I have written a few posts lately on the state of Hive, but then it has been on my mind. The platform has been around for a year, but had already benefited from several years of growth as Steem and a lot of the old users came over.
There are various ways to measure growth of internet platforms. A common one is the look at who is visiting it over the web. This is not so simple with Hive as there are multiple sites you can use. The two biggers (apart from gaming) are Peakd and Hive.blog. I use the Hypestat servive that picks up data from Alexa without you having to pay for access. You can see that both had good initial growth, but have plateaued and may be dropping a bit since the start of the year.
@Splinterlands is the most popular Hive dapp, so I thought I should check the stats for that too. You can see that it gets less visitors, but then it is not going to appear on searches for general topics as the blogging sites would.
What may be more useful is a service that actually looks at the blockchain. @dappradar does this.
Splinterlands appears to get more users than the others put together, but this may include a fair few bots and it indicates that a lot of people are not engaging with the social blogging side. I have long wished that the game could integrate some of that, even if it just shows game-related posts by players and could allow you to great a quick post about a recent battle.
DappRadar can show you historical data. For Peakd it has not changed too much.
DappRadar covers lots of blockchains. Overall Splinterlands is 11th, Peakd 35th and Hive.blog 52nd. For comparison Steemit is 17th with nearly five thousand users. No other Steem dapps can manage more than about four hundred. Steempeak will shut down soon.
I do think it is important to compare with Steem as that is the most similar platform, even if it is not really decentralised now. They still manage to attract users as the priority for many will be what they can earn and STEEM is worth about twice what HIVE is right now. That may be due to market manipulation (my speculation). I know that some people use both platforms to take advantage of the rewards. Others were effectively barred from Hive by lack of the airdrop or just not made welcome. In my opinion we should not be detering people who may have something to offer even if they chose the wrong side a year ago.
There are further stats we have access to. @penguinpablo and @arcange post post regularly with statistics they collect. Both show hundreds of new accounts being created each day. @ecency and @tipu are two of the biggest account creators. It looks like the latter does it via Hive Onboard. So why are we not seeing a significant rise in activity from all these new users? Even if some do not keep using Hive we ought to see thousands each month sticking with it.
We know there are usability issues with Hive. The main ones tend to be around usage of keys, but Keychain makes things relatively simple. It looks like Hive Onboard will make it easy to import your keys into the extension, but people should make a backup too.
Beyond all that the fact is that Hive is pretty much unknown to the majority of people. There are efforts to remedy that with some marketing. There are proposals for the offical marketing from @lordbutterfly and Twitter marketing from @nathanmars, but neither is funded right now. That is partly down to efforts to stabilise Hive Dollars.
Without marketing we are relying on word of mouth and that can have limited effect unless really big names take it up and we could wait a while for that to happen. People who are used to millions of followers may not be interested in a platform that only has thousands of users and the rewards may not be enough to tempt them to try it. I have often said that we should engage more with middle-ranking 'celebrities' who may have thousands of fans, but struggle to make much elsewhere. If they do give Hive a try then they should be encouraged so that they see it as worth their time. If they persuade hundreds of their fans to come across that could have a big network effect. The fans stand to earn too through curation or their own blogging.
One various podcasts and Facebook groups I encounter opinions about blockchain and cryptocurrency as being 'tulips' or a massive waste of energy. Obviously Hive is not relying on proof of massive energy usage like Bitcoin and the tulips thing misses the point.
I have been involved with this platform for well over four years and keep waiting for it to really take off. I am interested in opinions on why this has not happened and what we could be doing to improve matters.
What do you think?