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.