Gettr - Hive Competitor Gains Millions of Users Due To Support For Dr. Malone - Who I've Been Heavily Downvoted For Supporting.

in #hive3 years ago

For those living in a cave, Dr. Robert Malone has been grabbing online attention for days following his interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. Gettr is a new 'free speech' network that has now exploded with millions of followers as a result of Twitter banning Malone and him promoting Gettr on Rogan's show. Lessons need to be learned here on Hive.

EDIT: Predictably, the Getter Terms of Service make clear they are NOT a real free speech site at all and will delete any content they find 'objectionable' ;)

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I have been interacting with Dr. Malone here and there on Twitter right throughout COVID19 and first promoted him on Hive back in July, 2021 when he first came to public attention in his appearance on the Black Horse Podcast.

I am told that he created an account on 3speak and uploaded various videos here. He's a smart guy who pays attention to technology and how to overcome the scumbags who currently control so much of the world's resources. Here's another post I made a while back that highlights his statements on the relationship of Vitamin D to COVID.

Whether you think Dr. Malone makes sense or is in error regarding his extensive commentary on COVID19 and the associated vaccines, you cannot successfully deny that he is grabbing major attention, despite being censored by Twitter (and now Youtube) and blacked out by the mainstream media. His appearance on Joe Rogan is currently the most watched show on Spotify.

Given all of this and given that Hive is primarily designed to be censorship resistant, there is a glaring problem here that the Dr. Malone situation is highlighting (again). PEOPLE REPEATEDLY CHOOSE ANY OTHER 'FREE SPEECH' NETWORK OVER HIVE!

I am told that Gettr is hosted on Amazon servers and uses Google Captcha, among other bad design choices for a free speech network, yet it now has 8 million users from Joe Rogan alone! It's only a few months old. Similar 'free speech' networks made similarly bad design choices, such as Parler, got big and went nowhere due to bad design. Hive, as most people here understand, legitimately improves on these poor design choices and yet the majority of well known activists, whistleblowers and controversial voices refuse to come here.

I've been saying this for years and yet it seems that enough people don't care or disagree with my message that I am ignored and nothing much changes. We are now at the point where one single person on Hive has enough power to zero my account for months without repercussion, meaning that one of the few advocates for Hive's primary use case is being forced off the network. Do you really think this is going to make Hive a success?!

You really need to question now what the real agenda behind the downvoting is because as a professional marketer, free speech advocate and fairly well connected researcher/activist, I know for certain that there are well organised operations in place on social media to use whatever tricks are available to shut down conversations and people that stand a chance of genuinely helping humanity by exposing and ending serious largescale abuses of human rights (usually by scummy corporations or governments).

Hive (and Steem before it) have consistently missed out on so many opportunities to grow that I have lost count and this has largely been due to a failure to recognise that it's primary use case is being overlooked. Free speech is one of the most undervalued human rights and points of dignity - not because it isn't important, but because so many people, in reality, want to shut it down in order to hide their own lies. In short, we have a crisis of dishonesty and DENIAL.

One of the points that Dr. Robert Malone made in his interview with Joe Rogan was that the world is trapped by 'mass formation psychosis', which is a fancy way of saying 'people are frightened and unconscious, which makes them easy to hypnotise and lead down dead ends by nefarious people'. The way to end this trance state is to understand DENIAL and to end it. This means recognising how much we are blocking out and therefore how much in error our thinking is about all kinds of things.

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One of my main aims online has ALWAYS been to help end denial in myself and others. It's pretty much what I am doing constantly - there is so much denial that it is a full time job! From my perspective, my intent to end denial and therefore to stick to what is verifiably accurate and also what is very likely to be rejected by many people is both why I get a lot of upvotes here and probably also why I am getting downvoted to oblivion.

I put a few weeks into creating the Untrending report to list out the current downvotes on Hive because failure to take action to respond to crippling downvotes from high stake accounts means Hive loses it's primary selling point - free speech support. I'm not really interested in going through yet another round of listening to people claiming that downvoting is not 'censorship'. Just look through the accounts receiving the biggest downvotes and check what happens to most of them in a short space of time. Most of them leave, no matter how long they have been active on Hive and this is the point of the downvoting. I have been told directly by the biggest downvoter to leave (with no reason given!).

I am really at a loss as to what the 'leaders' of Hive want it to be at this point because few of them show any evidence of doing much to actually grow it based on it's primary selling point. Perhaps they are frightened and in denial - as are most people at this point. That seems likely, so I am asking them to get real and feel deeply into what is really going on inside of them that causes most of them to 'overlook' this issue or even support the downvoting.

I read an old steemitblog post from Steemit Inc. from over a year ago which highlighted the problems with downvoting at that time and stated that SMTs were going to solve the problem. Obviously they never materialised and now we have layer 2 options via Hive Engine, but the cost of entry is too high currently to empower these to fully solve the problem. Until we have robust and cheap layer 2 solutions, it will continue to be possible to frustrate, stifle and eject people on Hive simply by holding enough stake on Layer 1.

Two Key Questions on Downvotes & Marketing


  1. Does the community want/intend to do anything about the habitual downvoting of people based only in disagreement? Do we not really care? Or are we waiting for someone else to fix it - perhaps via Layer 2 groups like VYB?

  2. What exactly do the downvoters see as the main selling point of the rewards pool in the world? Given that they often seem not to want the biggest target audience to make use of it (dissenters and those ejected from Web 2.0). To many intelligent people, they seem to just want to dominate it and control it for their own reasons, rather than use it to attract new users. Note: blocking rewards from established/growing Hive users in order to try to lure in new users is more akin to a pyramid scheme than much else (Which is exactly the complaint I most see about Steem/Hive from 'influencers' in the crypto world.).

The total amount of rewards paid out to authors is a small enough percentage of the overall staked HP that it is surprisingly insignificant overall, yet these folks have no problem in acting like saviours for dominating a small number of people for months on end to protect what is actually a small percentage of a normal marketing budget and that generally isn't spent on marketing all that much!

I get that people have better things to do than stand up for the victims here - I was similar for a long time. Not that I didn't want to help but I didn't really know how and wasn't aware of the nature of the problem as much as I am now (and not being limited like I am now too).

If nothing else I would like people to comment on the marketing vision for Hive based on the current scenario because as a marketer I feel it is very difficult to promote the system as it currently is - for the same reasons that Hive is rejected by so many outsiders. It's particularly frustrating to hear @acidyo complaining that I am not doing anything to onboard people, while he does so much, while I can clearly see that millions of people are being turned away by missed opportunities as a result of not understanding psychology deeply enough. (Note: I appreciate that Acidyo is the only one of the downvoters to engage me, listen and respectfully change direction so far - this is not an attack on him or OCD).

