I've spent a lot of time on Hive over the past six years and since the early days communities were touted as a must have for the chain.
I have to say that i agreed with them and still do that Hive is not marketable in it's current form. Hive is just a protocol filled with thousands of very different people with a lot of different ideas on how it should operate. Differences that have driven a lot of those same users away form the chain when it didn't go the way that they would have liked it to.
Outside of the protocol Hive is like a small country made up of these different people, different ideas and different skills. If people put them to good use we could have thriving country regardless of size like Monaco or even Ireland.
If we get lost in the politics and can't find a compromise the chain will lose all of it's talent and be cut off from the table like North Korea or England. Like with any country power can be bought and sold based on your stake but unlike other countries you can work your way into a position of power and influence solely through hard work and time.
If we have the right people running the protocol and working on improving the overall experience for everyday use then you need to look at the second layer of the country. The business layer, social layer, working class layer or whatever you would like to call it.
If you filter the whole chain through one viewpoint then everything is a huge mess of different content, transactions and opinions. No country in the world operates like this and every layer gets subdivided down into more sections.
That is where communities com into play here. The games and apps can look after themselves as they stand alone in their little circles as it should be. However content is still not filtered properly towards groups of like minded people.
We have had lots of attempts in the past but nothing that lasted long enough to stand alone as a proper community and grow.
Splintertalk is still going due to it being propped up by it's successful app.
Looking at the other tribes that have been created they seem to all be dead in the water. Looks like sportstalk is about to follow.
Leofinance being the one exception as they have build on the basic version that they started with to create a proper community and site that they can operate on.
The standard tribe pages are so poor to look at and so complicated to work with that they will never amount to anything. I've asked about an upgraded version in the past but there are no plans to make them easy to set up and profitable to run.
Leo decided to take the initiative themselves and do it right which is going to be a great case study to show if it can be done once the site is set up properly to run the community.
They added the features which we know are the most needed and changed the entire layout to focus on short form content instead of blogging to optimize the site for earning revenue. An actual business decision.
- Easy onboarding.
- Lite accounts.
- Nice layout.
- Revenue from advertising.
- A team of volunteers.
- Marketing.
- Customer support.
- Customization options.
These should all be the standard for new communities with a package for people to operate them with no coding nessessary.
If it can be done once it can be repeated a hundred times.
This will be a very interesting experiment to see if the community can grow in Monthly DAU's as well as increase the token price by building their community in the right way.
It could still fail as anything can but at least Khal and the team is giving it a proper go.
I'm very hopeful that this is the template for a successful community and that going forward we will be able to create a lot more of them for a fraction of the price that has been put into building this one.
The one amendment that I would make if i could build a similar project is to take 20% of the revenue form the website and instead of buying LEO would buy Hive to power up for the community and use it to vote on the best content. Taking hive off the market and rewarding top quality users at the same time. Comparing to LEO's current revenue that could be $1000 of Hive every month powered up from the markets.
Now try to get 20 successful tribes running consecutively, bringing in new users while reducing the circulating supply of Hive.
I hope that we can see this in the not too distant future and that we can build a new sports tribe in this model next to become the second project bringing revenue into hive and to it's users. A crypto site is a good first option and sports would have to be the next go to in my mind.