A few things about the User Experience
Some negatives and some positives.
Negatives
I left this platform a few years back because the content got really bad, happy to see it's improving. Then I came back around 9 months ago and had some trouble getting set up so I wandered off again because life is short and there are other things to do other than struggle with stuff that's pointless. I'd like to try Hive again to do some blogging, however, as a returning Steemit user from back in the day there are some onboarding issues:
When you look for Hive in google you get these other fuckers. Not good.
https://www.hive.org/socialnetwork/
https://hive.com/
Because not everyone knows you have to type in Hive.io. So how is any random person on the internet going to find your blog on Hive when they aren't going to find Hive?
Not coming up in Google search on first page results is a problem for a site with tens of thousands of written articles and content. Maybe this is Google's decision to delist Hive, however, it's the biggest problem Hive has. Without being able to be searchable no one is going to find you.
When you figure out it is Hive.io you need then the first page (Hive.io) is nice and clean and well-branded. The design is nice, better than Steemit's. So well done whoever did the branding.
But then you get this page https://hive.io/eco
And where do we start with this?
One project is down (3speak) and the rest are a whole bunch of new interfaces that have nothing to do with the Hive branding.
Are they all really necessary? Wouldn't it be better to have Hive Blog as the main thing, like Steemit was. What's the point in all those interfaces?
I just want to do some blog stuff, not have to navigate a ton of different quirky interfaces with different login parameters and layouts. This is the opposite of KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid).
Hive blog has a nice design and a clean layout. Why isn't that enough? Why doesn't everyone focus on one layout so the site can gain some actual traction and impact in the real world?
Imagine being a person new to crypto and excited to start blogging on the blockchain. You'd take one look and just go "Nah, life's too complicated". My point being when does the simplicity of messaging and branding start?
People are out there right now looking for an alternative to Facebook and Twitter and they are used to one interface, not a bunch of weird competing ones. If you come across Cent, or Twetch, or Status or a number of the new decentralized blogging platforms out there, you don't have this problem. New blogging opportunities on Ultra and Theta are coming on board too. None of those platforms have a metric s ton of poorly graphically designed internally-competing micro platforms to confuse and dilute their userbase.
I get this is decentralization and democracy but consumers have choices and if the 2 billion people who could eventually take up your platform choose not to because it's just chaos and a god-awful mess, then what was the point in trying to create a brand only to dilute and destroy it?
Does the Hive community expect it is going to grow to mass public adoption and to scale when Hive's internal platforms are a tangled, convoluted, competing mess?
The Wallet Experience when trying to receive Hive from an Exchange other than Blocktrades sucks.
When I used to use Steemit it was easy to buy Steem on Bittrex and to send it to Steemit. You just sent it to Bittrex's Steemit account with your username and it always turned up.
Nine months ago I bought 13 Hive on Bittrex to try and get started again and sent it following all the correct instructions and it never got to my Hive wallet. I then bought about 3 or 4 Hive on Blocktrades and it turned up.
All Crypto wallets in the whole of the blockchain world have two basic functions. You can always go to a wallet and find "send" and "receive". Why is there no "receive" field on Hive's wallet where you can simply and easily send Hive to your wallet from any third party exchange without needing Blocktrades?
Positives.
I like the Blogging interface in Hive Blog. I love being able to type and add content on one side and see your final result next to it before you publish. It's pretty much the same as it was in Steemit. So no real advancement but at least the best feature about Blogging in Steemit has remained.
It's also nice that a lot of the message comments seem to have cleaned up.
Actually Hive Blog itself is lovely. It works and it's great. It's just a pity that it will never get mass adoption because no one will ever find it on Search and because the Hive community is so determined to dilute and destroy their own strong central brand with all their internal competing platforms with dubious branding.
Welcome back :)
If you like hive.blog stick with it. Meanwhile I actually loathe condenser (the thing steemit and hive.blog run on, sorry quochuy and co it is a metric boatload better than it was x_x) and am really glad that peakd exists because the only thing I hate about peakd is the fact that it's closed source. And anyone who doesn't like either of those things can figure out how to make their own how they like.
The actual hive part of hive seems to be more trying to be a base layer for stuff to be built on top of rather than a thing itself.