It is accepted scientific fact in business psychology that people are FAR more bothered by losing something than they are by the prospect of gaining something. You can try to sell them on rewards and free speech all day long, but if they smell that they can have things taken away from them, they will be MUCH more affected by the thought and are likely to recoil. From what I gather someone put people in charge of 'vision' on Hive that doesn't really think free speech is worth marketing.

It's just such a shame to me that Hive is being so limited by limited thinking. Let's have a conversation and create productive solutions!



Wishing you well,
Ura Soul



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What good is free speech when there's nobody around to hear it?

Hive is decentralized; there are no 'leaders'.

It's up to the individual to take charge on their own behalf. Several other platforms for well over a decade now not only had 'leaders' but also handy algorithms positioning instances of content under the noses of consumers. These consumers demonstrating behavioral/consumption habits were offered content they'd most likely agree with and therefore consume. Content creators were then in turn offered the illusion of organic popularity. They'd create their content and the systems in place would position it in front of the target audience. The creator of said content didn't have to do much work beyond focusing on their craft.

Some of these content creators then heard about other options like Hive and the various other 'new' platforms. They might have nearly a million followers outside of Hive in some cases. They post an instance of content like a video, on several platforms, including Hive. Same video that can be found on Youtube, everywhere. And for years on Hive, as they post their videos almost daily, there's hardly a peep in the comment section and the view counter barely moves. Yet they expect to be rewarded, just for showing up and sharing a link. They don't offer any exclusives and do absolutely nothing to drive eyes to their work on Hive.

Having nearly a million people in a market outside of Hive and very little views, votes, and signs of consumption like engagement in the form of comments on Hive is a clear sign the local market isn't interested (the local market is small and is made up mainly of other content creators rather than content consumers) and it's a clear sign that content creator is far more concerned/interested in collecting money rather than an audience willing to listen to their latest rendition of 'free speech'.

Money doesn't have ears.

People coming from web 2.0 simply don't understand a platform like this doesn't exist to hold your hand and carry your messages for you.

It's not meant to be a free lunch content dumping ground.

People don't even realize they're free to set up their own revenue stream on this platform. They arrive thinking the current market and stakeholders are supposed to support them and their work. They don't even realize their supporters don't even have to spend money in order to support their work. All they have to do is take money from their bank account and place it in their Hive account, stake it, and vote daily, forever, at no cost, and if that consumer wants to, they can leave with all or even more of their money back.

In going on six years here I've yet to see anyone with a large market on the outside truly embrace what this platform has to offer then act on their own and work towards establishing themselves here, drawing eyes and attention here to their work, and utilizing the support systems in place to help fund their message.

So again I must ask, what good is free speech when there's nobody around to hear it?

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I have progressed from No 5 to No 3 position...hehehe...Truly these people love me so much ;-)

Hive could see millions of new people signing up. The current whales dont want a bunch of political people signing up here.

They have made it clear in their responses to me they dont upvote political content and only want to upvote content that is something you would find on Facebook

All GETTR needs to do is allow a HIVE Signer or Keychain feature. Rather than signing up for accounts with JUST email, why not ALSO allow a Blockchain wallet... like HIVE? Oh but BLURT will work just as well... AND I PUT OUT THE CALL!

What happens when BLURT beats HIVE to better onboarding? We'll Soon Find out!

100 percent agree

"It was just laying there on the floor..."

Oh ok, I don't recall seeing those messages. It isn't even really necessary for whales to upvote political content for new users to come here, it's more about them not being hugely downvoted and generally left alone. There's a ton of political content on Facebook too though, so I'm not really sure I even understand this position. If they are hoping to recreate facebook's 'family friendly' aspects here then they are in for a let-down as Facebook handles that side of things much, much better than Hive and has privacy settings that Hive can't support.

It’s fine to not upvote it. Tbh I don’t rly myself, I see enough on fb anyways and rly can’t be bothered to get into it here and I am happy with the creative, food, travel and art stuff but I still stand up for peoples right to free speech. Not upvoting isn’t the same as down voting it. Fb still has a level of free speech as long as you avoid certain trigger words from tripping the system you can at this point still say anything you like. There is a whole group on fb that talks about travelling mask, test and jab free that’s been going for the whole time.

  • Hive still does not have short messaging service
  • What is the business model of gettr? I find it highly dubious that they have a good interface "for free". Who runs the show there in the background?
  • Does Joe Rogan/Malone own bitcoin? I doubt it.

Angeblich ist der Mossad oder CIA involviert, s. mein anderer Kommentar

d.buzz is a twitter form of Hive.

as far as I am aware, gettr's business model is driven by advertising.

Yes, Rogan and probably Malone use crypto / Bitcoin:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/worlds-biggest-podcaster-joe-rogan-accepts-bitcoin-payment

Here's a comparison of traffic vitals for PeakD, Gettr and Twitter. Despite Gettr only being a few months old it demonstrates better performance in Alexa and MOZ than PeakD. I presume this is because it is being promoted by big names and gaining traction as a result:
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domains have a high domain age, really interesting.

That just refers to the first time the name was registered, which may have been by someone totally unrelated to the current website who then sold it on later.

sure but it never expired in that timeframe :P

even if it expires, the domain age will always go back to the first time it was registered

ok, I think the metric I refer to was then without expiration. Thanks for the clarification.

As a former domain hunter i had a table of metrics to look at :)

Is self voting with VYB a thing now or is that still against their rules?

afaik they penalise for self voting

why am i still a little bit shocked when they ban yet another one... just saw his recent interview on rogan.. enjoyed that discussion

It will never end until society fully understands what has really been going on all these years or at least until power is decentralised!

I really enjoyed this post thanks for sharing 👍🏾 happy new year to you and your family 🤝🏾🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🍻

Thanks, you are welcome! Welcome to another Earth orbit! <3

What?!

Common sense!?

Quick! Downvote! Make it go away!

Haha. Controversial, I know!

Stop that! Back in your box!

Reason for downvote - You left your box. (How dare you.)

Remember now, I'm only supporting the science!

🙃😶😑🥸

Thankyou for enforcing the laws of the universe.. Without that we would be wild animals and nothing would ever get done on time! :)

I am pinning my hopes on VYB because Hive is all over with a bunch of dickheads controlling the content and the reward pool. Steemit part 2...

And im also on Bastyon which is doing interesting things.

Gettr sounds like another con.

Gettr was apparently created by people in Donald Trump's team, but I don't know much more than that. I'd be surprised if they thrived long term but having a big userbase helps a lot.

