Okay, I'll admit it; my title was clickbait.

While the title itself was clickbait there is allot of truth hidden within that lie. To be clear I don't see the HIVE Network as a failure and the success of a TRIBE can be determined in many ways that aren't linked to a tokens price.

Readers: "Rentmoney, what the hell are you talking about"?

My Journey On Hive

I have been doing allot of contemplating about HIVE/TRIBES and my Blog in general. This caused me to type out a set of goals I have set for myself but have not reached yet. If you are interested in reading what those goals are Click Here.

The contemplating I was doing also struck the memory of my very first goal I set on HIVE/STEEM. That goal is the reasoning for my overzealous clickbait title.

Readers: "Rentmoney, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT"?

My Original Goal

My original goal on HIVE was to show that someone can come here and become successful. Now success can be determined many ways. My blog by all means gets plenty of interaction and I'm grateful for that. A comment is worth just as much or more than an upvote. So when it comes to engagement I feel as my blog has become a success.

On the other side of that coin success is also determined by ones wealth earned. Now my goal when originally set wasn't just to be successful on HIVE. The original Goal was to show its possible to become a financial success on HIVE without currency investment. Put another way, I wanted to see if it was possible to start with 0 HIVE and build it up to something meaningful through hard work via content creation.

I feel as I gave this my best shot but failed. To give some more clarity my join date is January / 2018 and my total HIVE earned is 4376 (I have sold 0 HIVE) so plenty of time has passed before this conclusion was made. I am by no means complaining about the rewards I earned. I'm simply typing out my observations after deciding its time to put my original goal to rest as the time has come in which I intend on swapping some of my other currencies for HIVE. Now that I have gave you some background information.....

The Truth Hidden In My Lie Of A Title

For anyone living in first world countries, if you are an average JOE/JANE and all you are doing is content creating, I feel as its next to impossible to be a financial success on HIVE without an intitial investment (even then its not gntd). The appeal to places like this is the sexiness of earning via socializing (AKA, Creating Content). The bulk of users that this place needs for mass adaption will likely not invest much fiat. Its likely that the majority won't invest any fiat at all BUT these users are still needed. There is no social media site that is a success without them.

General users are needed here not just investors. Once they do get here they are going to quickly find out that most of their content goes unnoticed. It doesn't matter if its a meme they have posted that only took two minutes to create or an opinion article that took them hours to create. Their content will mostly go unseen and undervalued in which will eventually piss them off to the point where they leave. Thus the sites user retention problem.

We can give such users the agrument that earning $0.20 USD on a topic here at HIVE is still $0.20 USD more than they would have earned on Facebook but our species are a fickle bunch. Such users don't see that they earned $0.20, they see that someone else made one hundred times that much for lesser content and in their eyes that's not fair so back to Facebook/Twitter they go. I don't see this mindset changing so thus there will likely always be the user retention problem.

The users themselves thinking like this is just the tip of the crypto iceberg. There's circle upvoting happening / Alt account upvoting and various other underminded things that are hurting the potential growth of new users. Downvotes are another hot topic and user retention deterrent, no-one likes negativity even if its warranted.

To put this in perspective, Facebook tried a "downvote" option and people went ape shit over it. Facebook then removed the downvote option as it caused unnecessary conflict. So if users get angry over downvotes that take no monetary value from them you can bet that they will go APE SHIT CRAZY when an upvote is applied that does take monetary value away. Some here on HIVE are a little too downvote happy / others use the option sparingly then there's others who simply ignore content they don't like without downvoting it. My opinion, a rework of the downvote button is needed. Keep the downvote button but have the downvote negatively effect the users rep only.

Tribes

Will Tribes be HIVE's saving grace?? Who knows, certainly not me but if one wanted to experiment with how a no downvote option would work creating a TRIBE to do just that in might be the Ideal way to find out. Am I going to create that TRIBE? Nope, I'm much too busy but if one happens to pop up with such a feature I bet there would be allot of eyes on it. Those "eyes" could one day end up being potential investors. TRIBES using tokens that are 2nd layer have their work cut out for them but they have shown that their USD value can surpass the value of the HIVE token itself. Maintaining value for a TRIBES token isn't something that has been mastered yet although sites like LeoFinance just might be able to break that mold.