On your voice post it says:
Governments and financial institutions have a monopoly (of sorts) on “trusted” and reliable identity and reputation services for individuals
How does Voice do this differently? I agree that some type of decentralized identity verification service would be really awesome, but I haven't seen a good implementation of that (though I also haven't really looked for one).
Additionally, you made the point that the success of a social media service isn't about money or features, it's about getting a critical mass of users. I think the reason no blockchain-based social media platform has taken off is that the vast majority of people are just fine with Facebook, et. al. and the "decentralized" alternatives don't really offer them anything they care about.
The community of people who don't like Facebook and the other big social media services is still super small, and I think the majority of the people using the alternative services are just there to try to make a quick buck and don't really care about much anything else. The continued use of Steem seems to support this.
Voice just asks for name, email, and two different selfie photos. That's it. It's actually quite nice in terns of onboarding.
But yeah, I agree. People (myself included) are creatures of habit and they will stay where the watering holes are that include all their friends, family, and co-wokers and such.
Onboarding been improved a lot since last HF, you can signup to Hive very easily with just an email. https://ecency.com/?referral=ecency
Well how do they prevent someone from just signing up with a bunch of different different names, emails, and selfie photos? How do they determine if the photos are of someone who has already joined? Are there people who approve new users?
I'm guessing this info is already available somewhere so if you have a link to something like that I'd be interested to read up on it.
My understanding is it uses some kind of 3D face recognition technology using multiple selfies (one zoomed in after the other) so you can't upload a photo, but have to take both photos in real time.