It feels revolutionary... it should be simple to implement... could it solve one of the biggest problems on Hive?
TL;DR: the introduction of a "like" button could improve the trending page, help (new) users get much more visibility and solve the problem of "low quality posts"
A big problem on Hive currently is that the implementation of "Proof of Brain" (PoB) doesn't really work very well. What is PoB you ask? There is a good post about this from several years ago by 
Proof-of-brain is described in the Steem bluepaper as having the following two properties:
- a pool of tokens dedicated to incentivizing content creation and curation (called the "rewards pool")
- a voting system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to assess the value of content and distribute tokens to it
These two properties come together to allow the Steem blockchain to distribute a large portion of the block rewards using human participation as the mining mechanism rather than using electricity and finding hashes which traditional proof-of-work blockchains utilize. The human work is what is valued here rather than the hash rate of your army of computers. (emphasis on my part)
Now that we understood PoB, why doesn't it work?
The major issue is not the content itself, but the misalignment between the goals of the curators and the goal of the platform and the proof-of-brain system. In the current system, it is not compelling content that is rewarded, but profitable content. While at times compelling content can be profitable, this is not always the case. (emphasis on my part)
There have been quite a few suggestions made by the community and I won't address them here (e.g., see the post above for examples). Obviously none of the right ones were implemented or nothing really solved this problem as we are still faced with it now.
What I am suggesting is a "like" button for Hive.
Yes - it's that simple. Adding a "like" button (or whatever you want to call it) on top of the upvote mechanism would be a way to make posts more visible. Why does visibility matter? As valuable content (which might also include "low quality posts" such as selfies, memes or AMAs etc.) is often not seen by the community due to the failure of PoB or users simply not wanting to reward such content it is a simple way to give (all) users a chance of getting noticed. This of course would result in other users seeing these posts who could therefore decide to "upvote" such content, thereby making such posts also profitable.
However, I would argue that it is not even always about profitability... social media has shown that what people often want is just attention... That in itself can already by satisfying for some users. Attention, however, is something that is much more easily gained through "likes" and not necessarily by "upvotes". If Hive wants to truely become competitive in the social media landscape (and not just remain a niche) the current system has to change.
For the implementation of this idea I think it is crucial to keep the current reward system which is distributed with "upvotes", but also have a "like" mechanism which resembles the one found on other social media sites. We know that the former system is flawed, but obviously Hive wouldn't be Hive without a global reward pool (a fundamental which I think shouldn't be discarded too quickly). So introducing a "like" mechanism would build on this system rather than completely change it.
The "like" button could work as follow:
Could this solve some of the problems of Hive?
I would be really interested in getting feedback on this since I think it could really change Hive for the better. So I'm just going to tag a couple of users who I think should see this. Don't be afraid to spread the idea if you "like" it 😉
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