Some good insights here, however I am a bit challenged to find examples to support the following claim:
"You're right when you say many left when they realized there weren't enough curators. Thousands left."
I still follow some of the people that left here, and followed many before they left. Never once did I read someone state their reason for leaving was they just couldn't gain traction, they just couldn't get readers.
Various other complaints that have been alleged to be the reason for the abysmal user retention of Steem, and now Hive, demonstrate have not either been supported IME, save one. DV's.
Flagging was responsible for every single ragequit or departure I was told the reason for. Flagging into the dust, forever, on every post and comment. I also don't think they were wrong, because it is mathematically demonstrable that flagging concentrates and centralizes stake on the platform. Hive remains woefully centralized today, because flags concentrate stake in the accounts of whales. BT practically owns the platform today, and his extraction of DHF grants is among the primary reasons Hive is below $.1 today.
~36 whales have continuously maintained a bare majority of stake (excluding the Founder's stake) from the inception of Steem to this day, and they continue to monopolize >90% of the inflation issuing from the rewards pool. That's the issue that drives people off the platform, and it always has been the issue that has crippled user retention.
Social media became the largest sector of global financial markets about the time Steem advented. Today it is still the largest sector of that market, and this platform has crashed from #3 in coinmarketcap to >400 last I checked. The innovation of the rewards pool, consumers curating the creators and content they liked directly, no ads, and no censorship had potential to dominate social media, the largest sector in the global financial markets, yet has eroded it's userbase and polluted the market with the stench of the honest and true complaints of the quitters that the claim to be censorship resistant was complete BS, and that's what drove them away.
Hundreds of influential creators with substantial followings were censored by that mechanism, robbed of the rewards their followers provided them for their content, and ragequit for good damn reason. DV's are essentially taxation. Every stakeholder can tax every producer on Hive to the limit of their stake for any - or no - reason at all. Can you even imagine how IRL business would operate in that kind of tax environment? No significant businesses would make products to sell them, because no profits for their work could be counted on. Ford would destroy Toyota, and BMW would tax away every pfennig Chevrolet earned. Some few monopolies, just like on Hive, would extract >90% of the purchase money spent for their products, because no one dared to tax them because the retaliatory taxation would utterly destroy them.
After April 2017 Steem experienced a mass influx of users that overcame the onboarding and UI issues to begin blogging here. The whales sucked up every satoshi of their earning if they didn't powerdown and flee in disgust. >1M accounts came on and left because of flags from Bernie and curangel, Marky and the rest. I have discussed with hundreds of them what happened and why they left, and ubiquitously they left because of flags. None of them ever cited any other reason.
Hundreds of us remain, and we remain because we aren't ambitious, don't care about financial rewards, never stuck our heads up to get shot down, or just can't stand Big Tech censorship and put up with almost anything else to avoid it. Right now KYC and digital ID is crashing alternative platforms like substack across the world. It's Hive's big chance to capture all those creators that are unwilling to comply with KYC to post, and unwilling to self censor to be allowed to post. Are we gaining any new onboards because of our censorship resistance?
No, we're not. No one believes we offer censorship resistance because >1M ex users flagged off the platform have infused us with the stench of durable outrage and hatred for our lies. Taxation is theft, and taxation applied for opinions is censorship. We aren't better than X, Fakebook, or Goolag. We're worse - and they're terrible.
As the price continues to collapse because BT is mining the DHF for the millions of $ left there to steal, what's left of our userbase continues to dwindle, and people that have endured for years finally lose all hope and give up.
At the same time Blurt's token value rises against Hive's. Despite the other issues Blurt has (which I'm not going into here, but are substantial) the lack of flags makes it preferable to Hive. We're at an existential boundary.
If we don't fix it, Hive will collapse to nothing, the witnesses will quit paying for servers they can't afford, the last Hive will be sold to some sucker for $.0001, and you and I will each wait for the other to leave so we can turn off the lights when we go.
~36 whales will have to find some other opportunity to profit by renting stake, and it will be up to Blurt to enable the tech Steem advented to take over the social media space. Maybe they'll get some investment - which will probably turn the platform into the private domain of someone like Sun Yuchen, and that will be the end of that.
Flags will have killed a platform that could have taken over the largest sector in global financial markets because of greed for birds in hand and a pathological need for control. Even if we get rid of flags, the fact that Hive is a pure plutocracy makes it incapable of enabling free speech. One big investment captures the witnesses, and then it's a private playground, just like Steem is today. I don't even think Blurt is any different, so it's just as existentially fragile.
Is it really so hard to reward and value other metrics than money? I guess so, because we never managed it.
Edit: also curation rewards aren't payment for looking at content. They're payment for upvoting content, regardless of the content. They replace the subjective curation of content with purely financial incentive. They're the bulk of rewards today on Hive, >60% of the rewards paid out of the rewards pool. The profiteers are averse to marketing Hive, which is what quality posts and happy creators well rewarded do, have little time and interest in creating content, for the most part, and prefer circle jerks and curation rewards to pump out ROI.
