something like, you can use Hive and post Hive with your user id and email id and you will just start earning once you decide to generate your keys .

It is no doubt that all form of content can co-exist and may be sometime they will complement each other.

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3speak implemented a second sign in layer. I am not sure how it is affecting sign ups although I know they are still working on updating the basic software.

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I think there has to be a future for short form content, especially selfies, faces of hive was like a breath of fresh air, but I think you've hit the nail on the head with other platforms and tokens - SteemHunt was a pretty good model, not really my thing at all, but the platform worked well and Hunt posts were largely invisible to me on Steem/Hive.

There's plenty of room in those blocks for a lot more content, they're looking kind of empty ATM!

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There is a selfie blockchain where people get rewarded for sharing selfies. I don't remember where it is now because it was mostly an unused blockchain, but I remember drafting an article about it (and never sharing it).

Great idea. I would definitely post selfies with my and my babes on a daily basis, if of course, they didn't compete with my blog posts, on days when I do get around to blogging.

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You could set up an alt account for selfies, that's what I did with @blockbeard

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Surely there is a solution by just voting a lower percentage for short form content.
This could be a setting in autovoters too.

If someone wants to give a piece of short form content a 100% upvote that is their choice but the default could be 25%.

I could see that. There has to be a way to deal with short form content via the voting mechanism.

Could it be through a layer two or does that have to be at the base layer?

It is worthy of some discussion.

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I believe the 'autovoting' mechanisms are exactly the source of all these problems and discussions. As a matter of fact, every automatism at all is the REAL problem here that fuel these differences of opinion and perspectives about these new dApps.

If the people only knew what the hell they are voting on, only consciously & organically reading it and digesting it thoroughly before grant a vote. I bet no one would have any issue if it was granted to a short-form content or to a long-form content to qualify these as shitposts or quality posts.

It's obvious and evident that no one would make any fuss seing a simple comment earning $100 or more through a fatass greasy big upvote granted by a whale who actually has READ it no matter how short-form it was. Am I right?

The actual mirage of ownership of the collective rewards pool and the entitlement that everyone feels they have to extract more or less value from it according the stake they have invested within the platform, it's specifically the root of all these disagreements which are truly preventing the real growth and evolution of our platform.

Even when the rewards pool fills with new minted tokens everyday from inflation, everyone thinks they deserve more than the others of these brandnew shinning tokens solely for themselves.

I feel Hive should be home to any App that have the potential of bringing more people to the blockchain, we've got to remain broad and accommodating. Not everyone can write what we call quality content, so having Apps like Quello accommodates people that just want to answer or ask questions.

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And "quality content" varies by user.

I spend more time on quora than I care to admit. Sometimes it is reading gossip about the Royals (Meghan Markle is doing what?) sometimes it is reading interesting answers regarding adoption or medical procedures, sometimes its getting lost in the comments and letting myself feel good about how much better I am then the commentors on there (lol me...). It obviously has a quality of entertainment to it, and, entertainment is very important on the blockchain.

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entertainment is very important on the blockchain.

And that settles it, being too serious here isn't the best of ways to engage I suppose.

Sometimes I feel like reading about finance, and sometimes I feel like laughing. There is room for everything.

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If people like that or need the alternative to the Twitter I would agree that this is more the necessity then the annoyance. Next thing is that the Twitter if you don’t know delete content and a lot of account gets suspended and with the application on Hive that emulates Twitter functionality that would not be the case.

That is certainly the big advantage to applications on Hive.

Accounts cannot be deleted and the content (text) is always there. On Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, it all can be lost.

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I think Hive should be open to all forms of content. Not everyone wants to read or write blogs. The biggest social media these days is short posts and videos. We could have a slice of that. Of course it could affect what we earn for blogs, but it could add value. Those using auto-votes need to consider if that is the best strategy. We need rewards going where they are earned. I say that as someone who gets plenty of automatic votes.

The "problem" is that EVERYTHING we post comes up on our "blog."

I remember when Dlike came out, and I remember really, really, liking the idea. I could share interesting articles and get rewarded up to three times per day. I quickly found that those shared articles did not co-exist with my blog well. It made my account look spammy.

It watered down my personal content, and it was very annoying that sharing a good article sometimes earned more steem/attention than my blogs.

I considered making a seperate account for just the shares, as some of the content I was sharing was (in my opinion) superb content that had a place, but that was too much work.

I would not use a twitter like platform unless the person creating the platform separated it from my blog.

Regarding rewards, they could be separated. The whole platform could have its own rewards that are then split amongst the users, so, you don't earn per tweet, you earn per week.

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The first time for me to really use Twitter was during the @NathanMars Seven77 Campaign; although using an account registered in 2009. It seemed a great way to connect with Steemians Hiveans without the live-ish aspect of Discord or a more committed blockchain posting.

Like @metzli, my feeling is that if it were on the Condenser panel that it would be very useful and offer an additional dimension of connection within the community.

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