Hive is the choice for decentralization, or so the story goes.
It is certainly better than Steem, currently being tightly managed by SteemIt Inc.
However, there are a lot of signs there are problems with decentralization here as well.
Top 20-50 Witnesses Rule Hive
The top 5 trending posts today, like many other days are from top 50 Witnesses
Every Approved Proposal is from a top 50 witness.
Several if not all of the top curation groups are managed and funded by the top witnesses as well.
This IS improvement over Steem, but is it desirable, and does it attract new users and investment.
That remains to be seen.
In the name of Transparency this account is owned by @whatsup. I am using this account as it does not receive many if any autovotes.
So, as we move another week closer to the initial power downs being over, I would like to hear from those already here...
What are your views on the centralization issues here? Are things better or worse than before the split?
If things feel centralized now how do you see that playing out going forward? Are there steps in place to improve that?
What is your personal experience, would you buy into Hive? Why or why not?
@whatsup, using the DRAMAtoken account.
That's why I'm moving on
What did you think Hive was really about in the first place?....the ultimate fear that that Sun dude was going to come along and cut into their ponzi scheme. They simply weren't having it. The truth and reality of that can be found in the fact that those who peddled the fear Sun narrative are still over there on Steemit posting....that's because it was never about censorship, centralization vs decentralization or any of that crap, it was about protecting the status quo and the status quo's ability to keep the money coffers flowing into certain pockets.
I wrote a post on the "witnesses rule hive look they are also getting paid on dao" subject:
https://peakd.com/hive/@howo/some-information-about-the-hive-previously-steem-proposal-system-sps-steem-dao-hive-development-fund-hdf
tl;dr: witnesses tend to naturally be paid on he dhf just because they are often devs and generally have the trust of the stakeholders. It's not because of a conspiracy thing.
Ok
I have no interest in arguing with you, but I'll try to put it like this..
It takes more than a development team to build a growing community and the results of the efforts to date seem to back this up.
I would never tell you how to code or develop or how to improve security. As that is not my background. However developing processes for onboarding, training and hiring the staff to do it and managing the outcome, IS what I do.
Because you are working and providing measurable results that you understand does not mean you are achieving creating a project that people know about, hear about and want to use.
I have never questioned the efforts put in on these tasks.
It's the complete lack of understanding that it takes more than that which confuses me.
I think blocktrade's recent posts on direction begin to address that but not totally.
You are likely extremely good at what you do. That does not make you an expert on things you don't do.
I have no need to argue with you I get it, if I wanted to have more influence I could buy stake. At this time the price and weight of those who managing the project and yes, working hard.. is way too expense for the current level of value. (not the over-all value of the project, but rather the influence)
I still hold some Hive I still have hope that at some point people who are seeing their real work and efforts not turn into success will ask themselves if they have everything they need to move the project forward.
It isn't a problem you are paying yourself for your work, it's a problem that you don't see there are other things that need to be done as well.
That there are other projects that bring value as well.
I would be surprised to see any proposals being approved that are not by top witnesses. We won't and can't just give random strangers money and witnesses are the most well known people here, so that's just logical imo.
On the topic of top posts being by the same people - I am also annoyed by this. But on Hive I see two major reasons for it. First is that Hive is new and everything that once was posted on Steem needs to be posted here again, to build a new foundation. SEO-wise and to have those posts that help beginners. Second is, it's not any different on other platforms. On YouTube the same people are in the trends - again just a logical consequence imo.
If you only concentrate on posts it may seem centralized, but I think the times when Hive/Steem was a blogging blockchain are long gone. The amount of dApps and developers here is big, of course not as big as on Ethereum for example, but still dApps are being released on a weekly basis.
I think just the fact that we have no central company or CEO behind the blockchain makes us more decentralized than most other projects out there. It's comical if people speak about decenttalozation while 'their' blockchains have de facto CEO's.
And to be honest, I don't even see many options to make Hive more decentralized. Like, what could you even change? We have nodes, dApps, the supply is pretty well distributed. What could you change?
I think we should wait some more time and we will see how Hive will look then. For now I think we are on a good way, even though as I said above, some things are not perfect.
It is expected proposals to be dominated by witnesses. Most developers here are witnesses.
It is also not unexpected witnesses leading curation groups, people who tend to be go getters and builders tend to be witnesses as well.
Trending, I can’t speak for that as voting has always been fickle and showing favoritism.
I am not surprised by any of these especially while we don’t have a massive userbase fighting over the reward and attention pool.
Hive is barely a month old there and is a ton of potential. It is already performing better than Steem in almost every metric except centralization, censorship, and freezing accounts.