This will forever be the discussion on Hive, right? What are we - a social media/community platform or a content platform?
Let's say an example of the first is Facebook: no-one creates content to 'attract outside visitors' yet everyone wants to be on Facebook sharing their blurbs of thoughts or art without a second thought on who might see it - they know who does, their 'followers', in that case mostly friends or family.
Let's say an example of the second is Medium: everyone creates content and expecting it to go viral through sharing it on Twitter or letting it be shared on other platforms. No-one has Medium.com as their 'most important news outlet of the day' yet everyone encounters a few Medium articles casually while browsing the internet.
Facebook has enormous value because people want to hang out there, so much so that they can sell adds on that platform.
Medium has enormous value because people want to read quality content and they even pay a monthly fee to get unlimited access...
So then, what is Hive?
It's neither 1 or 2, currently.
It could be 1 if we (for example) had EPIC apps that were so intuitive to use that people would share their breakfast and cat pics while waiting for the bus. They would tell their friends and family to quit Facebook because on Hive you could do the same and get paid! Even if 10% of Facebook users would use Hive the advertisers would start researching if they could make a dime on here as well.
It could be 2 if we (for example) had ways to actually make professional articles - with view counters, stats on visitors at time of day, more influence on layout and multimedia embeds, and, most of all, a comment section that didn't require a full-on Hive account - because if we send an article to our boss, neighbour or twitter addict, don't we want them to have a seamless experience by having them leave a comment which would even subscribe to an e-mail next time someone else (with or without a Hive account) left a reply, like you can do on Wordpress?
Just me thinking out loud - might copy this to a new screen and make a decent post out of it ;-)
Cheers, good to have discussions :-)