Why Has Hive Not Achieved "Mass Adoption"?
The average social media user does not care about earning from social media use.
The concept is alien to them. One would think that anyone loves free money. The median payout per post $0.60 to $0.8 on Hive according to @demotruk's statistics, which is in fact amazing given that on mainstream platforms median post rewards are zero, is simply nowhere near high enough for the average person to put up with an immature ecosystem and a much greater level of complexity compared to mainstream platforms.
This is why I have been saying for quite some time that attracting the average Facebook/Instagram/etc./etc. crowd is not a realistic goal at the moment.
The average social media user does not care about censorship resistance
Censorship on mainstream social media platforms is an issue only for content creators whose opinions are not mainstream. The average person is unlikely even understand why censorship resistance has any value in the first place. They think it's a great there are administrators and moderators who have the authority to boot out people who cannot behave themselves. Average people get their news from mainstream sources and adopt mainstream views. They don't care if anyone gets censored.
So what should we do?
I think it's pretty obvious that we should target early adopter types. Just forget about people who lack the early adopter psychology. It takes a bit higher than average IQ to get the hang of the basics of this platform. One must have greater openness to novelty than the average person. The learning curve is steeper than on mainstream platforms. Also, the kind of person who wants to hang out only with people he/she already knows is unlikely want to be here. Simply put, target the smarter than average curious individualist who may feel somewhat alienated by mainstream society.
Because Hive has only about 3,500 daily active posters, this is a very small community incapable of catering to a very large variety of interests. This is where we can all step in. I've come across a weird notion that posting too much content is somehow bad. That's a load of nonsense! Go to Communities and find a community you find at least somewhat interesting and post content. The Quello and Ask the Hive communities are great places to create a lot of short form content. Quello is an app that shows the content in the Quello community that works basically like Quora. Go and populate these communities with questions and answers. The more there is content, the faster the amount of content will grow because there will be more content to catch people's interest.
Also, we should also continue our Twitter presence because that's the best way to reach the heavy hitters in the crypto space. The community has already done a great job at that.
When the early adopter mass is large enough, there will be more apps, more content, more stability and maturity over time, which will attract the more average social media users. For that to happen, though, this platform will have to have transformed into something quite different. It could be that the social media aspect of Hive will never grow very large, although it would still be very small even if it were 1000 times larger. Instead, I think gaming on a blockchain will give gamers advantages that they will appreciate: free trading of in-game assets across boundaries unhindered by policies decided by a corporation in total control of the whole experience. Having all those assets on public blockchains means a new kind of freedom and flexibility. That concept may require some marketing, too, but I think it should be easier than marketing censorship resistant content creation.
The necessity of developing higher quality apps applies both to content creation and gaming. The average person is not impressed by abstract concepts. The average person must get to use well-designed polished apps that are easy to use. That requires more investment, which brings me to my final point.
Hive would benefit from getting a piece of the DeFi action. @edicted has written a great post about that topic. Steem used to have savings accounts that paid interest. What @edicted suggests is using a mechanism used by Maker DAO to create Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP) to allow users to gain a passive return while stabilizing HBD like DAI is a very stable crypto-backed stablecoin on Ethereum. Instruments like that would be likely to attract passive investors, which would help the price of HIVE.
What are your thoughts?
What attracted me to HIVE was that the platform allows for micro-transactions without a transaction fee.
One way to attract people to HIVE is to create things that people could do with their wallet. Right now the only interesting thing in the wallet is the internal HBD / HIVE market.
There is a version of the WooCommerce plugin for Wordpress that accepts HIVE and HBD and possibly HE-tokens.
Yup, I make around 5 $ a day and spend like 2~3 hours on Hive posts. Or like 1/2 the hourly minimum wage in Korea and 1/3 the minimum wage in Canada. For some people, that's a good day's rate. But who can relate or more important wants to pay to consume content made by people who think 5$ a day is great? It sounds rough, but realistically, the typical content people with large disposable incomes consume are made by millionaires and the odd highly creative student just starting out, not people struggling to feed their families or scamming to make a few extra bucks.
Yup, those that do are very vocal about this. 99% of the internet is not censored anyway. The problem is everyone wants to say and do whatever they feel like it on a handful of websites that want to moderate. The people too extreme for social media come here and produce the same content that doesn't really attract consumers with disposable income...mostly because these types don't really want to put their credit cards on the internet anyway and that's how we make money.
This is very true. We have been doing it, that's the problem. I think we need to re-think monetization and start burning a lot more Hive.
I'm not following. Is targeting early adopter types a problem or not?
What do you mean by burning HIVE?
The problem is despite targeting early adopters, we aren't getting enough on board. Do we want to promise them more riches or will we just promise them development....when SMT?
Burning Hive is the act of reducing the amount of inflation by sending it to null or simply not creating as much. This will get people interested as they realize they don't just need to keep pumping out trash to stay on top of things.
