RE: What is Changing on Hive?

There are two prominent changes I want to talk about.

The first one is made by “itsolay”, also known as “thebeedevs.” I’m not sure whether she works solo or as part of a team. Anyway, she came up with an improvement to the search engine. Now we can search on PeakD (and similar frontends) using the meaning of our search term instead of being limited to tags or exact words. Many social media platforms already had this feature, so I’d describe it as an improvement in content discovery.

Although content discovery algorithms always need improvement, this change came after about two years of repeatedly calling for better solutions, at least as far as I know. That said, “good karma” has also done a lot of commendable work on content discovery algorithms. For example, if you visit any post on Ecency, you can see related content at the bottom. That’s what content discovery is about.

In short, it’s about giving people what they want to read instead of making them work hard to find good content. Of course, what’s considered “good” is subjective.

The second change I want to talk about is the introduction of a consistent $ value for upvotes. No matter what your mana is, the $ value of your upvote will remain the same, assuming your HP stays the same between two different upvotes. For example, a 35% upvote will give the same value whether your mana is 80% or 90%.

It seems like a change meant to make upvoting easier on Hive. However, as someone who looks at it from a tokenomics perspective, I think either our upvote limits will be reduced, or the way mana works will be adjusted, or there will be some other change to compensate. Otherwise, it would cause a sudden increase in inflation.

We shouldn’t speculate too much about what this means and should wait for clarification from the core developers. I’ve already burned enough brain cells thinking about the possible downsides of this change since it affects upvotes, and upvotes are directly tied to inflation. Let’s wait and watch, and if we don’t like the change, we can always vote the decision-makers out of the top 20.