It's one thing to have opinions. It's a totally different thing to voice them and stand strong when others disagree with them. Strength of conviction is a rare and valuable thing.
Too many people are afraid to voice their opinion and stick with it. It's very hard to stick out against the majority especially in this day and age when opinions are treated like weapons.
"The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."
When covid was in full flow anybody that didn't agree with the government live was called a fraud, an idiot or even worse and idiot. Now some of them were (bleach is not a cure) but most had a healthy skepticism for force fed narratives with little evidence or proof behind it.
"You have to believe us because we are in charge."
As parents we constantly lie to our kids in this way because it suits us and the government are well able to follow the same set of rules when dealing with the general population. How many times have you told the kids that something was closed that you didn't want to go to. That we couldn't afford something that we didn't want to buy. Or that eating vegetables will make you grow tall or see better. Now there might be good reasons behind doing this but it doesn't make it true or right. Kids don't have the mental capacity to know why we should make these choices but as adults we have earned the right to make up our own minds from the truth.
I'm watching the Nickelback documentary right now on netflix and I never got the hate. They had some great songs over the years. They never wrote songs that changed the world but they wrote what people wanted. Nothing wrong with that and it made them very successful. Fair play to the band who took a lot of abuse throughout their career and kept going regardless of the negativity.
Voicing opinions on Hive can be much more dangerous as there are a cohort of larger users that don't appreciate criticism or harsh truths but sometimes you have to stand over what you think.
There are two sides to that. One is that it's very easy to criticize people's work when you haven't done anything yourself to improve the eco-system. Those are keyboard warriors and their opinion is worth very little.
It's not easy to build anything let alone a successful product. Most crypto projects don't last two years where as we have apps and an eco-system that have survived multiple bear markets and struggles over the years.
I have bought hive, shared links, invited users and helped where i could but have never built the things that i would love to see here that could improve our experience and grow Hive. But i can also see some very obvious issues that have been pointed out for years and never addressed which could be the end of the chain if left unchecked.
At the moment there is nobody buying Hive. But there are plenty who are selling. That is what will kill off everything.
I have no problem with selling. That's the whole point of a reward chain where you earn for your content. Why would people want to earn hive if not to sell it and use it. The issue lies in the buying of hive. Except for future value you do not need it. I could run my whole account on 200 Hive so I could sell 75K and be just as successful. That is a problem.
Apps need a certain amount of hive to let their users operate but it's the same group of users across all of the apps. The largest one splinterlands has about 10% of it's peak users now compared to the last bull run. It only earns revenue from pack sales but most users are buying packs with earning money from the game or from hive. It's the same money getting recycled over and over again but losing value over time. LEO is the same with rewards paid out from their pool. The DEX is funded by hive / leo rewards and again little to no external money is coming into the system. We had started ads which were bringing in external money and buying hive/leo off the market but that was removed after just a few weeks.
There is no money coming into the eco-system but lots flowing out. The DHF is pissing away money. Most users are long term and not buying from the markets. Users are selling their rewards. There are lots of new games but they are all pulling from the same pool of hive users and the same rewards so that none of them are doing well.
We will only survive if we get external money coming into Hive from ads, users, new apps, partnerships, sponsorships or other business sources. I don't think that any of the projects on hive other than maybe splinterlands are running as a legitimate business and at some stage this is going to come to a head. I hope that i'm wrong or that we can create some new business ideas but until then things are looking grim. It feels like we have been slowly losing a lot of our devs and authors over the past years as it gets quieter and quieter in the community which is sad to see.
On the plus side blocktrades is putting in a lot of work to develop under the hood if we can get new developers and projects. There are new games appearing. Splinterlands and leo are creating bridges to other eco-systems and we have a very good core group of users here that want to succeed.
All isn't lost yet but i do worry about the future if we don't see changes.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha