A recent Cointelegraph article made news about how a new WordPress plugin "can help with copyright issues, prove who created a piece of content, and to reassure readers it has not been altered" using Ethereum. Sounds familiar?
If you're reading this article on Hive, chances are good that you've taken it for granted for years that our blockchain provides such benefits. So what's different with the ethereum based plugin? Well, it asks for 6-25$ a month just to provide a timestamp on your posts on the blockchain. Probably due to needing to pay Gas fees to do so. And that's without mentioning how Hive provides a wide range of other complementary social features.
Have we really been this bad at promoting our most basic features that this becomes newsworthy? Let’s do something about that!
First of all, I would be grateful to anyone who'll like, share and help bring attention to our own tweet pointing this out here and/or comment to the cointelegraph article here (our twitter handle is exxpio).
Second, this should be more about promoting Hive, than about us (although our plugin is the alternative to theirs which would instead bring new users to Hive). And I believe we ought to take some lessons learned from this.
Lessons for us to learn
For years our blockchain has provided something unique and disruptive, yet people even in the crypto-space are hardly aware. So let's begin by acknowledging that we’ve failed miserably at communicating and marketing these unique attributes (for which there are many different reasons). I think one such reason is us getting so used to many of the basics of Hive that we forget how significant they are.
I'm talking about "small things" like having social account names, a social platform with a built-in wallet that follows you across different apps and websites. Or how similar to the Ethereum plugin, Hive provides real ownership over your own accounts, rather than making a password and user ID in someone else’s database, and provides an immutable record of content changes, enabling proof of originality.
In a way, I am feeling happy and encouraged about all of this. If such a simple product is newsworthy, then it means we have an untapped source of marketing material at our hands. I know I'll be spending the rest of my day working on a new tab for "Why blockchain" to explain these basics on our new website www.exxp.io
Please let me know what other "basic" elements about Hive you would like me to add there. Or even better, visit the new website and tell me what I've forgot to communicate!
Have a lovely weekend!
Fredrik