Why did I come back? Well, if I'm being honest, I came back here because I wanted to review some of my old posts ... but I'm glad I did because it's great to see that there is still a vibrant community here with both old and new faces. Hive, as the true successor to Steem, is very meaningful to me.
I still look back on my time as a member of the Steem/Steemit community (certainly NOT my time working at Steemit) as the best time of my life. There was nothing like that feeling of connection with so many like-minded people all over the world.
I think I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to replicate that feeling, but I have also accepted that it probably won't happen. Being early to Steemit was like catching lighting in a bottle, and it's hard to imagine that happening twice.
That being said, I am starting something new and different that I hope can replicate that feeling to some degree, not just for me but for others as well. I just wrote about this in my newsletter which you can find here.
Basically, I am picking back up work I started on here (well steemit.com) 9 years ago! Back then I was calling it "Crowdism" and thought of it more as a personal philosophy, but lately I've come to think of it as some kind of "theory of everything."
You can read that post here or watch the batshit video I created along with it here:
Just bear in mind that there is a lot of information in that video that is probably no longer accurate. I more just shared it as a kind of proof of history.
Over the past year I've been able to get the theory into much better shape, and now my plan is to continuing building it out in public. If this sounds interesting to you, then follow me here, on substack, or X.
For those of you on Hive who don't know who I am, I started as a content creator on Hive, became Steemit's community manager, worked my way up (that's a nice way of saying "every time shit hit the fan I somehow got promoted) to Head of Marketing and Communications, then resigned with the engineering team after the Justin Sun takeover, started a new blockchain company that built the first free-to-use general purpose blockchain, ran that for 4 years, and then left that to focus on my family for a bit.
If you have any questions for me about running a blockchain/crypto company, or anything else, feel free to ask in the comments!
Why isn't crypto based social media like hive or nostr more popular and more widely used, considering all the problems with traditional social media like opaque algo, censorship and shadow banning? Almost everything posted to reddit get censored right away.
Because people don't care about those things. People are information processors (this is a central premise of Swarm Theory) so they go to where the information is. This is why network effect is a thing. The more people in a network, the more information is generated, the more valuable the network becomes to more people, who then join the network, and so on. This is why so much work with Steemit went into onboarding. Steemit, Inc. was literally losing money every time they onboarded a new user! There were so many challenges with creating a social network on a blockchain and Steemit was a classic example of the dangers of being "first"; you have to solve all the problems.
Do you feel the same for crypto now as you did 5+ years back? Or has its dramatic shift also changed your perspective on it all?
I don't feel the same, but I think it's mostly due to basically not feeling like it's a cool new thing anymore. I like being an early adopter, so once things start to scale they feel a lot less exciting. What I tell people now is that I've never been less interested in crypto or more bullish. Institutional adoption has reached an inflection point. Mainstream adoption will come next. I still think it's an important technology, but it's just not as exciting to me as it used to be. I've actually been in the space since about 2010 and 15 years is a long time to be interested in anything!
Are you disappointed that Hive isn't more adopted than it is?
Felt like in the Steem days we were conquering the world
Of course it's disappointing, though tbh it's not surprising. When I originally joined Steemit I saw the "user generated content" and "social media influencer" wave coming and thought that everyone would become a content creator to a degree. So I was half right haha. I also thought that Steem would be natural for integrating into the apps those people used. I eventually learned, though I didn't realize it for a long time, that this vision I had for Steem was quite at odds with the creators. They didn't design Steem to be integrated into apps other than Steemit, and only pivoted in that direction much later and very reluctantly. Many of the problems can be traced back to those early decisions IMO, but that doesn't mean Hive can't still be a valuable corner of the internet! But it is not my intent to get involved in the politics or drama of Hive. I'm here as a user and ideally nothing more.
So what would you have differently if you could start over and be CEO?
What do you think Hive's USP is?
Being a CEO for 4 years actually gave me a newfound respect for both @dan and @ned. I couldn't have done what they did. Actually building stuff is much harder than looking back and criticizing. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is my opinion that the original focus should have been on building and promoting Steem as a universal social database that any website or application could integrate. That was always my vision for Steem.
Sorry, didn't directly address the second question, but I would extend my previous response and say that I think Hive's USP is that it is a turnkey database of social information (people, posts, voting data, etc.). But bear in mind I have not been paying attention to Hive for 4 years (crazy!!!), so I wouldn't put much stock in my opinion.
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing @andrarchy!
Do you think we kinda ruined it for ourself by having several forks from Steem and diluted our userbase or could there be an audience for several ones with some unqiue features?
I don't see forks as a problem whatsoever any more than forks of Bitcoin or Ethereum are a problem for them. I started Koinos Group at the same time as Hive began, so I don't think I'm really qualified to opine on the possible problems with Hive. When something doesn't have the kind of runaway success you were expecting it becomes easy to find a million problems with it but really hard to find "the" problem.
What do you think Hive needs to change in order to live up to its potential? (Also, welcome back 👍)
Thanks! Hmm, I don't think I've been around long enough to opine on that. I would bet that there are a lot of people around here who know better than me and are working their asses off trying to move things forward (like @crimsonclad).
Fair enough
Is KOIN a dead project now?
Welcome back.
I immediately remembered the bowling game in Bangkok in 2019 and how I invited you to a conference in Kyiv 😉
A lot has changed in our lives since then...
Which HIVE interface do you use now for publications: hive.blog, peakd.com or ecency.com and why?
I published on hive, but using ecency right now. Probably use this going forward.
In your opinion, can HIVE be interesting for an American user and what is needed for this?
I am very familiar with Levin's work and am following him closely. I fully plan on integrating his research into Swarm Theory! Swarm Theory is not intended to be the kind of "theory of everything" that throws out every other scientific theory. It's more of a synthesis of the state of the art for the purpose of giving people a framework for understanding any phenomena and taking practical actions. That's why I'm referring to it as a "practical theory of everything."
I don't actually remember exactly what I said in that video lol. Thanks for watching it though. The core postulate, I think, is unchanged (reality is constructed by nested swarms of information processing nodes). The rest of the video IIRC is more like a series of hunches, and I think I've moved quite far beyond that.
It will be interesting to see your opinions on how Hive developed and is developing. There's so much discussion and so many different opinions, it's quite confusion for newbies. Even after a year of blogging and reading, I'm still a bit confused.
The questions and answers that are already here in the comments covered what I had in mind to ask, so I'll just say "welcome back!" and that I'm looking forward to more posts of yours!
What are your opinions on how Hive is developing?
Still finding the balance between too many payouts that attract farming, and not enough payouts that make it "just another social media". I see a lot of potential, but a marketing problem, and missing adaptability. Some newer apps like @snapie (I think Meno mentioned that to you on your last post) are trying to bridge that, but there's still a gap - especially considering that most people are used to hyper-intuitive apps, and have break downs as soon as a swipe doesn't work.
For me personally it's hard to get new people on board just based on the social media aspect - most don't care enough about the problems they have at FB/IG and so on. They do complain, but it's not enough to make them want to switch. @distriator helps a little with that, especially for my peers that are also clients of mine, the cashback is an interesting option.
Meaning, there is a lot of developing going on. But the on-boarding still depends a lot on the users, mouth-to-mouth. There's still no self-propelling momentum. Yet.
for the Steem
and BLURT