The News
$HIVE has been dipping under 5c again, but is still running in parallel with the legacy crapcoin. I really have no idea where it is going, but I am not purely driven by what I earn here. I find Hive fun and I have a lot of friends here so I am not going anywhere.
There has been more news about premium features on @peakd, but it looks like you can still do most things for free. If you want to use the AI creation tools or post lots of pictures then you can pay the small fee. The fact that we get these great tools for free is great, but those features have costs. I have been contributing some rewards from my posts to them.
@tibfox posted about new features in @threespeak. Having chapters in videos is cool and you can also link to other videos. This is stuff that has been in Youtube for years. You can also opt to have ads in your videos to help the platform. Video needs massive storage and that can get expensive.
Friday Follows
- Last weekend I was at a Hive meetup in London. I was there with @shanibeer (who organised the venue), @adetorrent, @livinguktaiwan, @davidthompson57, @alonicus plus his other half. Some of them have posts with photos so check them out. We need more meetups around the world and they do not have to be anything grand. Just name a time and place then get the word out. Someone may turn up and it swill be fun.
- @chris-uk came close to losing his Hive account due to some hack, but is back. See below for more on how to recover yours. He posts a lot about what he is reading and I see he has been looking at @scrobble where you can log books.
- @epodcaster is preparing for a month of podcasts in November and I may participate too. 3speak is looking like a viable platform for that.
The Dog House
You may well have seen a lot of comments about a 'Hive airdrop'. That is something that never actually happens and it is a scam. These scammers are trying to get your keys so they can steal your funds. There should not generally be a need to enter your keys into sites you do not totally trust. You should be using Keychain and anything that wants your master key is likely to be dodgy. You only need that to do things like changing your keys and that is what the crooks will do to lock you out.
Please tell all your Hive friends to ignore those comments. Previously they have often used new accounts that may look like something official from Hive, but you will see they are new and do not have much of a reputation score. That will soon get knocked down as people downvote them. Now they are using accounts they have stolen which may have a good reputation. That is harder to reduce, but you should still be suspicious of any giveaways. People need to prove themselves to be trusted for that.
If your account is stolen then there may be a chance to recover it. Read this by @thekittygirl. It depends on having a recovery account who you can rely on to help you out.
I have said this before, but also beware of 'support' accounts on Discord who pop up on certain keywords and try to direct you to a private channel. Report any of those you see.
The End
It has been an 'interesting' week with major panics about PHP issues and insecure certificates that could let crooks fake web sites. The internet is very complex and the crooks are smart so you have to be vigilant. That is especially true with Hive where you are responsible for your own security.
Take care and Hive five!
 |
The man behind: | @tenkminnows: Helping good Hivers level up @proofofbrian: A bot that checks for tag typos #BritList: A monthly list of Hivers in the UK |
So much useful info in one post ! 😁
With ads, I'm not a huge fan of them because legacy social media has become a messy ad-fest with occasional useful things hidden within the mess. If we have to have ads, I'd love to see them only allowed to active Hive users (especially businesses !), and find ways to encourage them to bring their followers here as well.
I believe we need to find a way push 3Speak harder to the outside world, and maybe incentivise users who post the broader content that we're currently short of (3Speak at the moment seems to be mostly crypto/Hive internal/politics, we need more music, history and general entertainment....).
As for the data storage issue, I've been thinking that the solution might be to utilise spare drive space Hive users could offer, with it becoming another possible reward stream. I appreciate that creating a reliable and fast architecture would be a huge challenge (maybe initially just for deep storage of older 3Speak videos that don't need regular retrieval), but if it was solved and easy for casual users to implement it should naturally scale with the platform's growth. In the longer term and with strong AI-proof encryption it might even give Hive the ability to offer true private data storage to businesses and public that they can be sure won't be used to train AI's (although it might be necessary to make it only for data to avoid illegal images being hidden there).
Thanks for the good and detailed comment! You nailed a few points for sure. Still, I want to clear something up, because it seems many people see our ad program as income for 3Speak itself. That’s not really the case.
The main purpose of 3Speak ads is to tackle exactly the biggest struggle you mentioned. We don’t have enough variety in creators and niches. That’s why 50% of the ad revenue goes directly to the creators whose videos the ads run on. This is a crucial onboarding feature. Without it we will never sign up and keep any bigger creator from another video platform.
