Why is HIVE about speculation and not about community and content?

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Whenever people talk about HIVE there are a couple of topics that come up, mainly how much one HIVE is worth in fiat, and the platform/infrastructure.

I am a big fan of the developer-friendly side of HIVE, and like most people here I now try to not think about how much money I am in the red by investing in the currency.

Lately though, I have been thinking about how HIVE is basically an F-tier crypto currency in terms of reach and value, and why I think looking at it in terms of crypto rankings, and in particular conversion to US dollar value, under values HIVE.

I've said many times before that if this platform was NOT based on crypto, it would be performing much better.

Look at Medium. The CEO has taken that platform from "promising but struggling" to thriving. There are some excellent publications on there, so much so that I was paying to subscribe until I trimmed back all my content consumption due to overwhelm and lack of time.

Is Medium better than HIVE? No, and in fact I would say HIVE has some technical advantages.

Substack is another example of a platform that is making serious coin but has issues. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement similar features on this technical infrastructure but nobody will because the money is not there if you are tethered to a forgotten crypto currency instead of something people want to earn and spend.

Want another example? Check out the Ghost CMS. In many ways it is a competitor to both WordPress and Substack, and has been doing great, especially since the inter-company/personal drama in the WP community kicked off.

At its foundation, however, it is just a blogging platform with some nice added features. We have that here.

Going more old school there are sites such as Tumblr, Blogger, and even Reddit. They don't have capabilities that are not already present or could be easily here. They make money through advertising mostly, with some other schemes such as add-ons etc.

Even on Twitter there are people shit-posting and making $$$, some of them in five and six figures, mostly people making less than $100, but that is still way more than you can make from creating content on HIVE unless you have some wealthy benefactors in your network.

Let's face it here if I post and someone votes I can look forward to around $0.30 at the current exchange rate. The exact same content on my WordPress blogs makes a lot more, and that is without accepting advertising or sponsored posts. That is a DIS-incentive to post here!

My solution to this last issue was to create a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish here first and then long term get the value by reposting onto your public blog.

But why not accept USD on, for example, Peakd? You could allow people to have an ad-supported experience or pay to remove ads. Medium allows you to have content gated as premium for paying readers only, much like on YouTube or Patreon.

Heck, have you heard of Skool?

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People on that platform are making a lot of money, there is nothing there that can not be done here.

I am just saying we can think of HIVE as content and community, it doesn't always have to come back to "crypto line goes up"!

Maybe there is not the appetitite within the larger HIVE community but one of the sub-communities like LEO could do very well taking this different approach.

What do you think?

hive community blogging blog discussion technology developers
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You should make more than 30c on this post :)

Hive is different to those other platforms in not having an owner company. That has pros and cons. We don't have a marketing department to post ads and attract content creators and so it is up to the community, but we do have freedom and that matters.

People don't talk about earnings as much as you might expect and it was hardly mentioned at Hivefest. A lot of people care about their content and about what Hive can do for various people and communities. Of course a lot are also just here to earn, but you have to work hard to make much.

You have been here almost as long as me, so you have seen all the ups and downs. I expect you are also frustrated by the lack of growth. I would have hoped for millions of active users by now. Some may say we are not ready for that, but when will we be?

I don't have all the answers, but I still believe Hive has a lot to offer and I will keep promoting it as an alternative to corporate platforms (that I try to avoid).

!BEER

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Well, HIVE is still farmers paradise ... IF you have the right friends and supporters.

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There are a few cases like that. I do okay, but I'm not getting such huge votes very often. I earn about as much from curation as from posts and I try to give rewards where they are deserved.

At least everyone has some chance to earn here and the reward distribution would change if Hive ever takes off.

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You are an optimist, but I like you! :)

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LOL! Hive is still tiny, so things will be distorted by outliers. I've been here a long time and it's still fun for me.

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it's easy to be a pessimist

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Sure is. We need more positive thinking if we want things to improve.

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I don't have all the answers, but I still believe Hive has a lot to offer and I will keep promoting it as an alternative to corporate platforms (that I try to avoid).

This is why I was thinking Leo or one of the other communities that are built upon hive might be a more appropriate comparison. There seems to be a bunch dropped out which I guess is due to the low HIVE value, but niches are still here, and with less of a crypto emphasis perhaps they can grow organically through interest rather than income?

Decentralization is another benefit, but as we have seen with Mastodon and Bluesky, it has been the content creators in the end who attracted the people and not the tech :)

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Leo have experimented with ads and I think peakd are too for non-Hivers. The dapps have to find ways to fund themselves. It is in their interest to attract more users.

I like Mastodon, but you depend on whoever runs your instance. I don't plan to run my own as that is extra work I don't need. I've not looked at Bluesky yet and don't really want to take on another platform. I've been on lots and seen several die from lack of income or through Google getting bored with them. I hope Hive is here to stay.

