Participated in HPUD again this week and it’s got me thinking.
honestly I’ve been feeling kind of conflicted lately. low token value gets to everybody i guess, I don’t care how zen you claim to be about it, it gets to you a little. and with that comes the negativity. Then on top of the under 5 cent hive…there is the finger pointing, frustration rears its angry head and a lot of that frustration is fair. but I’m wired a certain way, my brain just wants to fix stuff, i search for solutions, looking for that magic needle in the haystack, the sharp diamond in the pile of shit, the goose with the golden egg. But can this ship even turn anymore…are we too set on a course. A lot of the chatter out there seems to think so.
so where does this Butt head go. we need buyers. obviously. but you don’t get buyers without reasons for buyers to show up. We need more users, more people on the chain, using the tools, posting (not only shit posting just to siphon), playing games, making apps, curating, commenting, taking photos and making music and art and thought provoking blogs…all that good human shit. a bit of extraction isn’t that big of a deal, whatever, let the needy planktons have their nickels. But seems we could direct that extraction energy via collective behavior, shifting the culture of extraction. Fuck if i know how… just doesn’t seem un-attainable. My point i guess is more real eyeballs (not bot accounts), even just that could attract some buyers in. 50k active users that care is nothing to shake a stick at. But maybe that is one of the things that i notice… the number of hive users that care is dwindling. How do you plug this leaky boat? I lean toward onboarding as a real solution, and more or less getting onboard is not really so hard anymore…issue these days is this void feeling… ‘what do i do here’ ‘are people even seeing my posts’ I’ve heard this referred to as Hive’s broken front door. Where even if you find hive, you feel overwhelmed or that it feels like too much work and you’re not sure how to engage or find the things you’re interested in. I acknowledge that a lot of the front ends have been working on algorithms and trying to learn peoples interests and put some posts they may like in front of them. It’s early days still…but im hopeful and appreciate that at least the stigma against algorithms has seemed to have shifted.
Another thing i think about and have heard it spoken of—- we just need to be smarter about how we present this place. Post to Earn marketing needs to die! I’d like to see proof of brain be replaced by proof of human… hive needs real people, stinky people, dumb, smart, who cares, just be real, i dont care about ai aiding posts i just look for accounts that i think have a person doing manual things behind them. If there was some good mechanism to verify that… i think community would naturally form and break off into their niches.
Something i see as a leverage point and marketing strategy for hive is tapping into all the people out there who feel used by corporate social media, who feel like a product, because on most all platforms they are the product. Nobody wants to be Zuckerfuck’s bitch, Musk’s little spoon butt buddy, google’s poodle. (lol, im not sure what that means, it just came out and i liked it.) This dissatisfaction with oligarchy factors is a real opening for Hive. For better or worse hive is the closest thing to a human based fairer distribution social media. And nobody gets to just ban you. Look at all our favorite spammer kgakakillerg, that guy is another level of resilience. 🤪🤦♂️ and ain’t nobody gonna stop him… hive as a home for the censored rejects still has its ring, even if im nervous about what that may mean if all of the world’s censored came here 🫣, for better or worse leaning into that reject spirit seems a good move.
which brings me to the part that’s harder to say out loud. the downer stuff. I know it’s basically beating a dead cat at this point but here goes anyway. Is there actually some cabal of high stake holders pulling strings from above, spending DHF money without answering to anybody, I genuinely don’t know what’s true. i didn’t get the invite to the smoking cigars room. I think im more on the side that it almost doesn’t matter if it’s true. It’s back to, its worse on facebook, twitter, tik toc, YouTube, snap chat… and what ever other top down social media out there… hive doesnt stop being closer to a peoples social media to me…even if some whales are draining value. 🤷♂️ To me the bigger issue is the PERCEPTION that a small handful of people make all the calls, that’s baked into the chain right now whether we like it or not. Whether this perception is accurate or not, it’s there and that sentiment must affect price. So maybe all this Black Hole DHF spending that people point at is just a drop in the bucket, maybe it’s not even why price is down. but it’s an easy target and it’s the unaccountable FEELING of it that’s done the damage. doesn’t matter if the feeling’s accurate. feelings don’t need to be accurate to create a cycle. To me it’s just so clear that a complete shift of expectations around DHF proposals is in order. the return proposal is too big of a hammer, it lacks dynamism. Smaller levers are in order. Levers that foster accountability and transparency. DHF is a grant, all grants come with mandatory expectations. There seems to be this idea that “the community voted for it.” So kick rocks if you dont like it.
so then my dumb hopeful brain goes, why don’t we just rally together. I remember back in the day there was that little collective of dolphins that banded together just to get a bigger combined vote. why couldn’t we do that again. not some power move, just regular stakeholders saying hey, we’re gonna vote as a block and we expect some basic things. accountability. reporting. actual KPIs from DHF funded projects, show us what the money did. Together we could expect a group of top twenty witnesses who are actually active, not just collecting and extracting hive in silence.
I know witnesses who aren’t even top twenty and they care so much more than some who are. they’re building, they’re vocal, they’re posting, they show up. meanwhile some top twenty names just sit there cashing out with nothing to show for it, no post, no update, nothing. why is there no pressure on that. why does nobody push back?
I guess it’s some kind of malaise. nobody wants to stick their neck out because nobody wants to get downvoted for it, and or they just dont care anymore. Look, I’m not talking revolution here, I’m not that guy, I’m generally not even a negative person. I’m talking about something almost embarrassingly simple. an occasional post from each top 20 witness saying what they’re doing. a DHF project actually showing results or at least where and how they spent the money they got. that’s it. that’s the ask. it doesn’t feel outlandish to me, so I don’t think it should sound outlandish either.
and if it’s not outlandish, then a big enough block of HP holders should be able to say, alright, we’re voting in alignment on this, we expect these basic things. is that so hard to agree on.
I guess I’m just a dreamer about it. I really do think if people stood together instead of scattering their frustration into a hundred different Discord rants, something could actually move. but then again what do I know, I’m just a Butt with too many thoughts on a Saturday. maybe the real answer is we all just keep bitching in Discord forever. That will likely solve all of Hive’s woes. 😜 for now ill just throw good money after bad and be a Hive Power Up Dope!