Yes, I saw that and already replied to it. Given Gettr's connection to the Trump team and clearly the CIA via Amazon and Google (whether deliberate or not), it seems likely that Gettr will be yet another shitstain on liberation! lol. We'll see.

Do you listen to NoAgenda? If not check this out! https://www.noagendashow.net/archive

Someone on Twitter just pointed out that the CEO of Gettr, Jason Miller was previously a partner at Jamestown Associates who had Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and the EPA as previous clients. Worth knowing!

Wow. Imagine that. On online war of ideas, and people profiting from both sides.

I'm not much into conspiracies but I do chuckle at the idea the pro vax and anti vax crowds are generating wealth for the same people. Maybe that's why the division being created separating those for it and against it into neat little social media piles is so deliberate, obvious, and highly publicized. This is basic business common sense and everyone knows social media is the new oil.

Fascinating.

I imagine it’s problem is it will become an eco chamber for one view and fb will be another will end up just with divided social media I guess so no one will ever listen to opposing views anymore. Opposing views are healthy.

Freedom of association is necessary and there are plenty of groups would differ so wildly on life/death issues and who are so emotionally pent up that they would literally become violent if face to face. Layer 2 projects enable groups to have their own spaces without destroying each other. Finding a balance between people is very healthy and absolutely necessary, but it can't happen at the wrong time and in the wrong way.

It looks cool tho, trying to sign up and it just froze on the verification page with no button to confirm email 0-0

I haven't tried to sign up and probably won't - but I imagine the issue is probably that their servers are overwhelmed.

I see, with the traffic already there, would been a good place to push truth content published here...

How is Gettr a competitor to Hive?

Other than the obvious competition between social networks... I mean is it a competitor in the sense that they are developing their own token/cryptocurrency?

I wouldn't call them competitors, Hive is a true free speech platform protected by blockchain technology... Gettr is Not. Gettr is a Twitter competitor, not a blockchain competitor (in my opinion).

All social media sites are competing for both users and SEO performance, for starters. Whether they have totally matching feature sets is not so relevant from a marketing perspective. In this case I specifically highlighted them because they specifically aim to capture the market of people looking for free speech sites. My point is that even though they aren't even a real free speech site, they still make huge waves through knowing how to market themselves. As highlighted, for some reason some of the Hive whales are very resistant to accepting the very audience that is most likely to result in Hive's quick expansion.

people are leaving fb because of control, they won't come to another controlling platform for the purposes of free speech, completely agree.

Unfortunately, most people don't take the time to do research into the situation and tend to end up on other platforms that inevitably either move to censor them in some way or get shut down. I think Hive also needs to be promoted as something that the members direct themselves in order for the message to make it across the gap of people's unawareness!

people are leaving fb because of control,

Fb show pushy ads, do we? Fb forcefully delete your post and even sometimes wiping out your account, do we? Do people play NFT games with only fb login?

they won't come to another controlling platform for the purposes of free speech,

Someone was blacklisted by spamminator for obvious reasons. He still have $1000 in Hive Power. He earns curation rewards. He plays splinterlands and all dapps of hive. He even still post of 2nd layer solutions and earn there token. If you do this with utube or Facebook they will just cut off everything. We have given you control if you play the game by rules. If you wanna be a player, you can't hate the game.

If you wanna make a change, play the game by rules, become big player and make new rules.

completely agree.

What is Hive controlling? We don't have a magical printer to print money. Consider it like a stake in company. The people with highest stake can make rules, just like directors of companies. Even the small fishes can agree of one thing and fight with big whales. This is the problem from "Meh Rewards" group also since they can't get together on one thing. Welcome to web 3.0.

And where does ‘we’ come from. You don’t own hive. I thought that was the point that it’s not owned by anyone. This is probably where the mentality comes from that a few people think they own hive. It’s like when people forget the police and governemnt work for us.

Change the word we = hive. It will make sense to you. "we" means how the plateform is designed or worked. But I am just a person on internet sharing my opinion. ;)

No hive is owned by everyone, like the world is if people woke up to their power. I believe the majority on hive don’t want a handful of people choosing what is on the feed because they used a big stake to downvote it. I imagine the majority want freedom. The only way anyone can know what the majority choose tho is by them forming communities and coming together on these threads as indivually the people have too little power to do anything and by standing up or questioning just risk being zeroed out so most stay quiet hoping they go under the radar whilst getting their payouts. It’s only when people lose the fear or enough come together that anyone will realise what the majority on hive want. I think the tables are slowly turning however on this one. We will see.

There is no free speech here whilst a small handful of people with the largest stake can effectively downvote peoples posts to zero taking away any right to earn like the rest on the platform and get them greyed out or moved right to the bottom of the feed. I see lots of people this happens to. It’s a complete block on free speech whilst downvotes with voting weight exist. They either need to scrap downvotes or make it at least so it’s only worth equal for everyone whatever their stake. Masses won’t come to a platform they can’t feel free on i doubt in this climate. Obviously it’s just my opinion but millions just joined that gettr or whatever it’s called in one day purely because it’s free speech alternative to twitter. I personally wouldn’t even dare put an actual opinion about my world view in hive cause it’s way too much negativity, attack and I literally just leave it for fb actually.

Well, growth does thin out the rewards pool... Could that be it! Those blaming others for being greedy are just projecting to obfuscate the true reason behind their actions?

Growth brings new users who bring new users who are all potentially new investors - so there's no real reason to assume that new users would result in less rewards when they could also result in more rewards!

I thought inflation was pretty much fixed?

More demand for tokens forces the price up, so even if there are less tokens distributed per person overall, their total value can still go up.

Yeah, I stand by my hypothesis then, because the value fluctuates so much. It's better to earn more coin than bet on the value, especially if you stake.

The price of Hive would stabilise with a higher user base - the volatility comes from the small market.

All those I on boarded over the years used steemit and briefly hive and then left due to the down voting. It also turned them off that most of the posts are the same thing over and over again. People copying each other. People posting about how much they staked that week to hive, or to a layer 2 token, people up voting things that are actually not that interesting to the majority of society and only appeal to people trying to centralize and maintain a status quo here on hive.

So people can complain about us not on boarding people. We can on board people but it is pointless if they are just going to turn around abuse them, and scare them off.

100% agreed, the situation is maddening!

I'm finding it funny that unless you are an Official person onboarding others in big paid events you get hated on for doing so...

I've met a ton of hivians. In person. But yeah....

And as to the vaccine and the truth behind all this? Why is it so hated that this is attacked in such ways.

Well when you do negative then negative comes. You keep being positive? And speaking the truth? People listen.

Good ideas don't require Force.

Oh and tear out a man's tongue, and show the world you are afraid of his words...

Odd how that control is out here.

