I believe that since this blockchain was born, the question of what is worth curating on hive was always one of the most important and controversial questions on the hive blockchain.
We have a reward pool that is distributing the hive inflation partially to content creators. The fact is that according to the amount of stake (hive power) we own, we can proportionaly define to which content the reward pool is distributed. Stake gives us power but also responsibility. The way we vote on content will define whose stakes are growing and whose not.
What does bring value to hive?
I'm a stakeholder with quite a big bag of hive power and of course I would like to vote and reward things that in my opinion bring more value to hive in the long term. But the question here is: what does bring value to hive?
I believe that what profits hive most is traffic and users. Traffic can be monetized and it's the best marketing tool. The more people come to hive, the more eyes it gets and in a way the more chances there are to attract new users. New users might need hive power to get a working account and the more people need hive, the better it is for the token and for the chain. More traffic means also better rankings in search engines and this could become a positive circle. So the question is really how do we bring more traffic and people to hive?
By creating quality content?
We have heard it over and over that we should support quality content on hive with our upvotes. However, it's pretty difficult to define what is and what is not quality content. Is a great post with 5000 words and 10 images better than a 500 word post with one single image? Does a long post bring more traffic to hive?
I think that initially the idea was that long posts with quality content would attract more users. The reality is that SEO on Hive isn't that good and the visibility of the posts is rather bad on google. In addition, people who write posts on hive, don't really have an incentive to place the posts well in search engines due to the fact that indexing will probably happening after the 7 day payout window is closed already. So search engine optimization is not really a priority.
So if a post is long or short but both can't be found on google, which one does attract more viewers? That's a question that I let you think about...
What can we learn from web 2.0?
There are plenty of social media platforms in the web 2.0 world and it's interesting to try to learn something from what they are doing. Maybe we can learn some things that would be useful to hive.
Where is long form content on web 2.0?
When I look at all the social media platforms on web 2.0, I see Instagram, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Youtube, Whatsapp. However, none of them do put their focus on long form content. Are there any popular platforms that are centered around long form content? I don't know any and the reason for that is that long form isn't that popular in general.
What is the objective of web 2.0 platforms?
For business reasons, I had to create a tiktok account recently and one thing that I found interesting is that it's almost impossible to include an outside link into tiktok. You will find it quite restricted for other platforms as well, except X. The idea behind it is that these platforms want you to stay as long as possible. They want you to interact, engage and do plenty of things but above all they want you to stay on the platform
What I deduct from that
I believe that short form content, shorts, tweets are what people are looking for and we should try to keep people on the platform by encouraging engagement and interaction.
My experience from noise cash
Some years ago, there was a platform called noise cash that was very similar to inleo threads or ecency waves or peakd snaps. The interesting part of this platform was that you could earn quite nicely for making tweets and engaging with others. At the time, it attracted a lot of hivians and we were probably one of the most active communities on noise cash.
The number of users grew very fast on noise cash because people knew that they could earn well. However, after a time there was no more BCH to be distributed and the platform kind of died quickly. What made the success of noise.cash was the reward incentives.
In my opinion, the big advantage that we have on hive is the reward pool that distributes Hive to the content creators. This reward pools is battle proved and it works pretty well. It has some flaws but compared to all other similar platforms, hive is really good in that.
Should we rethink curation?
The problem that I see is still that people think that the more work you invest in a post, the more rewards it should get. This is a bias that unfortunately is not really accurate and actually never really was. We should think in another way and reward what gives the most benefit to hive.
Since the reward pool is defined in it's size, we could simply redirect some of it towards the short form platforms. If somebody creates a thread, a wave or a snaps that attracts tons of interaction, he does contribute as much or even more to the success of hive than somebody who writes a post with 2000 words. If you could earn several dollars with such a short post, I believe it would work as a magnet and attract a lot of people.
Rewards are the best marketing tool to attract new people to hive
Under a comment @ecoinstant gave the following vision about curation on short form content that I found very interesting:
... The requirement for curation is to make the votes, so no curation is lost - its more like velocity of money - the same curation but some of the rewards are rewarding the community for actions.
"Comments" is one simple action, but comments with conditions (answer questions, fill out survey, share experience/screenshot), can "make the community" work for that value, and potentially bring even more value to the project/community.
If we tend to reward interaction, creativity and collaboration more with our votes, I believe that it would be very positive for hive in general.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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