The cryptosphere is constantly talking about the need for decentralized social media. However, surprisingly, no matter how much Hive/Steem is in the news circuit, no one talks about us like we're relevant.
This is a big problem, because all these people act like they want decentralized social media that no one controls, when in reality they want a new project that they control that everyone jumps in on and they get rich. Yeah... that's not how this works.
Hive is constantly suppressed.
It is truly an insult the way Hive is treated on a daily basis. It's one thing to constantly harp on the need for decentralized social media while claiming that Hive isn't a valid option, but that's not what's happening. We are completely ignored to the point of non-existence.
The most recent iteration of this can be seen on Twitter, where we are constantly shadow-banned, quarantined, and suppressed through stealth removal of votes, retweets, tags, and organic growth. @theycallmedan was banned for no reason. @splinterlands was banned for no reason. Of course there is a reason but the reason they give is an obvious lie or some bullshit generic statement with zero substance behind it void of any real explanation.
https://twitter.com/3speakonline/status/1418253789438439432
- 3speakonline
Here we see @theycallmedan using the @3speakonline account to show just how blatant Hive suppression really is. Twitter is legit lazy and not even trying to hide it. They simply take away votes and retweets from Hive Tweets with some weird algorithm.
The crazy thing here is just how blatant it is. We have no idea what they are doing in the background, and actions like this could exist in the background as well, but they are so lazy about their censorship in favor of efficiency that things like this start to bleed through to the end-user, who can see in real time that this is happening.
Who knows what kind of echo-chambers they have created in the background for groups they are looking to suppress. My account is definitely on some kind of stealth list, and I rarely get any kind of engagement from the outside of the Hive echo-chamber. They aren't allowing us to reach other communities on their platform and it's very obvious.
Way ahead of the game.
Many are concerned that Hive will go the way of MySpace. First to market is not always the "winner". To which I'd say, who cares? 40 million users is likely more than we can service anyway.
But at the same time, where is this supposed competition? It literally does not exist, and those who think it does are tilting at the windmills fighting invisible enemies. There is no competition for Hive. We stand alone, which is likely the main reason to so actively suppress it across multiple platforms.
I would welcome any competition that comes along, because competition within crypto isn't toxic, it keeps everyone honest and forces them to serve the underlying communities, or risk becoming obsolete.
Five years ahead of the game.
It's almost impossible for anyone to catch up to us at this point. Our token distribution is too good for anyone to swoop in and compete. People are greedy, and they aren't going to build an entirely new ecosystem only to take a 1% premine. They're going to do what they all do, and take a gigantic premine that puts the entire system at risk.
So while it is certainly POSSIBLE that someone comes along and dethrones what we have going here... the practical likelihood of something like that happening is essentially zero. It can only happen if a team of 100% altruist devs get together and make it happen AND somehow produce an incredible distribution right at the genesis block. If that were to somehow magically happen, everyone benefits, even Hive. So again, there's nothing to worry about in terms of "competition".
I honestly can't tell you how many articles calling for decentralized social media have never once mentioned Steem or Hive. It's truly a mind-blowing sight to behold. The only question is whether those reporting on the topic are completely incompetent at their job or are doing it on purpose. It's a good thing none of this matters in the long run.
Hive as a frontend is highly inconsequential. It's the backend that's truly interesting. It's easy to build here and the overhead costs are low. We have the foundations required that most other chains lack:
- "free" transactions
- fast block times
- usernames instead of wallet addresses
- account recovery
Just the fact that our wallets are actually usernames is a huge deal in the long run. This is what people are used to; this is what they want. No one wants to wait 10 minutes to a hour nervously waiting for a random Bitcoin wallet transaction to confirm. Everyone here knows how stressful that is. They want to send to @username and have it confirmed in 3 seconds. This is the way.
When Hive has a hundred different projects built on top of it, marketing the main chain will become largely irrelevant. At a certain point the blocks will fill up and we will have scaling issues just like everyone else. We aren't going to need more users a few years down the road. We'll have plenty. Too many, in fact. That's just how these trickle-down economies operate. They can't service everyone. Not even close.
