As some of you who've been following my journey into AI coding know, scrobble started off as a small project mainly about logging music aka scrobbling, but I hate just being a copycat of something else, i.e. last.fm or other similar scrobble sites. I didn't see any sites that offered logging of more than just music, and by combining the web scrobbler with the trakt scrobbler (both open source), now combined into hive scrobbler, it allows for automatic logging of both music and videos. Thus scrobble.life extended into more kinds of media.
That's not to say that scrobble.life is similar, it does still offer the benefits of the hive blockchain to those with a hive account (for now), while guest accounts can only scrobble and leave on-site comments but accrue passive hive rewards from their activity. These things aren't something to scoff at cause ever since I started creating this project there's been mass migrations, a lot of copycats being launched (especially now with AI coding) due to the mass migrations cause these former projects would change the rules and limit what users can do unless they pay them more. What sets scrobble.life apart is that it managed to have users using it, which 99% of copycats never get to, and the best part is that people started using it without any rewards to be had, they simply liked the idea and vision; to log your media in one place and on chain, so that if my website or myself ever go crazy and start charging people for simple usage or perks of the site, they can take their scrobbled data and move on to another website here on Hive directly. That's something many of those mass migrating users cannot do and have lost their data in some worst cases.
I've also been trying to stay unique in terms of smaller services/games the site offers, and not just copying whatever is popular on other pages or already existing here on hive, not everything needs a blockchain.
My point with this post, however, is that while I've tried to let people posting about certain kinds of media on other communities, it may not be easy to always curate those posts compared to them being in one community: scrobble.life. This does not mean that we want all posts to come through our community, we just haven't gotten around to figuring out a good way to not miss posts posted through us onto other communities yet and to be honest, even only curating posts in our community it's been costing our voting power quite a lot as the amount of users becoming active there has been staggering. Price fluctuations can sometimes skew the rewards a bit, you always wanna give posts more when curating with a big project which has been hard to see in times like these that even our max votes it'd only be something like $10 in author rewards, but we hope that with price correcting on the upside soon it'll allow our voting power to recover as well as we can give users more respectable amounts of rewards (even if we mainly look into hp rather than usd - we understand the psychological effect when most front-ends display usd value - which is why scrobble.life has opted for HP instead).
Another thing I wanna mention about the centralization aspect is that, while we've tried - with ocd - for the longest time to diversify communities we curate and empower their leaders and curators with extra voting power, these markets have shown that not everyone survives them. There's been many times cases where amazing communities we've put so much attention, voting power and curation thought behind have simply just had their leader vanish, leave the curators without any control/keys/power and thus the community whimpered a slow death. This always stings as it feels a little bit like a waste, sure the communities mostly are there and no leaders have gone rogue/bad actor to purposely mute posts or alienate users, but without someone at the helm steering the community it's mainly a shell of its former self. For that reason, after all these years, I've kind of come back to think that maybe it's not so bad if a community encompasses more if we know that it's going to stick around and not just die off for random reasons.
I don't know, haven't given too much thought into it, but it's nice to see how fast and large the community has grown in such a short amount of time at the worst of times. I'll try my best to steer the project in the right direction while staying true to its vision, scrobble everything in life worth scrobbling! Thanks to everyone using it and using it well!
I have a few updates coming up soon, some of you may have already noticed them on the site. There's also a big update I'm waiting on a bit that our mobile users will like, the reason for the delay is that a very own hiver/scrobbler has been working on his own mobile solution so I wanna give him time to announce it before I include guides on how to connect your scrobbles to mobile using his solution as well as existing ones!