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I should write about why I like Bluesky but TL;DR many of my reasons for liking BS (ugh) are the same as I like Hive :)

Originally I was tempted by Mastodon, and even bought a domain makersocial.org to run a server, but then I saw so many horror stories of people brigading servers to "test" the moderation (botting with the n-word etc), plus apparent legal risk around moderation, that I backed off

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hive rewards should just be considered as a bonus, we can do the general web2 rewards like others do as well on top of it along with tons of other advantages.

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With a community as diverse as ours we should be able to be like a mini version of Reddit in terms of niches, and at least some of those niches would buy stuff let alone have advertising opportunities?

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There are a lot of niche communities, we have onboarded a lot of them to our curation initiatives, but I guess we just lack the userbase for trade as I assume you mean occur on facebook/tiktok and actually paying for wanting eyes on your content/services/brand.

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I'm new around here and I can't comment about technical stuff because I only know little things about this platform and I don't use any of the others that you mentioned, but I can say that Hive have a lot of potential.

The problem here is that most of the users expect to earn lots of money with little effort and it doesn't work like that. If you wanna earn good rewards, you need to work hard posting good content and engaging with other users and communities. That way you are helping Hive with its principal goal that is to be a community based content platform and you build a good community yourself that can bring you good rewards.

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That is the thing though, the only incentives here to improve content are esteem and $votes$, but when you look elsewhere like Pinterest, instagram, or Twitter, people spent a lot of time energy just for visibility and publicity.

Heck local bands and food trucks make money from social media without expecting ad share or direct payments because the sites get traffic that turn into in person contacts

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(Edited)

Well, I'm posting content and engaging because I want to increase my HP and reputation, what can help me to get more visibility, but I'm not really thinking on taking profit from Hive. I think it would be better for all of us if everyone had the same thoughts.

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I think Leo is trying to not be just another hive frontend. Its tries ads, premium and creator sub.

We need more platforms trying different approaches.

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Hive is a shit CMS compared to WordPress. We don't support custom CSS or jquery. Heck, there are some HTML tags and markdown codes that some Hive portals support and others don't. We don't really have any good way to categorize posts, nor track tag usage. And so on. Comparing to WordPress is a losing battle because in both technical and in ease-of-use features, they blow Hive away. But that's to be expected: designing a good CMS is their only job, whereas on Hive it always seems like the CMS is secondary to everyone else.

Hive does compare better against Medium and Substack. I still try to echo my posts on both, but it is so painful to do. I think the only attraction of those two networks is the possibility of making money on posts and the examples of many people making pretty good money (much better than anyone except whales make on Hive). People read an article somewhere about how top Medium writers get $10k a month, they get stars in their eyes, and BOOM go open an account. It's a similar attraction as that of YouTube. YouTuber is one of the top future job wishes for elementary students these past few years for a good reason. Fortune and Glory, kid.

I fully agree that Hive should deëmphasize the crypto. At least I would support hiding the value of each post. Maybe a post author can still see what they are making, and the blockchain is public of course so after a payout anyone can sniff at things and see what you made, but that should not be displayed for everyone to easily see on peakd and other portals. It attracts the wrong kind of people, and it's not even giving an accurate image, since curators get 50% of that number under the post.

But I would say, as I always do and have been for the past 8 years, the biggest thing holding Hive back is it fails the grandma test. It is incredibly hard for regular people to sign up for and use. We overwhelm people with this key system that they don't understand at all and so just give up on using. It would also help Hive to allow comments from people without accounts.

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Agreed, all the techy stuff could be optional until folks are ready. Like "we created all this behind the scenes, this is how you claim them" kind of thing

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i actually have no idea how earning on WordPress works, especially with no ads as i never wrote blogs before Hive (forums yes, but not blogs). But i did make i would say over 300 videos, and to be honest, half of them are decent :D
only money i earned on youtube was 9$ before 2018 when they decided you need (what ever are requirements now for monetization). But they still run ads on my videos, they just don't share it with me.

One thing Hive has, and was kinda what i wanted on youtube, everyone can earn. And earning few $ for sharing something with the world is what probably most people are ok with. i know that was my idea. but then i got into staking and stuff and never cashed out, maybe this bullrun :D

And the truth is, on youtube, and probably other platforms, 95% of creators don't earn anything. And from those, i am sure half of them earn under 1k a year.

Grok says 97% of youtubers that earn something can't survive by youtube only (probably just counting ads earnings). It also says that X payed ~ 150.000 accounts. that is what? less than 1% of total users?

And that is just part of the Hive blockchain. There is a problem with "marketing" and at who to focus those efforts. I am sure that 70% of people on Hive don't know that Hive is used for decentralized podcasting distribution. and for decentralized live notification system. And that updating podcasting apps with podiping is 100x faster than Apple system (few seconds vs few hours) and much less power consuming, so it saves polar bears while Apple is actively trying to kill them by not using podping.

not sure where i was going with all of this :D

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i actually have no idea how earning on WordPress works

Hmm I need to write about that

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