Six Years on Hive

Hi Everyone,

Here we are again, another year has passed for me on Hive. It is amazing to think I have been here for 6 years. Each year passes faster than the previous one. Every year when I reach an anniversary, I feel proud of what I have achieved in the previous year. This year is no exception. I have written a good mix of posts. I have dug deeper into many different areas. These include the Establishment and the connections between various parts of it. Social issues such as the rise of woke culture, censorship, suppression of femininity and the lies regarding the equal treatment of sexes. I continued with the now annual economic challenge series and I will again this year. I ended the long-running Buying and Selling Game series and replaced it with a new series that has different types of contests each month. I completed the content for a book and published it as a collection on PeakD. I have started a different type of book that I am fully committed to complete by the end of this year. I will provide updates as I go along.

Despite the good and the successes, there are always some things that could be done better. I have become a little more distanced from the Hive community. I do not comment on the content of others as much as I did a few years ago. I think this is partially because I have less time to do so. I have been more occupied with deciding which posts to upvote and by how much. I have quite a few content creators on autovote, which reduces the workload. However, I do feel a little guilty using this approach. Autovoting leads to the under-rewarding of better posts and over-rewarding of not so good posts. For many, overall rewards will balance out but it is does not do much for incentivising better content. Autovoting also means I spend less time reading or watching content from my favourite content creators as my time needs to be spent on content creators that I do not autovote.

Writing about Hive

I do not write as much about Hive as I did a few years ago. This has more to do with Hive having less significant problems than it did before. The Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP) and the splitting of Hive from Steem solved most of these problems. For the most part, Hive is a well-functioning blockchain. The governance works. It still could be more decentralised and it still has vulnerabilities, which could lead to another takeover attempt. However, several safeguards have been implemented such as delays on voting on new stake. The number of DApps are consistently increasing. Many of them are good and are attracting their own unique audience. For Hive, DApps have their own entity that is separate to the blockchain. Whereas, for Steem, Steem and Steemit were intertwined. For users, the DApps are more important and relevant than the blockchain they sit on. Hive is more relevant for developers and investors. Many users are neither. Posting about individual DApps is probably more useful than posting about Hive and its many intricacies. Some of my content uses the principles behind blockchains such as Hive and discusses how they could be applied on a larger scale.

The Hive Struggle

Despite being around for quite some time, if we include the Steem years, Hive has struggled to grow. This is in terms of active users, and price. Many community members have put a lot of effort into marketing and advertising in various ways. However, the return has been slow. Hive’s most significant attraction are the DApps. Splinterlands is one of the most popular blockchain games in the world. The social media DApps have the greatest potential to draw in users considering the very large number of social media users worldwide. Sadly, the social media DApps are ignored as people are attracted to the social media platforms that have the most users and have the most well-known users. The Hive social media DApps lack celebrities and famous bloggers and vloggers.

All the large social media platforms heavily censor content and it is getting worse. This offers the Hive social media DApps an opportunity to attract users that have faced problems with censorship. The recent takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has changed things a little. It appears that Twitter have relaxed censorship on the bigger accounts. This has prevented them leaving Twitter and also keeps the users that follow them. Twitter are marketing themselves as a free speech social media platform. It is more like free speech for some. Many smaller accounts are still censored; there is an option to buy credibility/exposure/something. The algorithms still promote certain topics over others. It is uncertain how the changes will affect Hive DApps. At the moment, it is an unhelpful distraction.

Odysee is an example of an App on the LBRY blockchain. It is having some success at attracting video content creators that have encountered censored on platforms such as YouTube. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, censorship is not a problem on that App. I would argue that existing censorship is less of a problem than the potential to censor. Any company or even blockchain that has centralised control and governance can easily censor content. It just takes a few tweaks to its term of use or even loopholes in the exiting terms of use to censor almost anything. Centralisation of control prevents censorship from being challenged. I experienced that firsthand on Steem.

Will Hive Social Media DApps continue to struggle?

Unfortunately, Hive social media DApps are likely to continue to struggle. More people need to switch to these DApps. This is very difficult if people do not know about them. Marketing has not been great or consistent but that is only part of the problem. Despite all the problems with the current large social media platforms, people are unwilling to leave them and they are unwilling to look for new ones. I do not know when the majority will be dissatisfied to the point they will leave. Most will stay as long as their favourite content creators are still publishing on these platforms. People attract people. There is a critical mass. Once this critical mass has been surpassed, there could be an avalanche of people rushing to Hive social media DApps. Once one Hive social media DApp achieves a breakthrough, all of them will, as they all draw content from the same source (Hive’s blockchain). Most of us will wait. There will be others who will try to attract the magic users who will bring their millions of followers to a Hive DApp. This will tip the scales far more quickly towards reaching a critical mass.

If there are not enough users, the price of Hive is unlikely to remain high for prolonged periods. The price increases are most likely because of speculation and not genuine investment. We see this for many cryptocurrencies during bull markets or periods of temporary spikes. Consistent high levels of activity and a large number of active users (in the millions) will drive the price of Hive higher and it will remain high as the increase would have been driven by investors and not speculators.

My Future on Hive

I am very confident I will remain on Hive for the long-run. Hive social media DApps such as PeakD have given me a great outlet for my content. Anywhere else I would have been severely censored a long time ago. I do not have a huge following and I have not dedicated much time to attracting more followers. I tend to get caught up in my content. I have also done very poorly at attracting followers in the past. I rather spend time on something I am better at doing. I believe my contests attract some followers. The number of participants have been consistently higher than they were around a year ago. Unfortunately for me, not many of them engage in my other content. A few years back, I was very hungry for followers. These days, I am glad that I can offer something of value to anyone I can. I do not need a huge number of followers. My post are paying out reasonably well. I have accumulated quite a lot of automated votes over the years.

Since this is the start of my seventh year on Hive (auspicious number seen). I have decided to change my signature. I have added the sixth birthday PNG to my signature GIF. I have changed the old collection post links to the PeakD collection post links. Two of these links led to parts one and two of my Freedom-based Economics living book. These changes will give my posts a slightly different feel and I believe the new links will be more useful and informative.

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More posts

I have several collections of posts. I have organised these collections based on content and purpose.

The first collection contains six collection posts created before PeakD had the collection feature. Four of these posts relate to the core of my content, one of them contains all my Actifit Posts, and one of the them contains my video course ‘Economics is Everyone’.

The second collection consists of the posts that I consider define my channel. These posts are significant in terms of content as well as how they contribute to the growth of the channel. These posts reveal the most about what I believe in.

The third and fourth collection is what I call my ‘Freedom-base Economics living book’. They contain all the posts that support my ideas about the value and power of freedom. Some of these posts explain what we can achieve with freedom and what we need to utilise it. Some of them explain how we are deprived of freedom and how we often give up freedom for security and comfort. The third collection concludes with possible scenarios depending on what we (society) choose to do.

Hive: Future of Social Media

Spectrumecons on the Hive blockchain