The market is pretty saturated and the competition on monetization is huge. Most creators (not all, but the majority) dream of turning their hobby into a job. And many of them deserve at least a fair compensation for their effort. On Hive we will never get to that point, we all know it, and most of us are totally fine with that. But think about it from a video creator’s view. If one video takes 4-5 days to produce, a one-time payout of 10$ won’t keep them here. Ads are the only way to compete with the big platforms and bring mainstream creators to 3Speak, and with that to Hive.
On top of that, 10% goes to viewers as a reward for watching content on 3Speak. People who watch also comment, and engagement is another big issue we have on Hive. Another 2% goes to advertiser referrals, in case we ever have a user actually promoting 3Speak to businesses. And something I often forget: 5% now goes to the encoder node runners via @encoder.pay that got paid by a tiny 1% beneficiary in the past. That leaves 33% for 3Speak. Most of it flows back into our ongoing house ads to give our community a stable “income” and to promote the features of our platform.
On the “only Hive projects” note: we decide which businesses and Hive projects get approved. So don’t expect any fishy crypto scams or corn commercials :P But the program is also designed to onboard businesses from the outside. They will need to buy into Hive and get to know the platform over time. Other payment options will follow when it makes sense. For now they buy Hive on the free market, which is not bad for the price either.
The second point here: we can’t rely on Hive projects at all. We saw that in the past 4 weeks since the program is open. Only 1 account and 1 community not related to the mantequilla-soft team ran ads at all. Not a single outside dapp tried out our 50% rates yet. Some Hive projects don’t see the point in promoting themselves because Hive is small and they are already a well established name. Others just don’t know about the program yet because they are busy developing instead of consuming content (myself included). And then there are many smaller projects and communities that simply don’t have the funds to run ads in the first place, even though they are super cheap.
We keep networking in the background and will promote 3speak.tv and the advertise feature outside of Hive too. The whole team and the majority of the community see the huge potential of this new reward program. We will see if it turns out to be the onboarding trigger we all waited for (at least on the video side of content) :)
So the ads are not about storage costs. We cover those through post beneficiaries, even with the current low Hive price. But you are right that we need a long-term storage solution, and we are already working on it. We are moving to S3 buckets for long-term storage. We will also build a gateway so community members can offer their services as storage providers. S3 will save us a lot of headaches with our huuuuuuge IPFS repository. It also opens new ways for the community to help out, and creators could even host their own videos. First we need to get the S3 setup running and tested of course, that’s what we are on right now :) More on all of this when it’s ready.
This again turned into an almost-post-level comment :P
Thanks for the in-depth reply ! I love post level comments, nice to see I'm not the only one who does it 😁
I think the advertisers we need to attract are external businesses, although I appreciate it'll take time to build a big enough audience for some of them.
What Google and Facebook got right (and Brave got terribly wrong) was treating advertising as a form of micro-payments scalable for all sizes of business. But what they also got right was targeting. By it's very nature, Hive will struggle with that.
The only real reason I don't promote my own business through Hive (either in post-form or with advertising) is that Hive is a very non-geographical place, and my business is purely intended for UK buyers. I love Hive's relative anonymity, and would hesitate to sacrifice it if the platform started gathering personal data in order to target ads.
To get community storage going, I'm convinced the ideal would be to have a desktop/mobile UI that is super-intuitive to use and allows people to dedicate as much or as little storage space and bandwidth as they want. A lot of ordinary Hivers aren't coders - I tend to think of myself as more of a software power user with no idea what's really going on "under the hood". But with 3 PC's each with a TB or two of hard disk space, plus a couple of 2-10 TB external hard disks, I'm sure I could find a terabyte or so of space across them all to store 3Speak content if it was easy enough to administer.😀
Keep up the good work - I love the way you guys are advancing Hive !
More information - Support - Reports - Discord
Support engagement with a delegation to topcomment:
50HP - 100HP - 250HP - 500HP - 750HP - 1000HP - 1500HP
I've started adding 3% beneficiary rewards to Peakd on posts - infinitely preferable to ads. Before we know where we are, some ingenious Hivean will have coded an algorithm and we'll be doomed.
Good for PeakD that you share your author rewards with them :) But on 3speak.tv, the ads are not there to pay the team. We currently keep 38%, and this will probably go lower over time as we find more ways to reward the community. The ads are there to drive the creator economy itself and to reward regular viewers.
The reward pool system of Hive is cool and all. But for outsiders it is very weird, and often a reason to not join in the first place. Everywhere else on the internet it is normal that evergreen content keeps paying you, no matter when you posted it. On Hive your post stops earning after 7 days. So from a financial point of view, there is no point to create good quality content that stays valuable on the long term.
