This might sound like I'm swinging fists, but that's not my intention. I'm really asking questions of myself, of the community, and posing the possibility that we may have been taking the wrong approach after all.
I've been hearing for years that the appeal of Hive is the earning potential. I've also heard that without the earning potential, there is no reason for people to use Hive. My gut reaction is to disagree, but I have to try, we have to try, to understand what people feel when they say and believe these things.
To lay out the table, let's talk about Web2 platforms. After all, Web3, as much as we may claim to love it, is not really the norm. It's not really widespread. So I'll begin by asking one question:
Do most people use Web2 platforms for the money?
Actually, let me ask another question.
Do most people make money on Web2?
Do you see where I'm going? I guess that's a third question, but I can't help myself.
I hope the answers are obvious, otherwise my point won't land at all. It's my opinion that most people are perfectly OK with never making a single dime. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all of them. I don't know what the numbers are, but I'm willing to bet the gap is immense—the difference between the number of users on a platform and the number of earners on that same platform.
Now, I say this not because I'm arguing against the inflation allocation method, but more to point out that our focus on it, our tendency to make everything about it, has been myopic to say the least.
If we shifted toward building apps that were fun, intuitive, and simply enjoyable, the cherries on top and the icing on the cake would be the little tokens people earn along the way. The retention mechanism would not be monetary coercion, which seems to be what we've been doing all along.
With that in mind, I've been taking notes from 
This week I began implementing games on snapie.io myself. As of now, three games are available: Chess, because of course; Quick Draw, which is a Pictionary-style game; and a Word Guessing game. A few friends have been helping me tweak them, making them more enjoyable, and although they are not in their final form, because software never is, they are already quite fun.
Imagine more of us focusing on that. Screw the price. Screw the bear. Focus on making this place fun again.
And funnily enough, that might be what turns the boat around.
Is that irony, or just a feature of existence itself?
MenO
