Not user friendly
Hive can be a very confusing place. I have even seen veteran users or those returning feel like they are lost sometimes.
It more or less requires people to band together and work with each other to discover a majority of what this place has to offer. That is why communities have always been an important aspect of the ecosystem. It’s quite time-intensive for a single person to onboard someone. A community on the other hand tends to make that easier.
If you don’t already know a helpful website for people trying to better understand the ecosystem and join is called Hiveonboard.
There are also communities out there set up to help new people. I have not been in any of them for quite some time so I’m not sure what there is today of those kinds of communities. Asking in a larger discord community can often result in finding those places if you still find yourself or someone you know struggling.
it gets extremely confusing were things you post are going
I do believe over time more and more dapps will be going the custom json route. Project Blank (being worked on by Leo and I don’t think it has an official name yet) for instance is going to be a Twitter alternative that is working on json to hold microform content in.
I also would not be shocked if we see front ends to add in better filter systems one day so if there is a Dapp you don’t want to see it won’t show up in your feed.
It is currently an area that needs a lot of work. For a while, after the fork, many people who just used a single dapp had no idea they had switched over to posting a new blockchain called Hive. Many times people are so busy developing and trying to create a future that they don’t take a moment to communicate with their users what is going on.
Signing into apps
When it comes to Keychain we often make the comparison to ETH’s MetaMask. If users understand that then Keychain is not that big of a step to take.
Also if you take a look at https://leofinance.io/ they are working on trying to solve a lot of issues. They even permit people to create an account by signing up with a Twitter account.
Drama
We are no strangers to the drama that is for sure. For the most part, many are far more reasonable than what meets the eye. You just don’t see it on the surface when all you see are flags. You should not worry about getting on any kind of blacklist just for remaining respectful and constructive.
Quite a small amount of people are bearing large amounts of the weight of the ecosystem. There are just not enough community leaders, developers, and those willing to help out around often for free or very little compensation. So you often see very overworked and underappreciated people who have not had much sleep take things to an 11 quickly as they just don’t have the time to individually deal with 50 things all at once with any reasonable amount of time.
What happened on Steem should have been a bigger thing for all of the crypto to have stepped in or spoken out against it.
Major exchanges either were blackmailed or tricked or colluded with an individual to stake user’s funds on exchanges and take over a blockchain. Once they gained control they stole $5 million at the time worth out of the accounts of their top political rivals as a way to push them for speaking up. Then there was the mass censorship of posts getting blacklisted and hidden. Along with attempts of getting people banned on other platforms for speaking up about it.
The whole thing sucked. Many of us spent years building our home there. Many will never forgive and thus why some only post on Hive or take things even further.
Dev Power
Well, Hive did take almost all of the developers when we forked to here. Many developers believe in freedom of speech and decentralization. Add in the low cost to do business or run a node on Hive it creates quite the ecosystem where developers can spend on developing and not transaction fees eating up their bottom line.
The Community
I’m glad you found some communities to join. There is an almost endless sea of them out there. Some are quite massive and others just a couple of people. In my early years, I use to hang out in some of the bigger Discord communities and such. That is often where the most can be learned and you start to see the bigger picture.
Convert all my crypto holdings
While I love Hive I would never recommend anyone regardless of what investment it was to be all in on just one thing. Sometimes it’s good to get away from Hive. Some people have gone all-in on Hive as they are willing to risk everything to build a future they want to be a part of.
I’d rather see people involved in a couple of different things. Once you get used to Hive many rarely want to leave the comfort and yes ease of use (once you learn the ropes) this place has to offer. There is however a lot out there to learn and even bring back to our ecosystem.
So if I were to go all-in on Hive and somehow catch their ire
There are some powerful tools on Hive to counter things. Not only can you make your community you can even make your coin and have posts in that community earn that coin. Hive is not always the highest valued coin within the ecosystem and I’m sure many more coins will be created that will surpass it at least in price but maybe not market cap.
Since it's a blockchain all that information is still on the blockchain and there are many ways for a person to still use the blockchain. Earning Hive here is the least valuable thing to acquire in my opinion. Connections, friendships, and knowledge surpass getting onto trending and any post payout someone could ever get.
