The Hive Dilemma: Audience... or Rewards?

in #hive-1503293 months ago

Although it might be considered "blasphemy" to discuss such a thing as this, one of the things conventional social media has going for it — that Inleo/Hive does not, really — is that there is a pretty direct correlation between building audience and building success, on those external platforms.

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Having been a blogger and web site builder for more than two decades, life in the outer world — whether on twitter/X, with your own blog or maybe with Facebook/Insta or YouTube — revolves around getting eyeballs to like your content enough that they not only visit, but they also subscribe and RE-visit.

The bigger your numbers, the bigger your "reward," in terms of ad revenue or revenue sharing or affiliate shopping or whatever your monetization gig is.

Arguments such as "deplatforming/censorship" and "privacy" aside — and let's be perfectly honest here, those concerns might apply to 5-10% of all content creators, on a good day — numbers are what matter. BIG numbers.

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Hive is a little different, in that popularity isn't necessarily tied to rewards, and if the right curator likes your content, even not particularly appealing or original stuff can earn substantial rewards. And certainly, you can get decent rewards without your content having actually been seen by very many people.

I'm not here to criticize or debate the merits and flaws of either approach, but more to consider the community culture and motivation each one inspires.

When you are "building for audience," you have to consider providing something that is consistently funny or entertaining or educational in some way, so that people perceive that it adds value to their day; to their experience. We can't necessarily quantify "value" because there's (for example) a vast chasm between Tucker Carlson interviewing Vladimir Putin and Mr. Beast driving a train into a hole in the ground and someone creating a documentary on life in North Korea.

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Consider, for a moment, the sort of stuff that makes you think "that was really cool! I want to show this to So-and-So!"

That's an example of value, even if the friends you send the link to aren't on the same page as you.

Regardless, though, there is an underlying motivation and encouragement to share something all over the place.

As I said, Hive is a little different. We tend to be very insular here, in large part because we live within a system that doesn't directly reward external promotion of our content.

If I were to share something I create here on Hive to my Facebook page with 100,000 followers, where's the benefit? Even if I can get 1,000 people to show up and read the article, how many of them are actually going to create a Hive account, just to leave a comment? Which would actually be my only tangible motivation to to do such a thing... since the few upvotes from a few new accounts would amount to basically zero.

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And so, the Hive ecosystem revolves more about getting to know people within Hive; people who are already committed to the community.

On occasion, I have seen discussions on Hive concerning how we might attract some "influencers" to our community. Fair enough... but why would an influencer care about Hive? Even if I wrote blog posts that attracted 100,000 readers, what use would that be? 99,900 of those readers wouldn't be part of Hive, most likely.

As such, the best we could ever hope for would be for influencers who treated Hive as "on more outlet," and essentially recycled their content here.

Which has actually happened in the past... and if I'm not wrong, those influencers were blackballed and downvoted off the platform for duplicating content here.

Sorry folks, that's how content creation and sharing WORKS, folks!

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Don't get me wrong, I love our Hive community... but there are some limitations inherent within our very structure that are likely to keep us a "niche platform" for many years to come.

Bringing on content consumers from elsewhere will likely remain a very slow and gradual process... led by our own existing creators sharing their work elsewhere even knowing that there's no reward in doing so... except the potential long-term growth of the community.

As always, thanks for visiting and feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

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I just like to go on Facebook so I can argue with people dropping comments on articles. The latest is the banning smoking outside pubs. That's been going for days now.

I sometimes go to Facebook and just pop some popcorn and watch "the fights" people get themselves into, particularly now during US Presidential election season...

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Even if I can get 1,000 people to show up and read the article, how many of them are actually going to create a Hive account, just to leave a comment?

This. Never mind the mechanics of voting.

It is certainly one advantage of ad revenue based systems over Hive. The ad based systems don't care where the eyeballs came from...