Somewhat relating to above, because we have communities now each community can build out specialised front ends catering to their own community so if you didn't like the all and sundry stuff that comes with the catchalls (what peakd and hive.blog are) and just wanted the leo finance stuff or the natural medicine stuff or the art stuff then you could just hit that front end instead. Not everyone cares about everything, and it would be a lot better to onboard people for specific interests rather than trying to get them interested in some stupid crypto thing.
With the branding and marketing stuff, seems there's some people working on that, but I don't really keep track of any of that side of things.
Something really does need to be simpler though. I've tried onboarding a couple of people and the tech savvy ones made comments about the keys and the non-tech-savvy ones just found everything too hard (which is not really surprising because I've had some Facebook crowd claim a forum was too hard so this is going to be even more insane).
hi ryvhnn, nice to speak to you again, been a long time! All great points. Maybe it would be better if there was one interface and you could select your preference i.e art, or healing, and then it would curate those kinds of posts. I'll check out peakd maybe. I've been working on developing community TV projects and it was going great we just had to shut down for a while because of Covid. I wanted to build it out on a blockchain solution but nothing worked better than building our own website. This is the concept. https://tweedvalley.tv/
I'm trying to find a censorship-free blockchain solution to create a social media network for the concept and everything comes up short because the onboarding and the wallet experience for new users is terrible. The only thing I've found that I like is Hylo which is something Holochain is developing and has really great onboarding (you just give people a link and they can sign up), it would be easy to build a decentralized community on, however it doesn't yet have some basic things like video embedding in posts. I also looked at some of the ones Blockstack is developing but nothing stood out. I think we're probably going to end up having to do it on a Mastodon clone instead because that's at least open source and peer to peer and censorship-resistant and very customisable and fully functioning. There doesn't seem to be anything on any of the blockchain side of social networks that works from the perspective of building communities. There's an interesting project by a couple of Australian guys in Perth called Ultra which could be cool if it lives up to some of the stuff they are promising.
I do like Hive but it always struck me as wrong that the communities that grew on Steemit like Team Australia etc. had to do it literally on third-party centralised servers like Discord.
You can already do that to a degree by following/subscribing to communities and starring tags (well you can star tags in peakd, I don't know if you can in hive.blog) but that requires a) being able to find out that you can do these things which requires not being overwhelmed by the interface and b) people using the tags you're watching and c) not tagspamming popular tags with irrelevant crap because their sole concern is more eyeballs.
Having the option/ability to split out becomes useful there as it's much easier for some people to just come into an art site or a video site or some other thing that's kind of vaguely familiar so then the resulting learning curve with the keys and having to install keychain or deal with hivesigner becomes slightly less of a cliff.
I don't know if you were familiar with hive-engine or the previous equivalent before you left, but with the ability to build all that second layer stuff (make your own website/community thing with your own token on top of hive), I don't think it becomes that necessary for users to have to know/care about hive itself unless they want to.
So in the case of your thing something you might do if you were going to build on top of hive is to use the blockchain and the wallet and write an interface that's familiar and comfortable for your target audience. Then you just have the fun of trying to explain hivesigner and keychain.
On the flip side, d.tube split off onto its own chain that just integrated hive because there was a bunch of stuff they wanted to do that apparently couldn't be done with what they had to work with. So I guess it depends a lot on what you want to do (I did have a quick look at your link and I saw a video site but didn't read any informational pages you may have had kicking around).
Only vaguely related, did you have a look at lbry already?
The other decentralised and distributed socnets that don't have cryptowallets or having to keep at least the crypto transactions on blockchain ledgers probably have it easier precisely because they don't have to do any of that shenanigans as that seems like the actual hard thing to do at this point and they've been around longer so most of them have already caught up with whatever features of the centralised things they like. The crypto socnets are getting better but still have quite a bit of catching up to do.
It's just occurred to me that you may have gotten more answers (and possibly some rage) if you'd posted into hivedevs or possibly some other hive-specific community (that's just the first tangentially appropriate one that popped into my head).
Also only vaguely related, what have you been up to aside from making community tv thingies? Or are you going to do/have already done a catchup post? :)