I haven't had much of a chance to watch anything from HiveFest, but what has been interesting to note is the lack of hype around it. There are likely a few reasons for this, including the bearish markets that has stopped people from going, but I think the larger reason is that Hive is doing what it was meant to do - decentralizing.
For many years we were all lumped in together and as such, there was a greater sense of community, as there was a lot of overlap in activities, more visibility on what others on the blockchain were doing. However, once communities started to form, as well as usecase interfaces like Splinterlands and Leo, there has been a fracturing of ties, which has led to some levels of disengagement, especially among the older, more staked users. It is not that they are disinterested, but they are less visible in what they do.
This is a shame.
I think that many still haven't understood that long-term success of Hive does actually depend on people building communities, where the staked influencers are nodes, rally points that people can gather around. They are the voices that can inspire other members to be more involved and engaged themselves, but when they are silent, people drift.
This isn't Instagram or TikTok where false influencers are algorithmically supported to maximize monetization, but it is a place where people have an opportunity to interact directly with individuals within the community, and build a sense of togetherness. Once those bonds break and people take the individualistic path, it all becomes about money and profit.
Have a look at Splinterlands as an example, where just yesterday they announced more layoffs from the team in order to cut costs. Restructuring isn't a bad thing per se, but if you look at the ark of Splinterlands over the years, they moved away from community content and interaction, to a for profit only model, so people flicked on their bot switches, set, and forgot. Rather than a vibrant community that love the game, it is a lot of people screaming at each other in Discord groups because they aren't making enough profit, or the value of their investment has gone down.
I might be exaggerating. I might not.
A lot of people used to call me a Steem Hive Shill, but that wasn't the case at all. I don't make silly predictions like "100 dollar Hive" or tapping into a "50 trillion dollar industry" or some such rubbish. For me, it has always been about building the community itself, which is why i railed against the bidbots so hard, because they were destroying it - Similar to the bots and battle-helpers in Splinterlands. But as long as a few were profiting, who cares, right?
The problem with set and forget activities is that it doesn't matter which community is utilized. It all becomes about ROI and then it turns into EOS, where there are only automated gambling apps. Even the creator couldn't stand it for long and left.
Hive can support a massive range of applications and is becoming increasingly easy to build upon. However, it people aren't even willing to engage with what is here now, to utilize the current environment, it is unlikely that "killer app" will find its home here, because the developers won't see the potential.
We have some of the highest paid accounts on the blockchain, getting a handful of comments on the majority of their posts. How does that inspire people? We have people talking about Hive at conferences and things around the world, but visit the accounts of those people and where is their community face? What happens when they encourage someone to look at Hive, but the person shilling barely uses it?
Maybe it is the high fever talking.
Yet, I can't seem to shake the belief that a community's success depends on communication within the community with each other. It is through the conversation that connections are made, people learn from each other and ideas are formed that can be turned into a reality, that gets the support when needed. If Splinterlands didn't start as "Steemmonsters" and leverage the community it had access to at the time, it likely wouldn't have got far off the ground. Yet, may of those early adopters, seem to have forgotten their roots, how it started and, how they were able to make so much profit from it. They are now entitled, no longer wanting to engage and have fun as a community, it is all about the ROI.
But as said, this was always the shift for Hive, because once it fragments into communities that no longer interact with each other, it becomes a decentralized economic model, where there are interdependencies at the infrastructure level, but the surface layers needn't see each other at all. An app can be "Powered by Hive" without people realizing it is on Hive at all.
And, it is because of this that the stakeholders are so vital, because it is they who underpin the ecosystem, by protecting it, and being the distributing force for the majority of the tokens to come out of the inflation pool. How that inflation is used is also an important factor for adoption and protecting the system, yet many people have also turned it into a money tap, to extract while it lasts, rather than using stake to build the platform, support growth, development, community.
It is impossible to say what happens to Hive in the future, because it could go to zero if people don't get involved, or maybe go the other way, with one plug at the right time bringing millions of people into the ecosystem. Whichever way it goes, it will come down to whether people are part of the community, or just biding their time until the next shiny thing comes along.
I just wish the people with stake, would influence the network with their voices too.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
