July 31st, 2020
In a few hours it will be three years since I joined and became active on the block chain. At the time there was only Steem. I have completed my power down on Steem and moved all my funds over to Hive.
I felt that Steem had lost its way and direction, and was becoming more of a mining platform than a social platform, as a new not fully informed person about crypto, this did not fit well with why I joined Steem.
On Hive there has been much talk about what Hive is, about what the Hive Community is, and about where Hive is going. I joined Steem Block Chain, not for the crypto experience, I joined Steem because my wife told me there was a lot of stories and books and things to read. There was.
I came to the block chain side of Social Media for the content. I like to read. The free offerings from Amazon for Kindle were becoming fewer and fewer, and the cost of buying was ever increasing. So when my wife told me there was a lot to read on Steem I joined.
I joined the block chain as a consumer, I am still primarily a consumer. Hive has offered up that opportunity again. A place to consume content, a place that has things I like to see, read and comment on.
There are a lot of people that see consumerism as a bad thing, I am not one of those. I fully admit I like to consume stuff. I like having options for dining out, even though they are pretty limited where I live. I used to like to go shopping even if I did not buy anything. Having a choice of different place to go and shop and look at things I enjoyed.
Big box stores came to our small town, mom and pop stores started to close, they could not compete with the in-rush of conglomerate stores. People were happy at first, they thought they would get better prices, more choice, more product, after all these were big stores. It happened for a little while, but then the choices were removed, the product spread became less and less, and some small niche stores, (mom and pop places) started to return.
Steem was becoming a big box store, removing peoples options, taking away choice, and telling people what they needed. (my view). A few of the larger accounts saw this, took action, and gave us Hive. The Niche community idea has come to full fruition. People once again have options.
Many on Hive keep talking about on boarding, of quality content and content providers being needed. Many talk about a lack of content on Hive. I find no lack of content on Hive. What seems to be lacking the most on Hive are people like myself, those that like to consume.
Vote trails, curation trails, they are not going to tell you what people really like, what they are reading, what they are enjoying what they are looking at. I am only one person, but I have met several people that see Hive as a Social Site. people that like to consume, but also people that like to be social. Look at the social interaction contest post. Not the photo challenge, or color challenge or free write post, take a good hard look at some of the social interaction contest post.
Post that advertise an up-coming Discord interaction get a bit of feed back and social interaction outside of the actual Discord show. Once again a Social interaction, a place for people to meet, have fun and interact and consume the content of a content creator.
For me the block chain has always been about a place I can find things to read, look at and a place to interact with others. Perhaps it is time for those that want to onboard more users to start selling the Social side, the interaction side, the content availability side and try to bring in more consumers.
Just a few of my rambling thoughts on my three years on the Block Chain.
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