Once again I find myself in a place where I feel like I have a lot to say to the point of it being difficult to consolidate my thoughts into a digestible post. So...yet again I'm going to go free write style on this and share with you all some thoughts and observations about Hive and where we're going.

Like a lot of you things like onboarding and marketing and user experience on Hive have been on my mind. I feel like lately we've had some major breakthroughs in long had problems.

This site is looking great and making awesome moves.

https://hiveinvite.com/

This is great for direct onboarding and something I think we can eventually use as a tool to provide influencers with links that they can share with large audiences. Where a lot of users can sign up via one link, and we'd be able to track all the new users that sign up since each one requires verification from the invitee.

Of course now PeakD has tips, which I'm not sure about the rest of you, but this is something I've long felt we needed to have functioning before we attempted to open the floodgates. Check!

So we've got an easy(ish) sign up process, tips(a use case for HIVE), Communities, which we've had for a while now, but again, this was a big one + a few other bells and whistles in different places. Long way to go, but this is good progress in the right direction.

I'd still love to see a more powerful search feature, an easy way for me to create a digital goods store(that's cross application(another Hive use case)) better content management tools(Still on the lookout for Collections) and an easier way to discover and navigate the different Hive apps. Of course I know they all exist, but there's no way a new user would.

I've been playing around with other platforms like LBRY and yesterday I got on Minds. One thing that's instantly noticeable is they are clearly thinking about the total user experience from their single applications. Where on Hive, we have a lot of different applications that only solve a single problem. For example the tools mentioned above. They are primarily JUST for onboarding.

This is a strength in that any developer can in a permissionless way, take a shot at solving a problem, but it's unfortunately a bit detrimental to the user experience because it fractures the user experience across a bunch of different tools and apps. I don't really know if there's a good solution to this.

Anyway, I still think we're in a good place compared to the other crypto content/social media platforms in terms of overall functionality, but they beat us on UX because they're delivering everything in one app, or in a website/mobile app combo, which is what normies are used to.

That part of the rant...END

Most social platforms are not exclusively about content creators or exclusively about being social. Most are somewhere in between. Twitter is like 90% about being social and maybe 10% about creating content.

Patreon is 95% about creating content and 5% about being social. Youtube is closely even, Instagram leans to being social, Facebook leans to being social etc.

Where do we fall? Understand that where these platforms fall in this is based on their UX design. You can technically do almost all the same actions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but the UX DEFINES how people use the applications.

Currently our applications lean heavily to content creation, not socialization. It's why we use Discord, Telegram, and Twitter for that. Further, it's my opinion that social features shouldn't be on chain or rewarded with inflation.

I think it makes sense to facilitate socialization in our applications, but considering we'll always have an immutable option when wanted or necessary, we don't need all the random noise of say a Discord Server on chain. We also don't want to pollute the reason for why people socialize and communicate online with financial incentives. I think it would actually defeat the purpose.

This is why in the past I've suggested simply integration of popular centralized applications like Discord via plugins. Did you know you can already do this on PeakD?

Unfortunately this plugin is not the greatest. The ideal experience would be, you click on this page and you see the Discord chat without having to click anything or authenticate anything. There is another plugin that does this, but it is buggy besides that nice feature. In any regard, something LIKE this, I think would be a great improvement to the UX in Hive applications. Especially if you integrate easy tipping and transfers via the chat. That way it would still be connected to the chain, just not with the chat ON CHAIN. Thinking about it like that, there's a lot that could be done with something like that.

All that said, I think we should lean into the idea that the people we're best poised to be a solution for are content creators. An easy way I'll distinguish who I'm referring to is people who are sharing content that they could successfully monetize somewhere else other than Hive. People creating content that has objective tangible value. I think a focus on solving problems for this demographic is our best shot at success on Hive. The content creators are what bring in the consumers. The consumers are the masses, but the creators are the bait to get them here.

I think upvotes and proposals are fantastic tools to bootsrap users, Communities, and applications that will move us in a positive direction towards this overall mission.

To create the best tools and the best environment for the next generation of content creators.

An immutable account so that you can safely build your audience here without fear of that connection ever being severed.
Immutable content so that you can safely pour your hard work into this system without fear that you'll ever lose access to it.
An immutable Community where you and others creating similar content can pool resources, audiences, ideas, and initiatives.
The lowest barrier to entry monetization system in existence.(Maybe a bit too low tbh)
Decentralized access to your audience without any middlemen.
Sky is the limit in terms of your potential growth.

...pause, let me explain that last one.

I think a lot of people when thinking about Hive think about it in its current state, but I tend to think about it at scale. It's not uncommon for a pretty popular youtuber to have 100k, 200k, 500k, subscribers. Imagine that on Hive. Someone having 500k real people enjoying their content here. People that are engaged HP holding users. With a combination of Hive votes, Tips, and hopefully in the future SMT's, Hive could absolutely be the world's BEST platform for content creators.

Gonna put a pin in that section of the rant and jump again

Vision, direction, and organization.

None of the potential that I see here will be easy. In fact it's incredibly difficult. I don't think we can just focus on blockchain innovation, or application innovation, or experience innovation. We also have to innovate on ways and methods of organizing people, labor and ideas.

Right now things are a bit of a mess. This is the major issues with decentralization. Someone is reading this post and thinking that I've got it all wrong. All these thoughts are stupid and this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. What we need to do is (insert wrong opinion here) j/k

With no one in charge, things move a lot slower, and even though we have resources(the DHF worth millions) there's not a ton of work being funded, and some really good work(ex. @dapplr) can't seem to cross the threshold.

We have to innovate in how we organize labor and resources.

Insert random idea I had, but first let's learn what a "Resolution" is in terms of the government.

The practice of submitting and voting on resolutions is a typical part of business in Congress, state legislatures, and other public assemblies. These bodies use resolutions for two purposes. First, resolutions express their consensus on matters of public policy: lawmakers routinely deliver criticism or support on a broad range of social issues, legal rights, court opinions, and even decisions by the Executive Branch. Second, they pass resolutions for internal, administrative purposes. Resolutions are not laws; they differ fundamentally in their purpose. However, under certain circumstances resolutions can have the effect of law.

In all legislative bodies, the process leading to a resolution begins with a lawmaker making a formal proposal called a motion. The rules of the legislative body determine how much support must be given to the motion before it can be put to a general vote. The rules also specify what number of votes the resolution must attract to be passed. If successful it becomes the official position of the legislative body.
Source

What if we had our own forms of resolutions that users could vote for in a similar manner as they currently do proposals. It would be a way of formalizing where a block of HP is like minded. This way, if someone creates a proposal, they could mention that their proposal is in line with resolutions x,y, and z. This way it would already be understood that the proposer understands expectations for their proposal and voters would know that the proposer is informed on their expectations.

Perhaps that could grease the wheels on more work being done concurrently and supported appropriately. For example. I think it's a pretty strong sentiment in the community that for applications being developed for Hive, if the developers want the community to fund development, that the code be made open source.

A resolution could contain exactly why that's the case and lay out specifics where maybe there are exceptions, like you've already built an app that's already creating value and want funding to support additional development. Then the potential developers could see the amount of HP that is supporting particular resolutions and have a decent idea at the level of support they might receive for their proposal.

Without any further development you could actually use the proposal system for something like this already and some have done similar things, but it might be nice to have something more official.

This is just one idea I had, but it's the sort of thing I think we should all be brainstorming.

Alright, that was a really long and discombobulated mess, but I warned you beforehand so you knew what you signed up for. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below if you made it through the whole post.

A bunch of jumbled together thoughts

Vision, direction, and organization.