I really appreciate hearing your insight to all this. I mentioned the keychain in the problem section but I really meant that as a positive, inside the negative. I do think getting to that point is a bit more than most normal social media users would go (as in people that would never use MetaMask either.) Once you get to that point though it does make things so much better. And if Leo is making it possible for people to sign up using a Twitter account, that would be a pretty huge step up I think. Though retaining people that sign up this way could rely on a good user experience immediately following the sign up. Such as abstracting away dealing with keys at first. Hope that goes well for them. I do think a lot of the other user friendliness issues will get better naturally over time. But I don't think an intuitive new user experience can be replaced by time consuming guides or even friendly users to help get started. Those are great of course, but people in general do not have the patience to get that far.
What happened on Steem does sound like a nightmare for not just those involved directly but the crypto world as a whole. Specifically the exchanges being involved like that. Before I knew about this and signed up for both, honestly I wanted to like Steem better. They had just introduced the ability to get Tron as rewards equal to Steem Power so I thought, cool! Double rewards. And it seemed like the more established option at the time. Then I learned more about the reasons behind the Hive fork.
Steem is totally dead at this point. There are obviously still people there and the value of the currencies are still relatively high. But the user experience is very bad, as much as I criticized Hive here, Steem is multiple leagues below it. I plan to write over on chibititan my experience trying to build a presence on the 3 platforms once I get another month or so in. And I will probably just drop Steem at that point. I probably should have dropped it as soon as I learned the details of what happened, just out of principle. An example of the different experiences though, here on Hive our intro post was upvoted 5 times and you invited us to a community, which is more than I expected. On Steem it was just downvoted twice and had a spam comment. Not a good welcome haha.
But I digress. I'm sure plenty of people can write for days about how bad Steem is. People that know more than I do.
I want to actually build blockchain features into our game. This is what actually led me to Steem/Hive in the first place. Searching for feeless transaction blockchains. Hive is currently in my top 3 choices for which blockchain to use. Which is another reason I'm kind of airing my concerns a little I guess. I want as much info about the blockchain as possible but also the community surrounding it.
Though I suspect not many people will end up reading this anyway. Still felt good to get my thoughts out of my head and into text.
Hive blockchain Integration
I don’t know much about going through that step yet myself. As my own game is quite far away before I start to try and understand and implement blockchain into it.
Outside of the documentation if you are still having issues there are a couple of people that would be happy to help game developers out with questions. Some of them watch the game development community so asking questions there might get help.
I’ve also been personally told by a couple of people to just send people their way if they need help and are stuck. They are very busy individuals however so that needs to be kept in mind that they are already putting 50 to 100 hour a week into Hive related things on top of other stuff.
Hopefully, over time, we will have enough posts, tutorials, and other content within the community relating to using the Hive blockchain that it will become a major resource for people to use. This is in part why I never made a Discord for the community as I want all that information on the blockchain for others to find and not be lost in yet another Discord. For now its rather lacking in such content as many of us have not gotten to that part in our game’s development.
Double Rewards
While double, triple or even more rewards from a single post on Hive might not be as rewarding it is more than possible to do. Who knows one day a coin that is worthless today could be worth a lot someday.
If you look at the tags on my posts you will notice two very strange ones.
Palnet tag allows me to earn Pal. All my palnet tagged posts also show up on their frontend. They did reduce inflation and the pool a little a while back so it’s hard to earn many pals these days. Most of my posts usually only get .02 to .09 pal.
Battle tag is for gaming-related content including game development. While PeakD no longer shows on the post how much battle I’m earning. It can still be seen under the Hive Engine wallet when it pays out.
The big money is in financial and blockchain-related content that people directly post from Leo’s website onto the Hive blockchain. People have in the past earned many times over in Leo what their Hive payout was from that post.
!ENGAGE 25
As always, thanks for the info! I am still a bit off from implementing as well. But I get pretty excited about the ideas. I have been thinking about bringing back an old simple game I created a long time ago just to explore how to add it to a game. Rather than wait until I get that far with the current game.
I totally agree with you about Discord. So much info about so many things are sitting in some discord server somewhere. 😆
What little I have looked at the Hive dev docs seems pretty good though. So I'll eventually start there. And reach out if I end up with more specific problems to solve.
There does seem to be a lot of secondary coins around. Leo seems to be the biggest but I see people giving each other pizza and stuff like that all the time. Haha. Haven't taken the time to really see what all that is about. Maybe I should.
ENGAGEtokens.