Share Your Thoughts to Give HIVE α Against Other Blogging Platforms
There are billions of social media users and ideally we would have millions of them on HIVE. According to statistics posted by @dalz, there are only few thousand users actively being a part of HIVE. The following is the chart for @peakd front end (which is among the most popular front ends).
I consider being a part of HIVE as a positive sum game and make a conscious effort to use multiple DAPPs and front ends everyday. There are many ways to bring in users. Games + microblogging has been my favourite combo to talk about. I don't want to make the conversation completely focused on two niches. We have to improve the user experience of being a content creator on HIVE.
Web 2 Compensates With Audience
These claims are either extreme edge cases or exaggerations. What we can know for sure is that these things are impossible on HIVE. We have not made past the 3 million account milestone yet. @dalz has some statistics on this:
The argument that centralized social media doesn't pay its users does not mean a lot to most users. People want to be popular and they go after the places where there is a large audience they can capture. Making money becomes an secondary thing. This problem is compounded by the difficulty in earning on HIVE.
The New Blogger Experience
Getting started on any type of content creation and building an audience is a very difficult task. I have been blogging since 2017 and even after all these years of work, I have 2,432 followers and make few dollars when I make a long form article such as the one you are reading right now. This is better than most bloggers manage to get in their lifetime. Most of the attention + money goes to a few creators on top. HIVE is not any different.
We Can Be Better Than Everyone Else
Not all traditional business/marketing advice work for a decentralized social media such as HIVE. One thing for sure is that being better than rest of the competition can go a long way. Excelling at only one thing will not make a big difference. That is fine because HIVE is already excelling at many different things.
- We have extremely high censorship resistance.
- Backlinks from multiple front ends can be great for SEO.
- Content is monetized from the very beginning.
- One account; many DAPPs.
- Amazing community.
These are already reasons why some users come and create an account. Then some of them start writing long form content and the struggle begins.
Typical HIVE Advice Works*
The challenge is that it is a massive investment and a time commitment. Most authors think good content should earn them good votes. This is something that hardly ever happens. At times I have seen a some of my best works get overlooked by a poll I made spending 10% of the time get better rewards. I write as a hobby and I financial incentives only make up a part of the picture. This is not the case for everyone.
Replace E-Mail with Discord and many of the advice given for traditional blogs and newsletters will apply to HIVE. Most successful bloggers spend 20% of their time writing and 80% of their time promoting their content. HIVE success will not be that different unless you are a Whale or part of a popular DAPP/project.
HIVE Blogging Needs An Alpha (α)
α is a term used in investing to describe the ability to beat the market. If you cannot beat the overall market; why even bother making individual trades? In the context of this article, what I'm looking at are ideas and strategies that can make HIVE more attractive to anyone looking to write long form content. I will list some of the competition we have.
- Medium
- Substack
- Personal Blogs
- Other Web 3 Social Media
We need to provide some α to make HIVE into the place where content creators thrive. It is possible to get a custodial account in a matter of seconds and write something on blockchain. What we need is a way to keep these users active.
Engagement X Money Makes The Difference
I was going to write the above heading as "Engagement + Money". While writing the article, I came to the realization that it is better to look at this as a multiplication. Consider this a framework to approach author retention. I can go on and add some ideas into the mix of how to onboard authors and keep them active. That would be the opinion of a single Dolphin who has been continuously blogging for 7 years.
There are those with a longer track record. There are those with many different types of experience with different types of content (@threespeak is one of them). I want to know what changes you would like to see to make HIVE gain an α on top of all the other alternative regardless of cryptocurrency aspects.
Share Your Best Ideas in Comments
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
And this would start by bringing real content consumers.
The current ratio is somewhere around 90% content creators, and 10% content consumers. Ideally there should be more content consumers than content creators.
The opposite ratio is leading to what we see nowadays on Hive.
Most people are focusing on posting, and the most of the blog posts are ignored/overlooked.
And its even false too. Because Blogger (Google) pay many of its users. YouTube (also Google) too.
And the Hive blockchain is also centralised in its own way.
Honestly speaking, not really.
It takes only one person with higher amount of Hive power to downvote someone's posts to zero, and the reputation of a user below zero, and after that (or maybe even sooner), their posts will even become automatically hidden due to low ratings.
And there are downvote trails too, where people blindly (automatically) downvote posts/comments without even actually seeing them (and they do the opposite too by doing the same with upvoting). This can quickly and easily boost the above mentioned process.
Of course they cannot delete the posts on the blockchain level, but if they reduce its visibility on the front ends, then the chances to reach actual readers and real audience is very low.
And this often reduce someone's mood to write anything.
And another thing.
I read this from someone else in the recent past. That the people are afraid to comment, because they fear that they say something wrong.
Not necessarily technically, but if the users are actually afraid to comment, then the censorship actually works. The people censor themselves in this case by their own fears, but still.
There are many things to talk about in this aspect. We could write an entire book about this.
Thank you a great deal for this reply. Learning what other community members want to see was one of the reasons I wrote this article.
This is one of the best pieces of feedback HIVE can receive at the moment. We need to have more people who are visit our front ends the way blogs are usually visited. We need some plans to bring in readers which can then be converted to users or be monetized with decentralized ads.
That is true. The difference on blockchain is that everyone is monetized from the very first day and the minimum payout is a fraction of a cent.
This is similar to shadowbanning than outright censorship. Abusing downvotes is a serious issue and I have seen many good people get discouraged by it and leave HIVE. Downvote trails are still a better alternative than a centralized system of content moderation. We are going to need some system to moderate content and these tools get abused by bad people. We have to choose the less bad option and try to find ways to minimize the problems caused by downvotes.
This is the most disheartening thing to read in your reply. These people should at the very least create an alt account to voice their opinions. I have received large downvotes for saying certain things. It's not good to see hundreds of dollars worth potential earnings disappear. I want people to be able to express their opinions freely. I do think we are light years ahead of traditional social media. We simply have a long way left to go.
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We should try to bring in more engagers