Seems like these people were forefront of the bidbotwar. And as well the entire tribesteemup. Now these civil war factions are throwing flags.

The war of the soul.of.blockchain.is going on.

I upvoted your comment despite you lumping TSU in there with the downvoters, because the rest of it was that good.

My arnt you touchy... Mr cowrapist... I do believe that your work was targeted over the fact you watch some dumb cowfart movie and then think that the destruction of million of animals and forcing the world to adopt your dietary opinion will save the world... Then write a huge post about why the entire world is bad.

Yeah.... That wasn't smart.

The fact tribesteemup is in the middle of the fight and throwing flags just as fast and hard as the opposition?

Well your downvoting. No matter what you try to say.

And the switch is going to cost alot of legacy support. Shrug.

I was offering to bury the hatchet and help you deal with this issue as the solution to fighting this war is easy. And winning it.

However you are still stuck in this fighting everyone and pretending that you are better than others? It's turned alot of people off.

Just because you don't understand what you are doing and then turn around and say your not...

Kinda erodes your position and action.

Keep waffling Kenny. Your involvement with the bidbot war set this content judgmental quality issue aflame.

You can't be mad when you get hit... But you are.

So are you going to fight your friends while in a battle? Or will you make truce and let others support you even if that means you won't get the maximum glory?

And Kenny you are not nonviolent, your harmless. You can only take a vow of non-violence if you are a violent person. And it only means something when you are capable of great violence.

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There are so many people involved and they each change from moment to moment, that tracking everything takes a lot of time. I feel what we need is a generally shared understanding of the core features and purposes of Hive - so that we can point to them when issues arise. Anarchy is great but when people are trying to unite for a common cause there has to be some kind of shared vision!

I remember getting downvoted months back by a whale for pushing back on the fascist narrative about what’s happening. I thank you for speaking truth friend. I had some words about it and my new year post I just put up is about it. Check it out. I already follow ya but I will pay extra close attention. You are on same page as me. Cheers to freedom my friend!

Thanks to you too! I checked out some of the Adam Curry site you linked me to - seems like they have some good content on COVID etc.
Each whale seems to have slightly different aims in their downvoting but they are similar enough that they sometimes blur together.

We need governance we don't need anarchy.

We need to be focusing on growing and retaining people rather than running them off.

Now bad actors yes absolutely go ahead and run them off and we need to have a group that helps us with that.

However community members that occasionally bump the rules need to have a way of making that up and as well community involvement in that entire process to free up the individuals who are defending the blockchain.

Next up people who are defending the blockchain need to be known, and in good standing we have had some wrongful reports by over eager new individuals taking advantage of the system for personal gain. That truly does stain reputation of a group that's supposed to be protecting the blockchain..

A key issue is that Hive is literally based on competition, so it makes sense that those who want to extract the most money will do whatever they can to remove competitors. This alone is a major issue that has never been fully addressed through discussion, planning or strategy (publicly) as far as I know. The only solid answer anyone presents is 'buy more stake' - but that isn't really a solution any more than building more nuclear weapons is a solution to the arms race.

Developing an institution for content creators that helps ensure they create the highest quality possible seems like a reasonable approach, but as always people will argue about the details and the form.

DPOS is a mixture of anarchy and governance, but the governance ultimately is defined by wealth and not much else. Without having agreements among the largest stakeholders there is little but demands and ideas turning into hot air.

We need the community organizing and delegating their own stake, community curation trails and rewards...

Like I said we need a balance. Representatives from the coders and witnesses who really can't speak for themselves and be understood.

And then the people and community.
.we need councils for managing this. Not just the current structure. That's needed as well.

But we need some checks and assurances the large whales can't abuse the common people.

Actually, I don't share quite some of your opinions concerning the corona situation etc. but I completely share your point of view that HIVE should be a platform of free speech where everybody can express their opinion and ideas without the fear of getting downvoted (no matter if I personally agree or disagree).

A big part of the flags on HIVE are given due to disagreement on opinion, retaliation or 'rules' like "Comments shouldn't be upvoted with a high percentage." etc. which is completely inacceptable in my opinion, and that kind of hostile behaviour will, exactly as you analysed, drive away uncountable users from HIVE.

I appreciate your efforts to point that out, and I personally am 'hibernating' and won't become active on HIVE again, until the overall situation in this centralized oligarchy will improve significantly.

This.
I guess we'll be hibernating for a long time.

Thanks for sharing your voice here - Upvoted 100% voluntarily ;)

I’ve bought what must be at least 30-40 people to the blockchain media sites Over the years. Probably way more than that actuallty. I don’t think anyone stuck it out bar maybe a couple most ppl don’t like this kind of negativity or found it too hard to get going. Retention has always been a bigger problem than invites to me as the more people loving the platform the more they invite new people and talk about it positively. So many people left even back in 2017 because of getting flagged and rep down to zero. Everyone I knew back then in fact left apart from me and maybe two others.

That's pretty much my experience too - though in my case the people weren't downvoted, they just gave up anyway. People need to feel at home - is the bottom line.. And most don't.

It’s vefy true. It’s also quite complicated for new users and people forget that after they have been on a while. Even my friends who own crypto struggled a bit. Then if anyone goes to the official chat rooms it’s just full of people calling each other idiots etc or at least used to be.

The powers that be on Hive do not respect it's current users nor its churn rate. The fact is that Hive doesn't have a strong identity. Its built on buzzwords like decentralization and censorship resistance but doesnt bother to stand by those design features, instead offering bullying as a mechanic so that majority stakeholders can do what they want even if it creates an ecosystem with the worst user experience of any product I've ever encountered. Hive is just vaporware and doesn't deserve more users. In reality, hive is not a viable alternative to any social media and isn't actual competition for a microblogging site. Ultimately, many people who onboard will be held accountable for the fraud they proliferate. There's a double edged sword where if Hive grows enough it could put it on the radar an entity who will actually do something about it. I'm looking forward when they get the Bitconnect treatment they deserve. If Hive were to self regulate properly and not have these massive liabilities then I would onboard thousands of users. Marketing isn't that hard when you have consistent ethics in place. But people want to put the cart before the horse.

Agree but all these freedom of speech networks fall again. I'm sure gettlr will not stay 1 year +

The Donald trump one is still here? I don't know. Maybe we see a split into many networks and every network will have some users but in the end, they use the mainstream ones.

I think hive is not ready for mass onboarding at all.

The first wave can maybe get handled. But If we grow exponentially, the disappointment of getting a wallet would be very high.

Also, educating " don't self vote and every other unwritten hive rule" would annoy people more than they would enjoy.

I also think the government token is a really bad one for main rewarding.

L2 tokens must be cheap and easy to create + should be easy to implement in existing forums and communities outside of hive. That would be the trojan horse.