No platform without curation rewards lacks for upvotes on quality content. No one reads content to get curation rewards because that's not what provides curation rewards. All they have to do is upvote Taraz, and they get a fair return on their vote. They don't have to actually read the (good) writing he produces. They can dump 10 100% votes on similar guaranteed authors and call it a day, every day. Lots of other good authors get ignored because the rewards on their posts aren't as consistent as are Taraz's.
Curation rewards are a complete failure to incentivize curation because that's not what they reward. They financially reward upvoting highly rewarded posts, and that's got nothing to do with actual curation. Four things could fix Hive. 1) burn the DHF. 2) use some other social value for governance, or create some kind of voluntarist witness list that enables people to choose their preferred witnesses rather than living with the choices of substantial stakeholders, or something other than pure plutocracy. 3) eliminate curation rewards. 4) eliminate at will flags. Limit flags to plagiarism, and other scams that mine author rewards, and only on posts that demonstrate the problem. They don't actually discourage spam and scams, that aren't dependent on author rewards and demonstrably don't care about flags.
I can vote for this response of yours to a comment I made over a half a decade ago, and get the same reward I'd receive voting for anything else, even if nobody else votes for it. The only way I'd see a higher reward is if someone came along and voted 24 hours after the time you presented these words.
That isn't accurate. Some time, several years ago, everything changed. But just know I'm not dismissing your entire argument just because you got that part wrong. Use the knowledge to strengthen your mind. Within 24 hours, doesn't matter what you vote for, the curation reward is the same, regardless of how many other votes roll in within that same time period. You can vote for noobs and get the same reward. If you vote after 24 hours, you get a smaller curation reward. The situation you describe was eliminated, several years ago.
Other than that, I'm too tired for these debates. I've advocated for the genuine and organic approach for almost ten years. I still see potential there. A lot, actually. People worked hard on all this. Often when I look around I see plenty of tools, still in the box.
And the entire time I've observed what I consider to be a severe lack of readers/actual consumption happening. I only have words and those never change things. I didn't come back to start knocking things down or become frustrated.
I was away, purposefully ignoring everything about this place for well over a year. I came back. It's quieter than ever. I'm way too far out of the loop to know what happened and why. Not even going to ask. No plans of blaming anything or anyone. Trying to keep my cool and just wander the halls, reading a few posts maybe. I might still talk about where I see potential and room to grow that might possibly lead to a more productive environment for many, but after this many years dude, I often feel alone in that department. Don't want to bother people either.
Merry Christmas.
We are in agreement about a lot of things. Those things. It's because of those things I am looking back at how our (Hive) circumstances evolved, to see where we got locked into this apparent death spiral. Maybe there's a way out, a way to fix it.
You came back. There's a good reason. The sense of 'almost, but not quite' I get so frustrates me sometimes it's difficult to check my tongue. Hive doesn't have to fail, but it's hard to deny it appears to be. I've been here nearly a decade too, not nearly as bright, nor as influential or as good a writer as you are, but bright enough to note more concordance between our views than discordance. There aren't many folks that have stuck to their organic guns as both of us have. I see that demonstrates we both consider human society to be extraordinary. I have used the word sacred in reference to society.
I don't want the technical advance in social media Steem advented a decade ago to simply be subsumed by profiteers, kicked to the curb by grubby token miners. I have occasionally pointed out that Steem (prior to the flight of The Hair) and Hive (and even Blurt, too, to be fair) have the base technology to enable voluntarist government to be conducted using the platform. Because I think we need voluntarist government I consider that significant. I think Steem solved the online voting security problem. I am unaware that anyone has ever cracked the encryption and the blockchain makes votes auditable.
I'm not seeking to oppose your views on this or that. I'm trying to come up with an alternative to Hive dying. I'm not trying to recruit co-revolutionaries (yet), but I am trying to get criticised and availed better ideas than I can come up with without abandoning my commitment to organic human society, a commitment you seem no less dedicated to than I am. The factual criticism you undertook above, regarding curation, was exactly what I need to keep from barking up illusory trees. I'm not particularly bright, but I do want to be factually correct, at the forefront of innovation regarding decentralization, and if Hive is going to use it's great potential to enable voluntarist governance, organic society, and empower social media to be what free people need instead of end up a shriveled worthless husk, then a way forward needs to be found. Since I can't find one, because my misunderstandings get in the way, I reached out to you here, where obscurity eliminates concern about treading on toes and you can forthrightly respond.
It's the words we share that enable high quality society to be beneficial. From it's outset written language has enabled words to be shared by people separated by thousands of miles and millennia. The 'Epic of Gilgamesh' still informs the West today. I can't think of anything more powerful mere men can use.
I hope you have a very Merry Christmas.