Not that long ago, I found myself attempting to push back—respectfully—on the idea that we can one day make Hive the perfect platform. My goal with that post, with that exploration if you will, wasn’t to attack those who are working to improve this place, but to remind them that we must not make perfect the enemy of good—or better.
When I wrote that post, I had already opened an account on Medium, and I found myself staring at very familiar issues over there. The seven dwarves live there too: Spammy, Scammy, Fakey, Colludy—you know them all too well yourself.
That being said, it's obvious that Medium is working. It's obvious that there are people who make a living writing there. But the uphill battle has an incline that feels like it requires professional hiking gear. Here, some people begin acquiring tokens the same day they open an account. For others, it may take longer, but it's obvious it's not nearly as hard to be seen.
This week though, I shared that I had decided to open a Substack account. An obvious move, I submit, since more and more it seems to be the platform on the lips of many influential online figures. My first impressions do ring true, it appears. They've cracked the code for content discovery on that side of the pond. The layout—although confusing at first—has grown on me, and I'm finding myself intuitively surfing those waters without much trouble.
However, as I’ve zoomed in—or dove deeper into the water (pick your favorite metaphor)—I began discovering the ugly fish. Or should I say, the floating turds. Substack is littered with follow-for-follow engagement. When I say "littered," I mean that literally. My feed has been kidnapped by a legion of bot accounts attempting to harvest followers for, I’m sure, later monetization. A common practice in the world of Instagram, where channels get sold or rented after reaching a certain size.
I’ve also found people complaining about this—an opposing force, if you will—pathetically failing, ironically, with the Streisand effect it ends up nurturing.
All this to say, I'm more and more convinced that the dead internet theory is likely what will end up killing social media. Bots, bots galore. Either that’s true, or there really is an account called Emma Horsedick who genuinely loves my stuff.
Have you heard about Paragraph? It's supposed to be the web3 version of Substack and, by coincidence or not, bought Mirror, the web3 blog platform inspired (or copied) in Medium. Keep safe, thanks and good luck again!
hey bud... No, I had not heard of these. I supposed I could branch out a little more, but it seems a little too irresponsible at this point! I'm willing to be persuaded though.
Are you using any of them?
I saw some the features of Paragraph and liked that the newsletter creator could hide parts of the content that would be visible only for specific NFT owners. I remember seeing some interesting posts on Mirror mainly about Ethereum projects but I think now the Farcaster/Warpcast platform got more attention from that blockchain community. By the way, maybe Substack still appears to be more popular and if you wish to reach a broader audience it could attract normal people beyond crypto supporters.
hrmmm interesting use of an NFT, and it makes sense. I do think, however, building things on Ethereum is like running with concrete shoes, but I'm open to being proven wrong.
I did notice very little crypto content on substack, which is making me hesitate writing a post exclusively about Hive (it was a plan). But, then again, linking back to this blockchain is still at play.
#hive
The other platform I'm using is Mastodon. I don't know of any way to monetise it, but people there are pretty anti-AI. They can be a bit 'holier than thou', but then it's a lot of geeks who may be quite smart.
It's inevitable that people will use bots to exploit anything they can. We've had the issue of crappy clickbait ads on various places for years and they may just be making stuff up now. I don't know what defences there are against that.
I know booster is also on mastodon. I like the concept of Mastodon myself. Maybe I'll squat on my handle there, at least that. Although It might be taken.
What is your goal with mastodon if I may ask?
I'm mostly on there to follow certain people and I don't post much. There's some cool stuff there.
#hive #posh
I have looked into this theory before and it's interesting af, for me I am trying to get back to the old days of the internet so I am looking into usenet and irc chats,etc. and a more open/interactive internet like we used to have and it's starting to get more and more popular nowadays also to look into past alternatives and or building new ones because most ppl do feel the same and are tired of all these bots, and shitty videos with AI narrators, if it isn't for good video content (if you really look) on youtube I would have left the regular internet we are so used to nowadays long ago.
I found out recently IRC is still around. For some reason (not that I had checked) I would have assumed it was dead by now.
yeh I thought usenet and IRC was dead also but it seems to be really active still and good thing about that is that it's ore difficult to get into for regular people so less stupid humans there xD