Some years ago, I randomly read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Basically, he is trying to analyze how some social phenomena go viral, apparently before the term viral was used.
He looks at some examples and identifies some patterns.
One example is a type of shoe called 'Hush Puppies'. (I had never heard of it before)
Apparently, the shoe was totally out of fashion and the company was about to fail, when some San Francisco skater kid popped up on a magazine cover wearing them. In a very select group of people these shoes were a thing, while until then everybody else did not like them. But those kids in SF were so cool, that it started a trend and the company recovered. Gladwell calls this a Cool Kids Club.
He describes how a group of cool, cutting edge, trendy people can unvoluntarily kick off a trend, just by being an exclusive social circle.
I do not know where the extremely expensive marketing campaign for Hive is going, but I do not expect anything to come of it. It is just money wasted. The name Hive itself was so poorly chosen that this thing will most likely never go viral. Or is the marketing already over? Has anything happened yet?
I know that I convinced very few people to even try out Hive (Steem back then) and that nobody stayed here. Every time, the dialogue flipped at some point and I was in the position of a salesman, while I was not even trying to sell anything. From my experience, you can not market this product to anybody.
We have been on this for 5 years. I do not think more of the same can fix our problems.
Perhaps, we should all take a much different approach and stop being newbie-friendly.
Perhaps, we should form more exclusive circles, be more secretive about this technology and become more hesitant with newbies.
Perhaps it is time for some reverse psychology type of approach; We should use more technical terms, abbreviate more, start circle jerking around Hive again.
When asked about Hive, I will tell anybody straight up: 'This probably isn't for you', which is the truth, too. Perhaps it will be an exclusive club of kids who are trying to be cool, forever.