Tokenize the internet is the best marketing. But hive is not ready for it.

Promoting hive on Twitter and co can look like promoting a "shitcoin".

I would love more to promote a working product besides the coin.

And I know we have working ones, but they can't scale 100x + very easily without hammering out massive problems.

I think Hive can scale pretty bigly without much problem tbh.
As others have pointed out (and I have now edited the top of this post) - Gettr's Terms of Service predictably make clear that they aren't really a free speech site at all. They will delete anything they define as 'subjectively objectionable'. lol

I don't say gettlr is at any point better.

The scale problem is a housemade problem, reducing the cost to 0,1 hive.

Fear for name squatting? make a reduced price for prefix/ suffix wallet names.

like: leo.username or vyb.username. With that unlimited names are available. No reason to make them expensive.

I brought this up a long time ago, also got some attention. But nobody cares.

If you read the post above, it clearly was not about Gettr being better, or even Gettr at all, but the simple fact that Hive's primary selling point, and the niche it best fits, is as a freedom of speech platform - a place for people to come who are being censored off the other platforms.

Unfortunately, those in charge of Hive have made sure, time and again, to do everything they can to drive away content creators, to punish creators putting out content that actually matters, and keeping the chain tiny, practically un-noticed, and always bleeding users.

If you read the post above, it clearly was not about Gettr being better, or even Gettr at all, but the simple fact that Hive's primary selling point, and the niche it best fits, is as a freedom of speech platform - a place for people to come who are being censored off the other platforms.

I never say that. Its a bullshit platform like perler and the other ones before.

Unfortunately, those in charge of Hive have made sure, time and again, to do everything they can to drive away content creators, to punish creators putting out content that actually matters, and keeping the chain tiny, practically un-noticed, and always bleeding users.

I dont think that's the main reason.

  • hive is complex.

  • you cant recover passwords ( and I have some forums, I can tell you people love recovering passwords).

  • Hive rules are random

  • and that's IMO the most important, you cant invite friends super easy. Like an invite link.

Personally, for me, i have some projects for years in mind for hive. But onboarding is too expensive, so I wait.

Also a reason nobody wants to build here ( with own money). Because you pay always twice.

marketing costs + onboarding costs.

The points you are making here are all valid and are ones that can and should be addressed through community collaboration - but doing that requires those with minimal stake to be rewarded for doing so and for those with more stake to be willing to use it.

I think some large stakeholders want the power they get from the HP but without the responsibility it gives them for improving the system. The bottom line is that without large stakeholders who are oriented to product design/development, we will mostly just get decisions that benefit only short term gains for them. There absolutely are some larger stakeholder with system development in mind, but there is a gap between that and the reality of what the product requires in order to thrive.

At present it is mostly the layer 2 projects that seem likely to improve onboarding but we aren't quite there yet. Alternatively, the community can work together with a shared vision to systematically identify and solve the problems - with stakeholders rewarding them along the way. Presently we lack coherence and focus as a group to achieve this and so it isn't really happening.

What would happen if people like Dr. Malone or big pundits went to Hive instead of the latest Parler/Gettr that gets squashed by Big Tech when it matters?

  1. Would mobile clients be dropped from App Stores because they don't have AI censorship?
  2. Would their followers find that they don't have the HP to post like they're accustomed to on other platforms?

What is the best site to introduce an average person to Hive? Like, "Hey, check out the better social media at _____" I hear LeoFinance has great onboarding tools, but the name sounds like it's for investors.

Yeah it is tricky I’ve invited so many ppl over the years they mostly left after a few weeks because of it being too complicated, difficult to get going on or seeing the downvoting going on and negativity. Most ppl are looking tonget away from fb for that very reason and let’s be honest are drawn to platforms they get an investment for their time.

Absolutely, it's interesting that so many people say the same thing and yet the downvoters repeatedly claim this isn't happening.

I just don’t post about it everyday. I don’t see the point in posting about the people you signed up. Just sign them up lol no one needs a medal. People went on about it because they got upvotes but to me it seemed silly as on most successful social media they don’t go on about the platform all the time or how many people they onboarded. They share photos and food and life and then just naturally sign people up. unless it comes up naturally in conversation it seems bizarre to keep telling everyone.

From what I've seen apps only tend to get targeted for removal on app stores once there's enough political pressure for it, so I guess it's possible that Hive apps could go through that process if they got enough attention due to a certain high profile figure coming here. Previously we did have some hackers that were wanted internationally come and use Steem - which resulted in Steemit Inc. adding them to the ban list so they don't show up in the front end.
I don't really know which which is the most free speech friendly Hive website as I'm not aware of any major challenges the blockchain has faced in that regard yet. Personally I send people to Peakd.com for desktops and Ecency for mobiles at the moment, just because they are the most user friendly of the once I've seen so far.

My user guide to Hive is a good link to point people to.

How do you assess the hurdles for people who, in order to come here en masse, have to get a simple as "idiot-friendly" access? From a marketing point of view, it is a killer to need a "user guide".
As long as a system doesn't invite even the last low-tech person, I don't think it has much chance of fast big growth, but rather remains a niche product for quite a while.

Another problem is those who, through early adaptation and participation, know the system inside out and are in any case superior to any newcomer who creates his or her media existence here with a single account. If you find out after a while that many people have multiple accounts here and that you can also buy in your power, it gives the impression that not everyone has the same starting conditions, which I think is more of a deterrent for the masses. Difficult to address this problem..

In the long term, the users will grow out of their technical infancy and the people of the future will probably have fewer problems with the technical refinements than the people of the present (if things don't change drastically in that respect).

So my comment ends in the usual way: It takes patience and goodwill to establish a platform in the long term. Any kind of negative publicity will therefore be looked upon rather disdainfully to the point of being damaging by those who see it that way.

I am rather stoic on this matter. I engage intensively in political debates at times and, on the other hand, I stay out of it enough not to demoralise myself.

There are designs to allow accounts to be created without people paying anything for the HP - such as account incubation. This can be done using existing logins for Web2.0 platforms too. This was all planned out when I went to Steemfest in Poland promoting SteemPassport, but the dApp designers of the day all wanted to 'win' and create their solution first - instead of working together. Steemit inc. ignored me and Ned fucked off after 15 minutes anyway as was planning his 'exit journey' from Steem anyway.

Bottom line is that solutions exist which would be best made open source, but currently they aren't available. Imo it makes sense to throw significant resources at this challenge and to manage it professionally right the way through. Having already started this on Steem I am not personally willing to invest more of my own time into repeating it on Hive without having guaranteed rewards for it. So unless that changes, it will be up to the biggest stakeholders to take action and only 3SPK and possibly the Splinterlands team are looking likely to do anything like that.

