Content creators boomed in 2019 as Covid and lockdowns hit the world. Platforms such as Twitch, Youtube and other content/streaming platforms saw a massive uptick in not only content creators but also the amount of people consuming that content.
The issue with this... Mega corps have become even more powerful as a select few companies acquired millions of more users and started to be very selective as to who they promoted, pushed, bought and their terms. We see countless double standards of bans, shadow bans, demonetization, weird so called "algorithm changes", uncalled for censorship, abuse of data and so forth and it's only getting worse.
It's because of this a huge push for web3 has been initiated and part of that vision of web3 is that power will be restored back to the content creators. Lets be honest if it wasn't for the thousands of content creators producing vlogs, blogs, video, music and other forms of entertainment to put on these platforms they would be a empty dead shell.
As I've said in the past I feel Hive was way ahead of its time and in some cases it still is. A blog along with a growing ecosystem (however primarily still just blogging) awards content creators for their time and effort from the community within them. It's one of the most powerful things about crypto by directly rewarding content creators for their time and efforts along with the every day user. Now everyone has a share in the system and would only want the best for it being part "owner" of it by holding the utility token.
We also saw a huge roll out across the music industry along with artists and other aspects of content creation that then created one of the heaviest growths in crypto and that took the shape of NFTs.
A new wave is currently taking shape and it comes in the form of web3 applications that will empower content creators to create content on new platforms that will look somewhat like web2 applications. Your Facebooks, Twitter, Twitch etc will all eventually be morphed into web3. While there are some options for this none of them have wildly caught on but it's only a matter of time before just one hits it right and takes off. From that the natural awareness and word of mouth will very well potentially explode all of these other platforms in terms of users and content. From there users and content creators will start to select what platforms they enjoy posting and using the most which is why UI will be one of the critical advancements of adoption.
Three core things are going to happen over the next few months. I firmly believe we will see rock solid applications towards the end of this year or into early 2023.
The first will be more decentralization. I don't believe we will ever see fully decentralized however it will be more so run by the users based on some type of stake weight of how invested or how much they use the platform. They will be able to vote and make decisions which will then be either followed through by real people who are hired on or autonomously through smart contracts.
The second will come in the form of rewards and how they are given and what will fuel their price. Sure some of these platforms have tokens but at the end of the day they need to create value. One of the easiest ways for that is ad revenue but there are many others such as offering services, upgrades, paying for ad placement and many more options. Primarily this is how these current social networks earn massive amounts of revenue so imagine for a moment that huge wealth being fully redistributed to the people that interact with it and then the community or users vote and use funds to build and change things. That's the ultimate goal of these platforms.
The third will come as products or other things outside of just the social media platform. What's really cool and powerful is how one social network can expand into many things. I think the best example of this from what I have seen so far would be Torum which has a Facebook style posting structure and format but has implemented things such as Crypto rewards, NFTs and DeFi.
It will be interesting to see how fast the hive community and devs start to build these functions out. I have to say I hope it's soon otherwise I do feel Hive will start falling behind the competition. Even so the groundwork for basic hive growth is there as a blogging platforms that rewards creators and that might very well be enough to increase the value and price of Hive.
