First off, all of this are just observations and thoughts without any intention to judge certain content or target anyone as everyone does what they want to do with their stake for all I care as long as it's not blatant abuse.
Some months ago, some discussion was about users who keep blogging while cashing out their earnings without holding any Hive Power. Some of these posts to name a few were:
User holding less HP than the Author rewards by @azircon
Invest or Milk by @slobberchop
Ok To Stake the Bare Minimum? by @solominer
Main Obeservation...
My main observation in the months following was how most users who get upvoted by Curation Programs on Hive fall in the category of having Zero Incoming Investment while keeping very little Hive Staked but instead even cashing out Earnings (or delegating them / turning them into HBD at best)
DO THE TEST YOURSELF!
You'll see that nearly nobody is investing and many are using Hive just as a Cash Cow selling even at current low prices which helps to keep the price of Hive down as there is no real incentive to Power Up let alone Invest and no consequence whatsoever...
Two Types of Hive Users...
I would say if you are on Hive, there are 2 main ways to do reasonably well which results in 2 types of users and those that don't fall into these types, most likely will have a very hard time to get anything going on Hive and give up sooner than later.
Type 1: Invest to Hold Enough Hive Power to mostly take care of your own post upvotes mainly by using Automated votes creating an 'upvote4upvote' mechanic as you mainly want to support people who also invested and are able to give something back.
Type 2: Learn the rules of the game to get inside the curation circle to get big upvotes that way mainly making the type of content that is picked up.
While in an ideal world, Hive could work as something like Patreon where people buy some Hive Power which allows them to support their favorite content creator, in reality most content on Hive is just not good or exclusive enough for anyone to ever do this and the 7-day payout window also doesn't really help with this.
Hive 'Quality Content' Intrinsic Value
99.9% of Hive content I would say (including mine) has zero intrinsic value as there are very few actual consumers for it (There is a reason why Hive removed the views counter) and there is no ad revenue on it. In that regard I think 'Quality Content' is overrated an everything is more about social interactions and also investment in the platform. If 2 people would make the same content, right now, it's normal for rewards mainly to go to the one who either is heavily invested and helps to hold the price up or has the social status on the platform.
In reality I would say more rewards should also go to people who help to bring outside traffic to Hive and help onboard new users along with new users who put in effort to give them some initial HP and a good feeling which is something some of the curation projects do an excellent job at.
Auto-Upvotes
I would say the good thing about using Auto-upvotes like hive.vote is that it requires users to actually invest in Hive and that it really takes a lot of effort to build this up also. It also automates Curation as nobody really has the time to manually plow through all the garbage posts to find something that is actually worth an upvote.The downside is that it mostly neglects new people that come to Hive while the knowledge that there are going to be upvotes while a daily post is required for many eventually will come at the cost of the quality that is put out. Also when the price of Hive goes higher, there tends to be an uproar as it doesn't feel fair that those who invested and grinded in the bad times get overly rewarded in the good times often on content that just shouldn't be worth those amounts.
Also one of the side-effects is that many on Hive Write exclusively about the Hive ecosystem as it's the one thing that unites everyone and tends to get upvotes. I almost never write about Hive anymore but I am guilty at quicker click posts about Hive as just few of the other topics people blog about honestly interest me.
Curation Projects
I'm not an expert on the different Curation Projects so I'm just writing what I see. It very much feels like a certain type of post which includes a ton of pictures and often personal stuff tend to get picked up and once someone is inside of the 'curation circle' they continue to get upvotes likely because it's an efficient way for the curators to 'find' and select 'quality content'. This without any requirement for the one who gets curated to be invested in Hive and even when they are just dumping everything they earn.Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thing for Hive that there are curation projects but what's the point if they completely neglect any kind of incentive to invest in Hive or take behaviors where Hive is just being dumped into account.
The Hive Price...
This brings me to the Hive Price which is -36% Lower Compared to a Year Ago in what can be seen as a bull run since Bitcoin in the same time went +117% and Ethereum +51%. As a more direct comparison, Steem is only down -2% / LBC is down -38% / DESO is down -28% / SNT is down -2% / BAT is down -4%
So While I would say Hive is to best Web3 Social Media chain around, it hasn't really shown in the price compared to the other SocialFi platforms
I would say the main issue for Hive right now which holds back the price is that there is actually very little incentive for users let alone investors to actually invest in it. I love Hive and kind of want a bigger stake at the current price as I've been around for 7+ years with no intentions to leave regardless any earnings or if the price would drop more. However, seeing how Hive is just being dumped systematically often by users who get many big upvotes from the existing curation projects gives me arguments to hold back.
Possible Solutions
Neither the situation where people who invest in Hive mainly to upvote each other to get some post payouts or the curation projects who mainly upvote people who aim to extract value from the ecosystem by dumping the Hive that they earn is optimal. I would say that a solution to help the Hive Price up could be if the Curation Projects took the general behavior of the ones who get curated into account giving incentives for users to actually invest in Hive. If the price of Hive ever goes higher, the bigger accounts that now get reasonable payouts with the unspoken 'upvote4upvote' could delegate part of their stake to these Curation Projects that set requirements for new players to be actually invested instead of using Hive as a Milking Cow.
None of this is an exact science and it mainly comes from my own perspective on how I see things. I understand that not everyone is in a position to invest while some are in a position where it's actually nice that they get supported by the Hive community and curation. Also everyone is free to do with their stake and earnings what they want without any judgment. It's just that everyone in the end wants the price of Hive to go up and the platform to grow and some action should be taken to give users more incentives to buy Hive and Power it up. The best advertisement for any Crypto Project remains big green candles that make the price go up!
10% of the post payout will go to the comments in this post by using @commentrewarder so feel free to leave a comment with your opiion and some feedback on how we can help make Hive more desirable again!
Posted Using InLeo Alpha