Resolving the problem of the gap of power between early adopters and new users requires a structure for education and creator support - similar to what Youtube provides but handled more by the grass roots. One challenge we face is that as soon as creators join forces, at present, they are accused by the 'curators' of doing so just to exploit 'their' reward pool.

We need an intelligent culture and not one based on power struggles, fear and control.

So my comment ends in the usual way: It takes patience and goodwill to establish a platform in the long term. Any kind of negative publicity will therefore be looked upon rather disdainfully to the point of being damaging by those who see it that way.

100% yes. This takes skills that developers and even plenty of investors tend to lack and that is part of the problem.

I don't know. Without being familiar with the technical aspects you mentioned in the first paragraph, I assumed the "dumbest user". In my experience, people jump on new platforms if they offer a super easy entry and anything beyond a few minutes is already a hurdle. That's why I was talking about a long development and life time for something like Hive or apps based on it to become established. The learning curve for the masses is slow to rise. To get back to the beginnings of YT, it took more than a decade for people who could not have imagined it twenty years ago to venture into uploading and posting videos. Camera and microphone technology did the rest. The applications have either become much easier or have been learned over the years. It seems to me that there is too much impatience overall with the growth of Hive. I may be wrong about that, but I think there is a grain of truth in it.

The people of POB or VyB seem to be taking a less polarising path here, and as I observe it, everyone is being talked to, which I take as a good sign. There are no direct attacks on others by the operators, which I think is a good strategy. Have you thought about joining there?

This makes me sigh again... I simply can't onboard 100's of 1000's of users mostly from the UK when I have to pretty much individually explain keys and Hive Keychain to anyone I bring to Hive.

My friend who I won't name here is currently driving 100's of 1000's to Gettr, I set up and am still admin on his 150k follower Telegram channel. But I can't get him to use Hive because none of the front ends are as easy as Web 2.0 yet.

However, I don't actually see Hive being the future for a user facing service. The simple fact is most of these people don't want ownership and self custody and responsibility. But behind the scenes, with the kinds of incentivisation they're building on @spknetwork, that's where I see Hive's future.

Dude. Just write it down once, then give them a copy.

that is not scalable when no money is generated from the process.

I was just being funny, but there is a lot of documentation available. It's funny. We were just talking about tutorials and I saw another one produced today by @steevc. Eventually at some point all the effort folks put in attempting to help, I'd hope, would be put to good use.

Not everyone thinks that same and unfortunately a very high percentage of people have relatively low IQ, limited reading age, goldfish memory and lack of personal will. While it's reasonable to say that maybe we don't need them on the network - they form the 'mass' of 'mass adoption'. As a result of this, the big networks spend a lot of time and money designing systems that accommodate them. They then form a magnet that holds networks of people together on the big networks - including the people who you might want on here more. There is a requirement to make onboarding as easy as possible in order to minimise friction and resistance to the process, which is high regardless of anything we do here.

I agree it could and should be easier. In the meantime, as folks work towards achieving those goals, nothing wrong with using what we have.

My oldest daughter, we were texting, talking about this platform. She figured it out all on her own and had an account along with keychain setup before I could even begin explaining. It's been going on six years since the last time I set up an account. This is the only account I have so I don't even know what signing up is like these days. I assumed it was rather straightforward though. I also remember watching a video Jarvie produced for peakd where he recruited a 'test human' of sorts and had her record her experience and talk through it. If I remember correctly sign up wasn't overly confusing. A few more clicks than folks are used to but aside from that, she got in. Splinterlands crowd seemed to be able flock over like nothing. Did they do anything special? I was able to move to a new device and sign in simply by exporting and importing one simple file on Keychain, so that was super easy. I think markymark wrote the tutorial on that one.

My memory is a bit hazy but I do remember at one point the folks at LEO were working on a solution to simplify things. Those talks may have been circulating before CUB was born though. Quite awhile back anyway. It's hard to keep tabs on all the happenings.

Those who are capable could also get together, write up a proposal and get to work developing something. I mean, the money is just sitting there waiting to be used and plenty of bright minds around. The demand is there. Plenty of stakeholders around who'd support it. I probably would.

Shrugs...

The actual process of creating an account and getting signed in is not overly complicated on a laptop/desktop, yes. The challenges really start when it comes to understanding how the economics work and how to find collaborators or the right spaces for your own niche/needs. Creating the account is only a small part of what is involved in fully onboarding. And then we have retention - what is going to keep someone on the network once they are here?

Ideally, retention and onboarding are resolved through the same process of support and education - but there's no direct money in doing that currently and so people are more motivated to do other things. We need changes to the UIs and other tools to make this work in a more automated way.

Yes, people can write a proposal and deliver solutions. However, I tried doing that back in 2018 and rallied developers at Steemfest in Poland. Unfortunately, while they recognised the need, they mostly just ended up in ego battles, trying to beat each other and achieving little in the end. Developing a standalone onboarding solution has been attempted and failed because the people involved seemed to lack insight into what it really involves. I started doing that but gave up after Poland and after Steemit Inc. proved themselves Inept. I considered carrying on via Hive but waited to see how the politics and project panned out before investing more of my time into it. So far I am being forced to invest time in resolving downvoting rather than onboarding - which is no fault of most people here - but is the fault of one or two.

Imbalanced egos destroy projects fast and they get off on it sometimes too.

Not everyone is a content creator, but everyone is a content consumer. I can't stress it enough. The role of consumer is easy, one cannot fail, and once they're in the door, they're exposed to all other things Hive has to offer, gradually. With more consumers, creators don't sit around twiddling their thumbs wondering where everyone is. Look at the amount of engagement on all my recent work from last year. Look at a Youtube video comment section. These places are jammed, with consumers. Notice how the Splinterlands posts get massive views, and those game consumers gradually work their way over to the social side of things, and now those posts see signs of life. 'We' cannot keep setting people up to fail by bringing them in as content creators. People need to know they can shit post as well, not expecting massive rewards. But even those don't work well without consumers. I can't stress it enough man. One thing I absolutely love doing is talking with the folks who visit me, and rewarding them. Nowhere else on the internet can a consumer be treated more fairly.

That really doesn't scale to adding 10,000 people per day.

So what do you suggest, Brian? Another question I have is: Are these content 'creators' you're talking about, or more along the lines of a content 'consumer'? I ask because, even if we could open the flood gates, if they're all 'creators' expecting money, who's going to support them?

You've been around for awhile. Do you see how disgruntled the 'employees' become around here when they post into the void expecting rewards, and don't get any? Then people blame the platform for being flawed rather than realizing if you fill the shelves with product, that product is nothing without a market.

