... and this is what I’ve found
I’ll admit it. I have been poking around other platforms that, let’s be honest, were inspired by (I won’t say copied) - steem (note - for this post, the terms ‘steem’ and ‘hive’ are used interchangeably). I will name names here - Publish0x (hereafter referred to as P0x) and Uptrennd (hereafter referred to as UP). A lot of readers have probably heard of these already. I first started reading blog posts on P0x three or four months ago and looked at UP properly for the first time yesterday. To be frank, these two upstarts are inferior in aesthetic, quality of content and community. There. I said it.
One of my early posts as a plankton on steem was called ‘Wen adoption’ - silly title, I know. The gist was that whilst crypto influencers at the time were screaming out for quality use-cases to drive mainstream adoption for blockchain (still are), steem was (and still is) a working example of a fully functional blockchain project that added value to people’s lives. Yet the folks doing the screaming seemed to ignore steem. Added to that, these folks were using platforms such as Medium and Twitter to do their screaming - kind of ironic. The impact of these younger upstarts’ poor quality content and communities is that it is less likely now that serious content creators will make the switch.
Before I take a more critical dive into P0x and UP, I will quickly reel off some of their pros and cons that I can see. I’ll ignore the aesthetics for this list. My experience on these two platforms has only been as a consumer of content (or ‘curator’ as they say on steem) - reading blog posts, voting on them and getting rewarded. The pros and cons list is through this lens.
P0x
Pros
- Low barrier to entry - register with email and password and you can vote on content pretty much straight away.
- No native token - votes are rewarded with ERC-20 tokens (currently Basic Attention Token BAT, Dai stablecoin DAI and Loopring LRC). These tokens actually have some utility and value outside the platform.
Cons
- No incentives to vote for quality - it just feels like a rewards pool grab (I’ll admit that I do this). This creates a feedback loop that results in poor quality.
- Because it’s so easy to vote and get rewarded, they have this system that limits how often you are allowed to vote. I think it’s 10 minutes after your previous vote.
- Rewards pool is not sustainable. From their FAQs - “If Tips are Free, Where Do the Coins Come From? Tips on Publish0x are free for both author and reader. The tips are sponsored by us. Tips will likely be sponsored in the future.”
UP
Pros
- The platform is very ‘gamified’ - when you gain points, you move closer to achieving the next level. When you move to the next level, your capacity to earn more points grows. Presumably as you level up, your visibility on the platform also grows as your audience grows. That’s pretty cool.
- Same as P0x - low barrier to entry.
Cons
- Same as P0x - no incentives to vote for quality.
- It looks like it takes a long time to level up.
What should I do with my time?
Now I’m on holidays and unable to go anywhere I’ve got some time on my hands. I had the idea that it would be possible to spend literally every waking hour earning tiny payments through these platforms just by skimming blog posts and upvoting (also by viewing content on LBRY, scrolling my twitter feed to retweet posts that use ‘tip bots’ such as coinkit and playing and earning on Axie Infinity). I even wondered if the small payments accrued through the day would amount to enough to pay the bills (answer - NO). But here is what it comes down to - if you were to spend that long, there would not be enough quality content to consume and upvote on these platforms to fill your waking hours. On P0x I upvote stuff that I don’t think is especially well-written, has been edited, has been fact-checked or has anything new or original to say. In spite of this, I do think that I have limits - if it is absolute crap I will not upvote it. My standards on Uptrennd need to be lower because the quality of content is even worse. It sounds mean but the reality is that a serious writer would never go near this platform!
The good news for hive
From the birth of steem came its first platform, steemit, which started out as a blogging platform. From there steem the blockchain became so much more, driven by community. Partly because this ecosystem is no longer tightly coupled with steemit, it may never become a mainstream blogging platform. But that’s OK. steem has iterated many times to optimise itself to be more sustainable and equitable. I often read people’s posts here saying that engagement levels on steem are down - no-one’s commenting anymore, etc. Whilst true to a degree, most of us here are so close to steem (people have invested serious money in it) that we view it with an overly-critical lens. You should look at engagement on P0x and UP. Whilst I’ve noticed a fair bit of commenting on UP, most of it is seems to be for the sake of earning points. I haven’t seen any honest feedback or dialogic talk. The power of the steem community proved itself when it hard-forked from the new (centralised) owner of steemit. P0x and UP cannot do this as they are centralised. There is currently nothing out there that comes close to what we have here!
Image credits
I sourced the P0x logo from their website and Uptrennd’s logo from their twitter account.
I have been looking around like a year ago .... then I came up with the same conclusion as yours above.
Looks like its still the same.
Its not easy to build these things and to find a decent model for rewarding and voting. Hive is on of the rarest platform that comes close to this.
Thank you for your thoughts. User @nonsowrites also published an interesting video on 3speak recently on the same theme and I thought you may be interested.