I can assure you that getting regular folks onboard is even more difficult at this stage of development. And I'm not so sure we have been targeting early adopter types very effectively. It seems to me that a lot of users have been trying to onboard friends and family and other people they know from real life without being too selective about who they're trying to onboard.
What we should tell early adopters is that Hive is an immature platform with interesting features. They should participate because with ongoing development there is a chance it could pan out in a big way.
I've heard suggestions to burn HIVE or to decrease the inflation before. HIVE is not a store of value coin nor will it ever become one. Why? Because it's not a Proof-of-Work coin with good decentralization and massive mining power securing it. HIVE is interesting because of the things you can do with it. The Graphene code base is optimized for high transaction volume. The number of consensus witnesses is only twenty and hard forks have been very frequent. If you could only hold it or gain rewards for staking it, HIVE would become just another PoS coin the likes of which there are hundreds on the markets. There would be no narrative. The project would completely lose its soul and reason for being. It would lose the social aspect of it which has served as an engine of decentralization through author and curation rewards. The community could never have been able to put up a fight against Justin Sun had it not already had time to decentralize owing to the distribution of coins based on participation in content creation and social activity on chain. And I'm not seeing a lot of trash getting high rewarded here. Actual trash gets downvoted to oblivion these days.
All that said, I think there should be an option for passive investors buy HIVE and get rewarded by earning through the same way lenders earn using the maker Maker protocol on Ethereum. Something like this should be replicated on Hive:
https://makerdao.com/en/
This would have the advantage of not forcing those people to power up to increase their stake.
Also, read the post by @edicted that I gave a link to in the post.
You are right about people mostly signing up their friends and family and others for seemingly odd purposes.
The reason I suggest burning Hive or as you suggest give more support to passive investors is to reduce the amount of utter nonsense posts made to simply skim rewards. I get the feeling that eliminating bid bots and discouraging vote trading was done too soon, let's face it most people are just making content simply for rewards and quality is lacking. We need another option until there are tons of high quality posts. Too many rewards going to junk.
I don't see a lot of rewards going to utter nonsense posts. I have no numbers, though, which is why I can't say for certain that this isn't the case. But I'm not even sure what you mean by such a post. I don't follow low-quality posters but when I go to a Community like Gems or Photography Lovers, I see a lot of not so great posts getting very little in the way of rewards.
Now I'm not following you. How would the nonsense post situation be better if the Economic Improvement Proposal causing the bid bot industry and vote trading to die hadn't been implemented last September? Before September 2019 a much larger proportion of the author reward pool was allocated in a completely content agnostic manner than now. I recall Trending being of much lower quality back then. When the free downvotes were introduced, I spent some time cleaning up Trending myself. The standards are much higher when it comes to the larger rewards than now.
I don't really know what you're talking about. Can you give me some examples to help me understand what you mean?
And even if it were the case that there is such a dearth of very good posts that a lot posts get rewarded too well, then shouldn't that make it easier for high-quality posts to reap the rewards?
I will repeat what I said earlier about introducing system like a Maker DAO on Hive to attract passive investment. That, and not killing inflation would work better in attracting passive investment, IMO.
We're still too centralized in terms of token distribution. There is no way other than inflation to improve it. Tokens need to end up in the hands of more holders.
Speculators do not mind annual inflation in the single digit percentages so long as the price swings are 100x as they have historically been. For them, the ability to time the market trumps any minuscule gains to be made by staking rewards.
I assumed the numbers are higher than 3500. That is such a small group but unity and consistent diversification of top notch content can bring in the necessarily army to take on the chain but I also feel what we are promising people is lesser than what most of them make out there in the world. 🤷♀️
Before mass adoption Hive desperately needs a good mobile app, and better marketing. We don't have yet a good mobile app, but we pay a secretary 500 HBD per day... and the marketing for this platform is almost inexistent, except Posh... All the others mainstream ones have both of those...
I agree on the mobile app. Marketing Hive is not necessarily the best strategy. Apps should be marketed.
It’s too complicated for all my friends! It takes more than 10 minutes to explain the idea to them!
there's so many layers to the platform that there shouldn't be any reason why people can't use it for different reasons. I believe there should be an easier way to engage with other users other than in the format I am doing now so you can grow your own communities. I and many I know only use the other social media platforms now for communication and not posting content @ I agree with @acesontop that a slicker mobile platform would be beneficial
The most hivers don't want to invite more people (more talented people, less upvotes for them as they are producing low-quality content, just point me up the 5 latest publications on hive, 99% shitposts) 😀
Hive on!
That's a good point. Most Hive users haven't been too enthusiastic about onboarding new authors most likely partly for that reason. That does not apply to the largest stakeholders, though. The more you have stake the larger the share of curation rewards of your total rewards. That's when you stand to benefit the most from a growing community also fueling speculative interest in the token.