With ads paying 50% to the creator, even years after posting, this changes. For me this is a huge step.
Good to try all sorts of things.
I came here to escape ads and the influence they start to have on content.
But let's see what happens 😍
Sometimes we need to face reality and wear the glasses of the people we want to onboard :P It will all be fine in the end :)
I've written about reality myself, you're welcome to read. I'm not sure ads will be fine because it's dependent on attention and there will be a certain inevitability about maximising that. I think you're a Hive Open Days organiser (or maybe the organiser 😍)? Be good to have a chat sometime about what's involved. We have a venue, accommodation might be more tricky, London is very expensive 😂.
True true - we will adjust things over time of course and well - I am not a maximizing person :P Yes I have been the main head behind Hive Open Days but now that the chain is not interested in real life outside promotion and community building I stopped my efforts on that part. But sure just send me a message on discord if you have any questions or I can give you any tips :) I will probably not be able to get to London anytime soon but at least I can support you from the far!
You came with a good recommendation from @ ph1102. Sure, I'll look for you. Speak soon!
Me too. I could pay them the 0.5 HBD per month, but I'm not sure I need the extra stuff. I don't tend to use AI.
Yeah, I prefer to keep it simple.
Another solid and timely wrap-up, steevc. You’ve packed some heavy infrastructure and OpSec realities into this one.
The shift you mentioned in the 'Dog House' section—where scammers are now deploying compromised, high-reputation accounts rather than fresh burners—is a critical tactical evolution. It proves that the old visual heuristic of 'checking the rep score' is no longer a reliable firewall for the average user. In Web3, reputation can be leased or stolen, which is why zero-trust protocol architecture (like Keychain) must remain the non-negotiable standard. The close call with chris-uk is a stark reminder that the margin for error here is razor-thin.
It’s also interesting to see the pragmatic pivot toward monetization across platforms like PeakD and 3Speak. Bandwidth, video transcoding, and infrastructure aren't free, and the 'everything should be free' illusion in crypto often leads to centralized funding or project collapse. Volatility at 5c is just noise; the real signal is whether the ecosystem can build sustainable economic models while keeping users from handing over their active keys.
Brilliant overview as always—keeping the community’s boots on the ground. Hive five!
Cheers. There's definitely an arms race with the scammers. AI may make it even worse.
I'm the long run the economics has to be viable. I don't mind paying a share to the services that give a good experience. A better price will help them.
You hit the nail on the head, Steve. AI is definitely supercharging scammers, making the arms race much tougher and robust OpSec more critical than ever. I also completely agree on the economics—if we want high-quality, secure services, the 'everything should be free' mindset has to go. Supporting platforms that provide a great experience through fair pricing is vital for long-term viability. Appreciate you adding such a valuable perspective!
It is precisely because of the friendships, the community, and the joyful atmosphere here that staying on makes sense.
I hope you've made some new friends here.
Yes, absolutely! 😊 I've met some wonderful people here and I'm happy to be part of this lovely community.
HIVE dipping under 5c and you are still here for the fun of it. That is the right attitude, and the Follow Friday list is a good way to spread it.
I know some just care about rewards, but enough just enjoy the platform. Obviously a better price helps, but we need to get the market interested.
That's pretty crazy how the two coins are right in step with each other. Pretty annoying too! I think there have been airdrops in the past but they usually just happen. The ledger is open so you shouldn't need to do anything extra to get it. My PHP nightmares have been pretty low so far!
It looks like some people must trade both coins with more volume on the other one. I don't really know why. There have been various crypto airdrops and I benefited from some, but you need to hear it through official channels.
I've heard of some school systems being taken offline, but then I also saw people saying there was no immediate risk. It's not had any real impact on me.
That certainly seems like a probability. We had one of our major sites that was offline as they were updating their servers. I'm in the process of working some stuff out with our website vendor right now.
Update: @steevc, I paid out 7.717 HIVE and 0.000 HBD to reward 13 comments in this discussion thread.
We often keep putting time and effort into things as we have already invested so much in them. However, I think, sticking with something just because of what we have put into it doesn't always make sense.
Kind of wild that hive still tracks steem that closely after all these years. Does your price script keep history? I'd be curious what the correlation looks like over a 90 day window versus last year.
I just get the data from Coingecko. Their API makes it easy.
Excelentes estadísticas