The holy grail in Steem around 2018 was SMT's , SMT's and SMT's. All the Community wanted were SMT's. Once this was launched then the world was our oyster. The problem was the speed of development especially for a platform as complex as Steem was. Steem was not huge yet but we were not lacking users either and during the early days of Hive the same could be said. Devs were in demand and could charge what they liked. Development was slow and arduous. The Community waited but there were only breadcrumbs and no major changes. Even to this day Hive.blog is pretty much Steem with a Hive logo. People in crypto stumbled across Steem like myself and yourself and once you survived the initial minefield of "You plagiarized this , you didn't source your images, you can't mass tag, self voting is like giving yourself a clap after you sing a song" and the 100 other unwritten rules, you found yourself a few like minded people to hang onto the dingy with you. If you stuck around and if you grew too fast this dingy of like minded people became what was known as a circle jerk so you had to float around and change dingy every so often. So the Community waited and waited for the bull run and it eventually came during Covid when people were locked inside with nothing to do only search the internet and spend some money. This was Hive's time to thrive and it did a bit but it never really took off properly. Many were waiting for the $10 Hive which never came so held their stash. Splinterlands was the driving force during this period as people sought any kind of online game to keep boredom at bay. I think Hive reached around $3 at peak but it was important to note even at the point where people had nothing to do and nowhere to go, blogging was still relatively low down the list of things to do. So once the pandemic cleared it was off to enjoy life once again and lone behold people started leaving. Fast forward to 2026 and Hive is at 4 cent, we now have the opposite problem. We have too many people building and making stuff for Hive but now we have no users. I have built a couple of websites in my time but mainly the old HTML-CSS-Javascript combo. Nothing like what I built with Sportsblock, its automated contests , Predictions , Sportsbites which is our short form sports content and also The Football Exchange which is a layer 2 of the Fantasy Premier League Game that is pretty cool , all on top of Hive. But the thing is users are lacking because there are not many active on Hive anymore. We all know each other and judging by Discord , not many of these people like each other either. People are only waiting for new projects to fail. Any blip in a project and its a pile on by the traditional devs. Those who are active have been delving into Opus 5 , Astra and building their own projects and its great. I see @lordbutterfly has Lumens , @acidyo has Scrobble.lite, @beggars has Hive Predict, @meno has Snapie, butts and eco are doing stuff as well and I can keep going and going. I see many have games in development as well which is brilliant to see. All really good looking platforms ( much sleeker than what we ever had) and all using Hive blockchain. I may speak out of turn here for all these projects but the platform or use case is not the problem with any of them. They are all good. It's just the userbase is lacking and I include my own platform here. If Hive had higher traffic then I am sure that these platforms would all be a success. Myself and @niallon11 decided to give away 500 Hive and 10,000 MEDALS for the World Cup competition where you pick 16 teams and assign each of your teams a multiplier on the confidence on how far they would get in the tournament. It was quite a cool concept by @fullcoverbetting and the contest itself was actually really interesting up until the final. We marketed the shit out of it. Now we know many on Hive are not into football but its one of these cases where you just pick a few random teams and off you go. Worst that can happen is you don't win the free prize. Only 60 people entered in the whole platform for free Hive. So if we had a charge or a fee on the new platform then you can forget about any users signing up. Nobody will enter. And this is the challenge on Hive. We are all too busy with our own thing than to check out other peoples stuff. I made an effort last week to check some of the other platforms out because I should be supporting the others new breed of dev if they took the time to visit my platform. There is only a small pool of people who we all target now. Maybe its time for the new kids on the block to come together and market Hive in a different way instead of everybody moaning about our past failings. AI adverts are now the norm. I've seen a guy recreate an advert that cost 1 million dollars for the price of a subscription. There must be a creative Hiver that can create an AI video with all the new Hive platforms. A look forward rather than looking back. Who knows. We might even get a few new users out of it and the cost would be minimum. Also for whoever is left we should be all following each other on X. Nothing worse than a project trying to get off the ground with 50 followers and the project bleating on about Hive being the best thing since sliced bread. Give @sportsblock.info a follow on X and we will follow you back. Let's kickstart Hive again. Thanks a million.
