I've been back here for a few days now, posting quite a bit as I'm watching a market or have some idea about some post, and trying to curate good content. This place is like a full time job. That's part of why it's not worth more, but what I'm here to talk about is a type of post that I've seen time and time again that frankly annoys me. I'm somewhat guilty myself. I still believe in this asset. It's why I never sold the Hive in my account. But I'm not going to tell you that hive is going to $5 or $50 or might become a top asset. To be frank, there are quite a few issues here.
When Steemit was running things, I had hopes they would fix the issues. I should have realized that was bullshit because they were impossible to communicate with. They acted like they were going to take ideas under advisement and then went absent.
Hive is a lot better. I know many of the people working on hive...somewhat, in the online sense that I've talked to them over chat a few times, not in the personal sense. What I'm saying is that they're approachable. If I found a serious bug, I know that I could talk to a few people and I'd probably be put in touch with someone to deal with it right away. Even if I just needed help with something, many of them would help. Not because I've talked to them once months ago, but because they're invested in here, and are approachable. I could not have said the same about Steemit.
With a few more resources, and the right direction, I don't see a problem with Hive eventually being worth a lot more. I believe in this place and am long on it. But it's just not happening right now. We might see a new ATH with a pump, and quite a few new people showing up, and that might get us there, but as it is now? Nah.
Hive still has some of the same issues as Steem did.
It's too hard!
cue "That's what she said"
Someone gets here, it needs to be easier to onboard them. We need a service to manage keys. Yes, NEED. And the reason we don't currently is risk. Many people do not want to deal with that headache. But if we want to be the crypto Facebook, or MySpace, or LiveJournal, we NEED easier account management and on-boarding.
Maybe not even for big accounts. Maybe once accounts get to a certain size, they have a process where they move to either personal management for a fee, or moving towards handling their own keys.
Image used under CC BY ND (source)
The past of Steemit also looms overhead a bit for those in the crypto sphere. How have they solved those issues? Have they fixed them? Could some asshole take over Hive too? These are questions I've been asking myself this entire time, and it scares me. They might not be the same as many users, but I think they might be nervous if they heard the story.
One of the other issues with on-boarding has a lot to do with communities. For years I kept telling people we needed communities. I was not referring to simply posting groups. What we have is a lot better than Steem was when I joined it, but it's not enough. When I came back here, I had no idea what to do to up my earnings. I am still desperately looking around for how.
One issue is disliking Discord and it's centralization.
I remember I once was a member of a sort of community on Steem. I ended up earning a lot more while I was a member, and getting curated by people there quite a bit. But a part of it really irked me due to a mentality that I had developed in my time there about curation being a sort of noble job. Part of the requirement of that community was to upvote a certain number of people every day. I think it was only like one or two, I don't remember. Normally this wasn't an issue. Some days I had to spend far too long trying to find something worthy of upvoting. Later I found out many members weren't even holding up to this rule, and just no one was checking. Also needed to comment to them and then report that you did on the discord. That was just annoying as someone with mild social anxiety. But these rules did work to ensure everyone in the community earned more.
Now I somewhat regret leaving it, but the anxiety that was building up to go against what I believed was not something I enjoyed. At the time, earning a few more bucks every post was not worth curating people I did not think deserved my upvote, which at that time was quite substantial due to a delegation.
I'm not going to flag a post unless it's crap that's overvalued, or stolen content, but I also am really hesitant to vote for many shit posts.
That community was private invite only. But it comes to mind every time I think about communities.
The solution to this problem, communities that actually encourage engagement and help users, does not have to be a major change to the chain itself. Though there are a few changes that could be done to make communities more involved. The front-ends could just integrate links for communities and maybe FAQ's.
There's a hive chat that's pretty much empty. Because it's just one link in a whole list. I only go there because I was a member of Steem chat. I haven't checked out PeakD's chat yet because when I clicked it, it didn't support the key manager I use, and I didn't feel like bothering to open my keys at the time. So I can't speak for that. But that chat was a major thing for me personally to interact with people on Steem, largely because Discord sucks and I don't like it. But many communities are really successful on Discord.
Here we have a chat that's easy to enter for Hive members, and no one in it because it's not really prominently displayed. PeakD's chat also uses your Hive keys, so that may be easy for people to join. Many people use Discord, so that may be easy for people since they're used to it, but their current accounts may be for another purpose, and they may need to setup a new one just for Hive. You still have the same issue as well, where no one new knows about your Discord.
These barriers for entry as an issue.
Things need to be easier.
People don't need to earn $50 a post from the begining, but they need to see a way to make progress. Right now you get here, there seems even less help than Steem, and you gotta figure things out, and as you try to blog maybe you make a few cents, and you have no idea what you're doing and it feels like there's no clear path forward. That loses users.
There are more issues here, but many of them boil down to the same basic concept, we need to make it easier. Right now this place was obviously designed by a coder. We need someone to translate this place to the layman and make it easier to start.
Until this happens, forget your dreams of $5 hive. Unless you plan on convincing Reddit to pump this place. Even then you probably won't see $5 Hive, because we have tons of people every day getting paid in Hive with "paper hands" selling massive amounts of the cryptocurrency. That's the final thing that I know we need to get Hive to be worth more, more reasons to hold. This one is actually being well taken care of by devs here from what I see though. Lots of people want to build up the Hive they're holding, and sell it for alts to hold as well.
But this is all just my opinion. What do you think?