#lumen

What if only bloggers are left?

What if, for all practical purposes, only bloggers are left on Hive? Or they are close to the absolute majority.

And by bloggers I mean the entire blogging ecosystem. Posting, commenting, voting, curation, communities, engagement, etc. I'm not saying there are literally no developers, traders or people building things. I'm asking a more fundamental question:

What if blogging has become the primary economic activity happening on Hive?

At first, that doesn't sound particularly bad. Hive has a very active blogging ecosystem. People post, other people read it, comment on it, vote on it, curate it and earn rewards. There is a whole economy built around that interaction. But it doesn't necessarily create much external demand for the blockchain itself. Not only does it not create demand, but it has the potential to stiffle opportunity due to a particular external view of what "Hive is."

The important question becomes:

What does someone who isn't a blogger need Hive for?

Not why would they enjoy Hive. Why would they actually need it?

What business is being built on it? What application requires HIVE or HBD? What financial activity happens because Hive exists? What is generating revenue from people outside the existing Hive community?

These are the big questions. A blogging economy can be healthy as a community while still being weak as a blockchain economy. It creates a ceiling. And honestly, I dont think Hive or the thing before it, was designed to have that ceiling. I dont think Hive was ever supposed to be "just blogging."

And it kind of is honestly, so much so, that at any point anyone tries anything that is not blogging, they automatically create a sort of a chasm between themselves and the rest of the "core" Hive community.

We have seen this happen many times. "Oh, theyre not really Hivers." No.... theyre as much hivers as the bloggers are.

At some point we kind of stopped expanding the number of things Hive can do and started maintaining the 1 thing most people on Hive are doing. Not even improving, simply maintaining it. While the market experimented, we put up walls comfy in our little bubble.

And that's where I think Hive has a much bigger problem than simply needing more users.

Hive needs more reasons to use the blockchain.

Blogging should absolutely be one of those reasons. It might even be one of Hive's strongest communities.

But if blogging is basically the beginning, middle and end of the Hive economy, then we're asking a social network to carry the economic expectations of an entire blockchain. Betting everything on only 1 thing. If we want Hive to be more than a blogging ecosystem, the demand for that has to come from the community, we have to build it, use it, fund it and support it. You cannot stand on the sidelines, understand what is missing, and wait for someone else to create the future you want; if we collectively don't act, nothing changes.

The interesting thing is that Hive already has infrastructure that could support much more than this.

Words are cheap, with LLMs running around they are at an all time low. Action is what carries value.

Posted via Lumen

Comments · 6

@steevc(81)· 5h
I think old school blogging is a smaller part of the internet than it used to be, but people are posting all sorts of content elsewhere. As I said in my post we should not get too precious about what can be here. A lot of people mainly read/watch/listen so they need nice stuff in their feed from others. They will also play silly games and we have some of those.

We developers trying various things around Hive. Coming up with something totally new is not so easy and then you have to make people understand it. You need to be able to pitch it in a 30 second video really.

I am fairly retro so I will read blogs and watch long videos, but I am not typical. I will also buy music I like.
@vikisecrets(80)· 7h
Mark Zuckerberg built a whole empire around social media, why not focus on the core business, attracting as many crypto users as possible, establishing ourselves as the #1 social crypto platform, everything else will follow, games, dapps, defi etc. That is how it used to be on Hive anyway. But ofc a new killer app would help too.
@stresskiller(73)· 11h
if only bloggers are left there would probably be less whining about the hive value in discord, i've always seen hive just as a social platform nothing more , post my photos and thats it . Only last year i started to act as a witness but even with that it's still just a social platform for me i don't see any other reason to use it . Being a witness is only helping the social platform to excist.
@hivebuzz(74)· 16h
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@wiseagent(82)· 20h

You cannot stand on the sidelines, understand what is missing, and wait for someone else to create the future you want; if we collectively don't act, nothing changes.

That is certainly a critical point, @lordbutterfly. Everyone here does what they can, but unfortunately, a lot depends solely on those with technical programming knowledge (for example).

Hive has enormous potential, but those at the top of the pyramid need to demonstrate that they are truly committed to the project's success.
@antisocialist(75)· 20h
Probably could have done without that first 5 years of running people off because they 'earn too much', or said something disturbing to the status quo.

It may have gone better if the core stake holders hadn't openly stated that they will reap the pool as hard as they can as long as they can and the only thing we could do about it is outspend them, or dump and leave, and then actually doing it, continuously, for the entire time, to this day.

Not many folks taking that offer up. They've mostly dumped and left.

Now, 6 to 9 years later, depending on when the wool came off your eyes, what's left of us see the deal on offer as essentially the same.

Unless somebody comes out with a killer app to bring in new folks that haven't taken the time to do the math, it's a slow downward spiral to distribution, imo. New users, new cycle, same problem.

At some point the price reaches a point low enough that folks start coming in, again. We can measure that with the price to power ratio.

Could you imagine buying in at 5usd per hive? Insanity. 'You get near zero power, we get 5usd.'

Nah, nothing changes until real fundamental power changes occur, imo. Changes that the crowd that left can no longer deny. At that point, maybe, some come back, and bring their friends.

Until then, we can continue to stumble around like the blind leading the blind, or we can facilitate power actually passing from the ninjamine era holders to the next generation.

Notice I didn't say burn, sell, nor delegate to those willing to bend over for favors from the court, I'd expect simply sidelining the stake against when/if it was needed to keep the train on the tracks.

At 10 years old one would think we could walk without somebody holding our hand. Since none of us were 10 when we got here, we could have likely done it all along.