And in a sense what we're doing here is akin to filling a department store, knowing full well the automatic doors are stuck, but instead of fixing the doors, we just keep stocking the shelves.

Who's responsible for supporting your 10000 per day? Who'd be at fault once they start leaving due to lack of support? Current stakeholders? Would these 10000 per day also be buying in or simply showing up expecting a free lunch, then flying off the handle 10000 fists in the air all over other networks claiming, "Hive is broken!"

Your thoughts?

There's a lot of work coming that will make things better for Hive from a user point of view, but I still hold that Hive's real future is as a back end system which front ends can somewhat obfuscate for users.

The global rewards pool is definitely not a long term feature: it's done a great job at distributing the governance token so far but the future of the platform isn't blogging for cash.

But on balance I seem more stuff heading in the right direction than the wrong.

Sorry for taking so long to reply.

I can agree projects built on top of Hive and all that flexibility is future friendly.

The moment the base layer is stripped of some of its functionalities is also the same time any projects now using it as the foundation go down as well.

All projects would have to start from scratch without that foundation or shared consumer base. The social setting becomes scattered. No more consumer spillover that I'm seeing take shape today. As example those folks signing on to play Splinterlands, visiting an article on PeakD about Splinterlands, leaving that post, browsing the rest of the merchandise, stumbling into an NFT to buy, leaving a comment under a video they watched, checking out some photos, maybe discovering an interesting post and artwork like my recent one which was pretty cool and you should check it out too (I'm demonstrating networking just for fun) and so on. All that just because someone signed up to play a game. Every project feeds and becomes fed by any other project and they all contribute to success as a whole.

'Decentalization' is not synonymous with 'disarray'.

To me, having that universal base layer and social setting all connected millions of different ways is where the value is. I'd know nothing about you or your projects without it for instance.

What's there is far more than just 'blogging for cash'. It's like a mall. Not everything out there is a 'blog'. Then all these projects are the stores. Can you imagine what it would be like if people had to exchange currency each time they enter a new shop. Those not accepting a universal solution all while providing their own layer of support on top lose out.

Removing that foundation is akin to removing the planet so we can just have cities.

I too see things heading in the right direction with far more positives than negatives. The only that freaks me out is when people start talking about pulling the rug out on the social setting that connects all the dots. That makes me nervous. Puts me out of business or "deplatforms" me which was never in the brochure. And makes my investment practically useless.

Hopefully you can power through this message without taking anything personally. That's only my position on these matters. Plus I just woke up and battled brain fog throughout.

I certainly agree that the base layer social must stay. But just consider what happens as the token price rises. It's wonderful getting multi $100 payouts for posts, but it isn't sustainable. The balance needs to be monitored closely. As lucrative as it may seem getting funded by the DHF to build something, nobody is getting paid full scale rates by the DHF (other than subcontractors!)

The DHF DOES very much help people build projects they want to build but very few are there just for the money.

Nevertheless base layer incentivisation of the core social product isn't going to disappear any time soon.

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I think it's possible to transform Hive to be user friendly. This is what I went to Steemfest in Poland specifically to address and had good meetings with the dApp creators of the day. Then Hive/Steem split (and Steemit Inc. gave me no help or even a meeting) - so it fell apart. In the current climate I don't have time/resources to do that again - so it's down to individual dApp creators to solve the problems themselves. SPK is definitely one of the projects likely to solve this and to possibly then take control of much of Hive.

This is really frustrating. Can it be that those downvoters have a hidden agenda, that in reality they don´t want to become Hive a success and get millions of DAUs (vs. ten thousends today)? Because then their influence would go down and this kind of mass adoption would lure some attention from (tax) Authorities? They get a comfy income right now from Hive as it is and maybe they don´t want any changes? Seems bizarre, as mass adoption would multiply the Hive price and they would benefit most of it. I really don´t have any other reasonable explanation for this toxic behavior. Or they are just all bought by the deep state? Can´t be, right?

You also would increase the number of users that influence how rewards are distributed. Imagine also onboarding miners to bitcoin along with users. I can kind of understand this. I have some practical demonstration of this. After joining POB early on, with a constant creation time of 50 POB/10 minutes, I was able to make votes and vote up 80 POB a single post. Now, I can only 100% vote a post to 17 POB, as other users have joined and bought up their own stake. I'm not saying their reasoning is right, though.

The more spread out the total vote value among users, the better the decentralization. That the own vote will have then less value is natural and should be for the most part compensated by the higher Hive price. Makes more sense to me than a small number of whales who mostly vote within their circles.

Maybe it’s just the government or mark z who bought up hive early.

Indeed, I am wondering who is supporting him?

IMG_20211228_090407_866.jpg

I think the mechanic behind hive doesn't work with higher prices.

First 10k$ posts on trending? But same content as today?

Second, the amount of HBD that gets printed should hammer down the price massive. I made a post about the exponential potential of converting if haircut should increase + potential abuse.

Besides this, what many forget, The HBD gets most likely cashed out. So there must be a buyer.

Most likely converting ( after 2 hand exchange),

So this would pressure the price.

The higher the price, the more money needs to flow in on daily basis to maintain the price.

Another counterproductive point is wallet creation. Wallets become insanely expensive with higher prices.

No RC = no wallet at some price level. Simple because 1 avg user doesn't cover X$ onboarding price +(marketing for onboarding).

I know, it's one of the " Urun spreads fud" type of comments/posts :D

But scaling is IMO everything.

10k per post? If Hive goes to 10$? Maybe. But there will be quite a selling pressure on the way to 10$.
The idea of HBD is that it is uncoupled from Hive.
I am collecting account creation tokens since months (others do too). If one needs a new account but has no RC they should just come to me. I hope one day there will be a pool or a site where one can get the first wallet for free. At least I would contribute to it.

Sure but that would be a really long and complex way to become a wallet.

IMO a wallet should have a fee, but only to protect spam. So 0,1 Hive would be enough for that. Or 0,1 HBD.

The price could maybe be a bit higher or lower. But the only method to scale on demand is pay on demand.

3 hive ( around 5$) is too much for a dapp to pay.

Pools will never happen, Blocktrades and others are against that because that would give account creation tokens a price tag. A long time ago it was a reply from him to some of my comments.

I don't know the exact answer but elements of what you are saying seem likely to me. I don't really want to hypothesis too much because possibilities can get very ugly very quickly! To look at it from a PR and marketing perspective, there are always Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) for any business/project and public perception of what the highest stakeholders are doing in a DPOS system is key to all of them. Like it or not, the biggest stakeholders play a role in the success of the system that they may not appreciate or even want. If they don't want that responsibility and just want to stay as investors, that's fine - but then they shouldn't get so active in daily outcomes on the network. If they want to get so busy in voting then that's fine too - but they need to accept and even speak out about the effects of their behaviour on the entire network.