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I took a break for almost a year and come to the conclusion that I will post on Hive and any other Social media for myself. If someone else happens to enjoy reading what I wrote then that's great. If I earn something then even better, everybody is happy. That's the only way i can feasibly interact on this network and I like it that way. All other social media is a big ad. Although 5 minutes a day to verify that IG reels sucks is enough.

10 minutes.

Sometimes 12 !LUV

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That is increasingly where I find myself. I enjoy Hive primarily for "recreational" purposes... I have no expectations that it's somehow part of a greater social media campaign.

And it does make me happy when I post something that actually results in intelligent dialogue on a subject... which is a great rarity on other social media which seems to be more about posturing and shouting matches.

I still use Facebook, IG and X/twitter as marketing and promotional tools for my business ventures... in their own right, they are more effective at getting eyeballs on a business/selling site.

Otherwise, I mostly watch cat videos...

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I understand they're really marking headlines.

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This is a very difficult situation to understand. The size of Hive community makes it possible to feel like a community and to make connections. I would never be able to have meaningful exchanges on Twitter or FB.

But there should be a way to attract more people to Hive. If we could use Hive crypto as a widespread means of exchange, perhaps we could attract more people who want to get away from fiat systems.

I like the way you are thinking ! It's worth looking at Distriator, which enables payment by HBD with a cash back if the buyer then posts about what they bought. The only problem is that like so many Hive projects reaching out into the wider world, it's just too small-scale, it needs to be grown by a factor of ten or a hundred at least.

Hive is, indeed, more like an actual community, much the way message boards and forums were, 20 years (and more) ago. And I definitely like that, about being here.

I know some of that "real use" is being developed in some parts of the world, especially Venezuela, where HBD has become legal tender in a growing number of businesses. Same is true — to a smaller degree — in parts of West Africa.

We just need much more of it.

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So, from what I have read from this discussion, I gather that there should be an easy way to attract more people by letting them upvote and comment on the posts they liked.

I think a kind of shadow account should be created using the conventional system of one password. These accounts could upvote by the symbols of their votes would be summed up together as the number of ‘hearts’ at the end of the list of upvotes. So we could see the numbers of exposures for that story.

If they wanted to become involved with Hive, they would have to sign up. In this way, there won’t be so much burden on the programming effort which would require extra resources. In this way, we could gauge the response and interest from people in other platforms. Then the stats will tell us if it’s worth the effort to push things further.

I don’t know much about gaming. But this channel could be quite attractive to other gamers. Lots of gamers had no idea about games on blockchain.

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Some very good points here ! I'd love to see a way for non-Hivers who visit to be able to upvote, creating a kind of "shadow account" which they can then activate and turn into an actual account to claim the rewards. Hopefully it would be a super-easy way for new people to get onboard.

But I appreciate there is a multitude of technical obstacles that would need to be solved - how to stop existing Hivers from creating fake accounts just to claim the rewards, how it would be funded, and how to make the shadow accounts persistent in some way until the users become interested enough to claim them.

As I understand it, the Inleo project has created a sort of "light" account, through their front end interface... you can actually "sign up with twitter/Google" which is a huge step for Hive. But I think it's limited to Inleo created accounts.

A long time ago, I made an elaborate suggestion/proposal for "light" accounts, as well... sign up with existing social media accounts, create your own password... which would allow you to do everything EXCEPT financial transactions. So someone could get started into Hive... but the moment they actually wanted to touch their HP, they'd have to create a "full" account, and assume custody of their keys. Resource credits and 20 HP delegations would come from some dedicated "core" account whose only function was account creation, initial HP/RC delegations. The delegations would automatically be triggered to end when the light account either became a full account, OR the account reached 20 HP under its own efforts, OR the account was dormant for 90 days. Or some other pre-specified period of time... which would also go a ways towards eliminating "dead" accounts that transacted once at their creation, and never again.

A hardfork would probably be required to add the code at a base level, but I think it could be done.

No, nobody listened to the suggestion because I am not "someone of influence," but at least it was said...

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