What do we need to work on?
The biggest problem with Hive is the learning curve. Many are working to correct this by centralizing the gateways to the ecosystem, which is great. Using lite accounts, frontends can temporarily control the keys of new users and allow them to interface with the Hive ecosystem using nothing but a username and password with traditional account recovery. This is what people are used to. This is how they are trained, and we need to lean into that in a big way.
It should not be a daunting task, learning about this ecosystem, but for many who come here that's exactly what happens: information overload. Too much all at once. By breaking up the steps into pieces and providing a centralized option to begin is the best way to go.
Let's be honest, it doesn't matter if 10000 accounts are controlled by a centralized authority if all those accounts are new users with less than $10 staked. Even more relevant, these 10k accounts always have the option of figuring out the ecosystem and downloading their own keys. Try getting that option on centralized social media. Not gonna happen.
Gaming is another super important thing that can be done on Hive but not other popular networks like Ethereum. ETH has proven time and time again that the volatile fees required to post data to the chain will constantly muck up the business models of game designers. Right when they think they've created a good model fees go up again and ruin it.
Hive is much more sustainable.
If you have the tokens to farm resource credits then you've made it. This yield farming of bandwidth sets Hive apart from most other networks, and again is a really big deal. Those who want to build here simply need to make sure they have enough Hive to continue posting to the chain.
Of course this is counting the chickens before they've hatched. Hive hasn't had a scaling issue since 2017, which was before the implementation of RCs even happened. We haven't even had a chance to stress test this system in the field yet, so I guess we'll see what happens and what the true bottlenecks are and if we can fix them.
My team
Tribalism is pretty toxic a lot of the time in terms of scaling up, but it also creates a certain togetherness inside of niche groups. Hive is one of those communities that's already shown that it's not going anywhere. Even in the event that some magical network popped up that was ten times better, people would still be loyal to Hive, because at the end of the day that's what people do: they get conservative and set in their ways and they don't want things to change.
No one talks about how you shouldn't root for a particular sports team because they haven't won the championship in a while. Fans are fans. Community is community, and crypto is the same way. Just because a certain network is deemed "inferior" doesn't mean the fans of that network are just going to pack up and leave. That's not how this works. Just look at ridiculous Doge. They are the perfect example of a community coin that just keeps on keepin on, much to the horror of the maximalists, which I find amusing.
Communication
Communication is the most important thing in the entire world. This is not an exaggeration, as it is the only thing that separates humans from animals. Without communication, no one would know anything because there would be no way to spread said information. Take a moment to let this sink in.
Progression of human communication over time:
- Verbal
- Writing
- Printing Press
- Fiat Currency
- Internet
- Crypto
Memo key
On Hive we can communicate on built-in encrypted channels. We have yet to need these memo keys to defend the network, as our last battle was with some man-child rich-kid trust-fund dipshit. However, think about what happens if a government comes down on Hive. Those encrypted memos might come in pretty useful during an attack like that, eh?
Other networks don't have this ability to communicate like we can, and this is a huge deal that gets taken for granted on a daily basis.
Conclusion
It's amazing to me that more people don't want to jump in on Hive, but considering the suppression and misinformation surrounding these issues I suppose it makes sense. There's also obviously a certain level of tribalism and toxicity employed here that drives people away. Certainly that doesn't help the situation.
At the end of the day the Hive ecosystem is a threat to Twitter, and Twitter is suppressing it. I'm not sure about other social media sites but clearly crypto Twitter is one of the main places to be for those looking to build connections in this arena. We've seen those connections severed time and time again by the bots and admins for no other reason than perceived competition with the official responses being nothing but nonsense.
This is discouraging for the short-term, but it matters very little in the long run. We should actually be hoping that more relevant decentralized social medias pop up so there is less reason to focus on Hive suppression.
While many tend to think of Hive as social media, we are really just a blockchain that incorporates native JavaScript into the blocks. The "social media" aspect is just one of many frontends. This is what makes Hive so powerful. We can really do anything here, and these barriers that have been put up around us will eventually crack and shatter as we continue to build out this flat architecture that has no centralized attack vector.