The past few weeks, I’ve had several cases where my friends caught me writing long paragraphs of comments, and being totally stunned when they inquire and I tell them it’s a comment. For most of them, their curiosity is piqued by the fact that I’m making a very long comment on a social media platform they’ve never heard about. Every time I explain and get them to finally get that Hive is a social media, the difficult part comes. Explaining how Hive works.
In my explanation, I ensure to keep it as basic as possible, which is how you’ll find this post. So basic it might hurt your head reading this. I mostly just try to explain the unique things about Hive that make it different from other social media platforms out there. This writing is a narration, so I’ll be writing in all points of view.
Hive is (a blockchain) not like other social media platforms.
This is the part I mostly find most difficult. A lot of people here don’t know much about blockchain. If I’m being totally honest, a lot of people here don’t know anything about blockchain at all. It makes things a lot harder explaining a social media as simple yet complex as Hive is.
I mostly just start with Hive is a social media. But knowing a lot of people here, their understanding of it would be that it’s just a place to post pictures with one-line quote captions that have nothing to do with the picture, like most of them do on Facebook. So the next thing I say is that it’s not like Facebook though where you just post single-line captioned pictures and run away expecting to be showered love by friends.
Well if it’s not like Facebook, what is it like then?
“Hive is not like anything you’ve seen before”
I always tell them.
Censorship Resistance: Your content is immutable on Hive
On centralized platforms like Twitter, never say never when it comes to what the Twitter team can’t or won’t do to your account once you speak on something they don’t like. Your account could get banned for simply posting a provocative meme of Elon or for saying against him. Elon has tried to convince people that he is bringing free speech to Twitter, but it’s really free speech until your speech doesn’t sit right with him. True free speech is only available on Hive and decentralized platforms like it.
Of course you can be muted in communities if you break the rules (dummy:) ) but no one can tell you what to or what not to post. Unlike on Facebook, Twitter and others where your account can be blocked over matters as insignificant as posting memes that do not agree with the interests of the owners. Even if you broke community rules, muting your posts doesn’t block you totally from using Hive, it just makes your post less visible. But still, you don’t want to leverage this to go around breaking community rules though because other people might press their freedom of speech and freedom to use their stake and grace you with downvotes.
Hive has no tolerance for plagiarism
This is I think one of the most distinguishing things about Hive I always mention. Unlike on web2 platforms like Twitter where you’re free to post pictures you got from wherever without telling the people where you got it from, Hive would require that you source pictures that are not your own. Tell us where that picture of even the clouds came from if you were not the one that pressed capture.
Hive appreciates unique and original content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t share or borrow an idea or quote from someone else. If you had to borrow an idea or something from somewhere, make sure to indicate that the idea is not yours and that it came from x, y, or z.
You can monetize your content on Hive
I mostly make sure to bring this part in the later part of my explanation because I want to see that whoever I’m explaining it to is interested already even before I told them they could earn here. People here will do almost anything, and I fear if I told them they could earn here first, they’d sign up right away and go to lengths of plagiarizing to try to milk the reward pool. Some might argue that this strategy will make me lose the opportunity of onboarding people with great potential, but no strategy is without flaws.
This part is also where I struggle the most to explain. Once I mention that they can earn on Hive, all sorts of questions rain down.
“How?”
When you post and people like your posts, you earn depending on the stake of the person liking (voting) you. You have to earn the vote though.
But I already told you these are people with absolutely no idea how crypto works, so you can imagine the hassle of explaining in simple terms how there’s money in the reward pool, and the people with the biggest stake fetch the most from it. Lol, you should see me explaining this sometime in person.
There are also questions about what form money is. Most of them normally just assume it’s in Ghana Cedi, but it’s another struggle explaining to someone that the money is in HBD, which you take to an exchange to sell for dollars, and then convert the dollar to Ghana Cedi using services like Binance p2p.
Getting a Binance account set up for them and teaching them about p2p transactions is another hassle, but thankfully this part only comes if they made it this far already and after a week or two of signing up.
Hive is just like the other social media platforms
“Wait a minute, but you just said it wasn’t like the others”
Yes I did. It is mostly not like the others and unique in soo many ways. But it shares some similarities with the other as long as they’re all social media platforms. Hive has the general features other social media platforms have. The interactions are there, you post and engage with people, like(upvote) their posts and re-whatever it is(reblog for Hive) depending on the social media.
One thing about Hive though is that Hive can be accessed from different websites we call frontends or Dapps. This is a cool feature about Hive that Twitter and all the others do not have. You can access the Hive blockchain from the leofinance.io frontend which is the community of finance and blockchain lovers, or the Ecency or PeakD frontends, alternative frontends to Hive.blog, each with their special features.
Moment of decision
At this point, I normally either would’ve lost most people, or confused the fuck out of them lol. Maybe it’s too much to take in at once. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to onboard one particular friend of mine who is an excellent crocheter. You should see her work.
With everything I told her, she still doesn’t seem convinced enough to want to sign up. I’m hoping that even later rather than never, she’ll sign up eventually.
Before I even consider signing people up though, I assess if they'll have any value to add, and if I think they do, then the explanations come. It'll be a waste of my time and theirs to bring them here if all they'll do will be spam every where they go.
So if after all the explanation, they would like to sign up, I take them through some general rules on what is accepted and what is not, and we create an account. Then I monitor their account activity and guide them both via comments on Hive and DMS on WhatsApp.
I’d love to hear about how you explain Hive to people when you try to onboard. Could help me a lot with my onboarding in the future. If you’ll make a post about this, you can tag me too so I can find it easily and maybe it'll help me and others with explaining during onboarding. Thanks in advance.
Ps: All gifs are from tenor.com