We currently have no central point of discussion for Hive - since the 'town hall' sessions ended (presumably due to @aggroed having success with his projects). Maybe that format of meeting needs to happen regularly for this to progress into solutions.

Indeed, are there really no governance or steering committee meetings? Decentralized or not, any entity should have those!

Yeah, we really need some core developers or top 20 witnesses to be actively involved but I'm not aware of any that have made any moves in this direction.

Actually we definitely need to bring those Town Halls back.

We absolutely need the community involvement. And if the community isn't involved in our own governance... And we just theoretically rely on some code.

Tell me which one of the Terminator movies we would like to live under.

Personally solely relying on code for our governance, is recipe for disaster because you cannot remove the people from governance.

And if you want to figure out who is funding all of these social media influencers to spread and attack any discussion of biological engineering technology that was outsourced to China....

Well we have people on YouTube that have been outing individuals getting paid to promote this. So actually these individuals do need to be confronted as well as they do need to be challenged by the entire community.

Like I said in one of my other replies here that they are getting paid to promote certain views.

And they're also making a deal to attack anybody who posts up anything to the contrary.

Personally I see this as just a continuation of the standard status quo of attacking anyone that shares the truth of what's really going on.

If everybody is tied up being afraid because of all the fear propaganda on the news nobody will be able to get involved with real politics or a challenge the current administration.

Which the current administration here in the United States is paid solely to promote a very narrow one-sided view of the world. Let's go Brandon is even agreed to and supported by President Biden.

Personally the only thing that's going to settle this entire situation is for the entire community to come together and start having Town Halls again.

Something like that is needed, yes - the worst thing that can happen in an open community like this which is economically tied to each other is that communication shuts down. A lot of the key stakeholders don't seem to engage at all on the blockchain verbally, yet heavily vote.. and we are left to just attempt to fill in the gaps with imagination, which doesn't really work.

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Hive, and before it Steem, still suffers from one crucial problem: lack of marketing. Steem squandered millions of dollars on "running servers" and development, it remained in the "beta" stage for years; who would want to adopt a platform in perpetual testing? Not very smart marketing-wise. Hive is no better, sure we had a major improvement in the code that significantly allowed system operators and witnesses to cut down on resources requirements and costs (i.e. API nodes going from the super expensive 512GB RAM servers to only 20-64GB), but despite the technical improvement there's little investment in marketing. Therefore Hive remains a niche in a highly competitive and emerging free speech space. Hive doesn't need more devs, it needs more professional salesmen.

also, marketing is not free and you pay twice.

First for marketing, second for onboarding.

Besides the cost barrier, hive is not an easy product. People need to stay for a network effect. I don't see it anytime soon.

It would need the promise of tokenized the internet + soft wallets.

100% agreed. Marketing has a bad rep for good reasons and engineering people (like myself) tend to reject it (as I did).. However, in the real world nothing sells or gets used without being marketed and rejection of marketing is mostly due to ignorance of what it actually is and also bad experiences with bad practices (and maybe slimy sales people. lol).

In reality marketing is a somewhat scientific process and can be engineered based on a combination of maths, psychology, research, analysis and experience. In Hive's case it's good that there has at least been some money spent on professional promotion, but UX (User Experience) starts at the blockchain level and spread out right through the eco system - including the actions of the community too. We can do massively more to orchestrate, optimise and improve every level of user experience on Hive - it has barely been touched. However, doing that requires some consensus and shared vision/understanding.

It seems currently that no-one with larger stake and resources wants to take responsibility for this gaping hole and stakeholders either don't have an interest in changing things or they are waiting for dApp creators to take the lead. However, experience has shown that dApp creators tend to be software people more than marketers, psychologists or business specialists and so the gap between user expectations and reality continues.

I also think that there is a prevailing idea that the reward pool is a negative to the system, yet nothing has really replaced it as a key selling point and it remains a key feature. The result is a lack of focused direction and lack of solid marketing foundation (plus other confusions in the community regarding voting and rewards).

Step 1 really needs to be market research, including carefully designed questionnaires and data collection to assess market sentiment. Given that I am on multiple social networks constantly, I have a pretty good idea of where sentiment is at - but it's always better to have real world data to go on.

I see a few issues with the issues presented as a whole...

The most glaring one is that being downvoted doesn't remove your content, it just hides it from some front ends. It's still uncensored and what not, it's just hidden on the main platforms. Not that this is an argument FOR or against downvotes, just a plain fact.

This could easily be remedied by firing up a frontend (it can even be a static hosted site on any number of static site / cdn hosts for near free) similar to my project https://personal.community/ which is hosted on GitHub pages. At this point, I definitely don't recommend new users to use personal.community exclusively, it's still in MVP status and heavily under development).

The other side of the argument is rewards, which gettr doesn't have. So again, do downvotes really matter?

Not that hive as is could support millions of new signups.. I imagine a majority of the nodes would crumble under the pressure. Which is why we have "paid accounts" to let the new users trickle in slowly, giving witnesses more time to build out hived (and other full node type systems) infrastructure, to be able to handle those millions of new users down the road.

For the long term, I can't say which is better...

I'm not a big proponent of downvotes, nor paid accounts, but I do understand the need. There is a ton that could be said, but eh, I've ranted enough. ^>^

The basic infrastructure of Hive can support vastly more users, it would just be that resource credits and accounts might run out during an onslaught of signups - but that can be remedied if necessary.

I have already posted numerous articles on the topic of downvoting and censorship that address your points, but I appreciate that you may not have seen them. This has been going on for some time.

https://peakd.com/hive-150329/@ura-soul/when-is-a-censor-not-a-censor-the-wider-implication-of-downvotecancel-culture-on-hive

https://peakd.com/hive/@ura-soul/how-many-of-my-upvoters-are-actively-using-hive-addressing-downvote-cancel-culture-on-hive

https://peakd.com/covid19/@ura-soul/your-comments-on-the-cancel-culture-and-zeroing-of-viral-posts-on-hive-by-curangel

https://peakd.com/hive-150329/@ura-soul/the-dynamics-of-dpos-and-pob-pitch-money-against-freedom-in-a-constant-brawl-for-decentralisation-over-centralisation-but-we-

https://peakd.com/hive-181335/@theycallmedan/saqwofmi

I also spent two weeks building a front end just to track Downvotes, which did not exist previously:

https://peakd.com/hivealive/@ura-soul/new-hive-dapp-hive-alive-or-includes-a-1st-for-hive-the-untrending-report-to-track-downvotes