I don't think HIVE is a community like it used to be when everyone was more aligned.
Right now people are either optimistic or pessimistic with very few people in between. I think most of this pessimism is based on HIVE price but I am not confident that is the only reason.
HIVE is really a bunch of nonhomogeneous communities that are forced to interact because of the Reward Pool. The Reward Pool is our shared group of funds and we choose how to allocate it.
How it should be allocated is always up for debate...
• Should we use it to support charity all over the world?
• Should we use it to support people's livelihood in 3rd world countries?
• Should we use it to promote other tokens?
• Should we use it to build things on HIVE?
• Should we just let people do whatever they want with it?
I don't have a final answer on how I think about it. Right now I am leaning towards we should use the Reward Pool for good on Chain. I am not sure how to define "good on chain" yet.
I think optimism died down with the changing mentality of crypto itself in recent years. People were really interested in features and tech before and that hasn't quite been the case in a while. Many have since moved on. Back when mining was an actual experience it seemed there were more builders around (not just on Hive, I mean the crypto sphere itself). It meant that with many coins you could buy up or throw hardware at it. Hive is a bit more hands-on given the mining is content curation/creation. Not quite the same as running your GPU when you're not home or sleeping. Price definitely kills off some activity and dulls the mood a bit still.
I think in our case we've fallen into that boredom of crypto for most. Where the majority of people want quick returns. And we've struggled to find features that could pull in a different type of person that doesn't quite exist within the crypto sphere. Creatives for example aren't usually that financially aware. They're not investors, or particularly good with business. They'll be avoiding crypto and just throwing out creations on traditional social media building the traditional way.
But yeah, I think we've struggled with features. Finding additional ways to not just earn but also spend and address the inflation side of things. The main chains tend to have survived because their 'thing' is the fact that people can create fast-return experiences with them. That unfortunately is their feature which attracts.
Splinterlands is our main attraction as an experience. Second is simply posting. It's not quite enough.
I think that is one of the fundamental issues right now. People want to make life changing money. I mean, I would love to make life changing money on HIVE but I do not think farming the reward pool is how people get there.
I think we have a lot of cool stuff here but we just don't market it very well.
For example, usually the pitch to get new users on HIVE is you can get paid to post here. So people come here to get paid to post. (Getting paid on other forms of social media is becoming more common so it is no longer a competitive edge).
If the pitch was something like this I think we would have more success retaining users - "Look at all the stuff you can do on HIVE! You can blog, you can curate content you want to see more of, you can play video games, build your own front end, build your own community, gain a following, or download the HIVE Key Chain app so you can access HIVE anywhere in the world."
We have a lot here, we just need to figure out where to pitch it.
We're slightly ahead in that you don't have to pay for some algo to boost your reach. Or that the earning option is only available to those with large followings. I think the social media platforms which did pay have started to pull back a little recently. Meta was throwing cash at people for posting on Threads, they removed it. They also removed a similar thing they had with Instagram Reels being posted to Facebook as well. It seems Meta in particular uses that concept when they want to push something a bit more that perhaps isn't performing so well, then once they're dangled enough bait in front of people they move it.
I don't see Twitter / X continuing it for much longer, there are too many problems with how they've operated which genuinely has turned the platform into a cesspool and made people less interested in using it. Not even regarding political content, but the encouragement to steal videos and images and repost lazily for engagement. For advertisers that do pay, it doesn't help them much. And advertisers are historically very fragile with where/what their ads get placed with. For context, I'm basically saying that the platforms themselves sharing from their own pockets is growing increasingly unlikely, especially in recent months where tech oriented layoffs are just growing in favour of AI and trimming the extra fat to maximise profit. (This actually brings up a new question: are they likely to pay up when more and more accounts are becoming automated?)
Beyond that there's the usual like YouTube and Twitch, but yeah takes a bit more time and effort and unlikely you'll ever earn on them.
This is definitely Hive's greatest problem though. I don't think (nor do I have the answers) we've been going about it properly. I've seen more discussions lately on introducing KPIs for some of the marketing projects and that would help give a bit more information on what is working and what isn't, but we've been sticking to things that clearly haven't been working for far too long, instead of trying to shift that attention and time elsewhere that could yield some results.
I think another big question that should be asked (depending on the type of marketing) is who we are trying to reach and get to join. Like a marketing team, creating a general idea of a person that might be interested in what we're trying to sell: age group, gender, location, and general interests. And I think this is where communities and niches can be quite powerful. As we then wouldn't be just selling a broad statement like "You can get paid for posting here!" to a wide net of people but more "We have people already in your interests posting here and getting paid."
This did bring to mind a fun idea though: imagine if some communities received a small sum purely for targeted marketing budgets each month? Even if it was $500 delivered once a marketing concept was provided and approved by the community. We'd then have communities like Hive Gaming targeting gamers, Hive Food targeting bakers and food fanatics, or sports communities targeting football fans, basketball fans etc etc. The Anime Realm could fund small booths at small cons here and there. Or Hive Gaming could just throw it all at a single YouTube video for a sponsored segment. You get what I mean ;^)
Yea I actually think we are on the same page on all this stuff.
YouTube is easier to monetize again but they are like other platforms. I think they just lower the boundaries for monetization.
I think X monetization will ramp down. I used to love X (even after Elon took over) but the AI videos and fake rage baiting content is out of control. Like half the breaking stories I saw ended up being fake to some extent.
Who is our target customer! Is the right question. I think we need to ask that more.
I believe there was originally a “if we build it they will come mindset.” (Very common in crypto)
But then there was a rush to increase the user base and it seems like we onboarded a lot of people by pointing to the reward pool as “free money” versus pointing at all the other interesting stuff we do here.
The reward pool is “cool” but conceptually is pretty simple and is not the main thing we should be known for in my opinion.
I like you idea on communities. I can’t help but be biased though cause I’m working on a TradFi community right now 🤣
Separately, I think Communities is an untapped gem and there is a lot of potential there! That’s one of the things I’m looking forward to the most right now as I’m poking around HIVE and trying out new things.