Last week I accidentally went down the rabbit hole, again. I noticed a username among the voters, one I used to know back in the day, so to speak, which means the legacy chain obviously and went to check them out. I knew they are not active posting anymore, unfortunately, but wanted to see if they comment at all.
Looking through their blog, that is not active since 2021, brought back so many nice memories. Reading through the comments made me realize how many good content creators are not with us anymore and how the userbase has changed. I don't even dare to make a list with all those who I used to engage with on the legacy chain and are not active, as it's going to hurt to see the number and know who's not active anymore would hurt even more.
Photo by Benjamin Hibbert-Hingston on Unsplash
You could argue about the reasons all day, I bet the majority would say current rate of $HIVE does not worth it, but this is just one of the possible reasons, there are several other reasons for why one could take a break or quit and may not even be related to these reasons. I'm not going to get into it as each case is different, some get tired of writing, others have demanding jobs, or family problems, only they know the reason.
What I'd like to write about today is how people tend to be blinded or tend to try to blind others by talking about numbers only. Statistics are good, granting you a glimpse into what has changed and how, but that's not all. We get data about active users, new accounts created, number of onboarded users and so on, but you never see any data based on demographics as you have the privilege to keep your identity secret on Hive and it's up to you how much you reveal about yourself and your life.
Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash
However, after almost eight years on the chain, I can tell with approximation where the user is from, based on their content. Now, before you jump to conclusion, what is important here is not their location, but the content they are posting, which unfortunately, is heavily influenced by their culture and where they are coming from. Is this important? What do you think?
Over the years a lot of effort and even more money has gone into onboarding campaigns (this is what they call it), but if you look at the areas where these efforts have been concentrated, you can see underdeveloped and developing countries have been targeted mostly. Maybe I'm wrong as I don't have all the official data, my conclusion is based on what I see on the chain, but this is what I think. I understand it's easier to convince those in need, to join and earn (most likely this is the first argument onboardrs use to convince people) and there are plenty who would do anything for a few cents or bucks (literally anything, no matter how many rules they have to break), but then comes the question of quality.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
As a curator (if you're curating for a certain project), you check the post to be abuse free, to fit certain curation criteria and it's good to go. Then there are those who are curating abuse as well as they have no standards at all, and think making everyone happy no matter what, is the future of the chain, but that's a topic for another day.
Curating posts as a curator for a project is one thing, you don't have to necessarily like the topic, but when it comes to individuals, I mean curating for yourself, things change quite a lot. You have a different set of criteria and your interest narrows down quite a lot and this is how I'm not interested in reading posts about laundry days, lecturing about what you've heard in church, sky photos or weeds you photograph at the side of the road, or some spun article you have no understanding of, but you think it makes you look smart, or your selfies every single day and so on.
Looking at new content I think it's safe to say it has changed a lot and I put this on the geographic balance shift.
As a content consumer, you have the freedom to read and comment on what post you want and like, but as a content creator, you get comments from whoever wants and is interested (for various reasons) in commenting on your post. It's not up to you, you have no say in it. This means you get all kinds of comments, ranging from interesting, honest ones, to stupid, senseless ones from people that don't know better and think repeating what you said and agreeing with you (to give you and example) would make you like them and return the visit and start voting them. If you have a higher reputation (which is a useless metric by the way but new users tend to think it's important) and your posts hit trending, it's inevitable to attract the latter crowd.
You can meet and make friends with a lot of people through comments, but making (online) friends and truly connect with people you can only do with those who you have something in common. My rule is to reply to every comment, even the stupid ones (yeah, you can get mad at me for this), except for the users I want to ignore intentionally, but that's all as I'm not going to follow you just because you comment regularly.
Most likely there will be people in the comment saying there are plenty of good content on Hive, which can be true but then again, deciding what is good is highly subjective. What I'm trying to say here is that the userbase has changed a lot, the balance has shifted towards underdeveloped and developing countries and as I see, this is the direction onboarding is focused on. Maybe it would be wise to rethink and change strategy, stop throwing money out of the window and focus on other onboarding areas as well and get the chain where it should be.
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