I have had the opportunity to go outside of the hive ecosystem and I plunged into the discovery of other blockchains and projects. It was a good experience and I see Hive in a new light now. With this new knowledge, I wanted to figure out what is the unique selling point of Hive. What is it that makes Hive special?
About transactions, fees and smart contracts
Hive is by far not the only blockchain that offers free and fast transactions. Many blockchains offer free transactions or almost free transactions. There are also blockchains that provide wrapped versions of BTC to allow free and fast BTC transactions. So all this is not really unique to hive and unfortunately they are not unique selling points.
Return on investment
Many want to attract people to hive because of the 20% APR on HBD. When you look at the broader picture, this is a way to get a return on your investment. Maybe you won't get that return on stablecoins easily but then people wonder whether HBD is really a stable coin comparable to others. With it's fluctuations and it's haircut concept, arguably you can't be sure that HBD will always be worth 1$. There are plenty of other places where you can get a return on your investment. So I wouldn't consider it as a unique selling point either.
A platform for gaming
There are some nice games on Hive but it's not different from other blockchains where there is sensibly more development around games. The gaming side is a nice plus for Hive but it's not something that makes Hive stand apart.
Blogging platform
Hive is by far not the only blockchain blogging platform. There are quite many of them but I would say that there is a big difference here. It took Hive plenty of adaptations and small changes to get where it is today and it's certainly not perfect but it works pretty well. Most other platforms are by far not there and probably won't get there. In my opinion, here Hive has a true edge towards any competition. The blogging platform aspect of Hive is one thing that makes it stand out.
Closeness of the community
I believe that it's thanks to the blogging platform and the relatively small community that we can feel closer to the other users than on any other blockchain. After around 5 years here on hive, I believe I know quite a lot of people on this platform. I know them through their names and our interactions. The community on Hive is of another quality than in other places. We exchange with people that we kind of know. In a world where it's getting more and more difficult to create links and build relationships, this is a very important point that speaks for Hive in my opinion.
What makes Hive special?
I believe that Hive excels in it's social aspect. It has a working blogging platform where you can actually earn some money and where you can build relationships through your interaction. I couldn't find another place where this works so well.
Now you take this blogging platform and you combine it with all the other aspects. If you have a project, a game or any other thing that you want to promote, Hive brings everything that you need to present your project to the world. This reduces the marketing costs for your project and you can directly tap into an existing ecosystem where people know each other and will initiate viral effects if they like what you propose.
The challenges to make Hive better
I think that the blogging aspect of hive can be an entry point for people who want to blog or for people who want to consume content. The social aspect and the community is what makes people stay in the long run. For me, the main challenges of Hive are the following:
- It has to be easy to create an account. We see great efforts being made by Ecency and Inleo in this direction
- We need more people who curate content and pick things that are worth reading. I think that the more curators out there the better. We should find a way to reward people who do curation. It's a tough and time consuming job and people who do it should get rewarded because they are the glue that keeps everything together.
- We shouldn't be scared to reward authors more. The rewards that are generated by posts are the best marketing to attract new users. If people see that posts can make 50$ - 100$, I believe we will have more quality content creators coming to Hive.
To conclude, I believe that there are some things on Hive that are really great and we should make our efforts in making these things even better. We don't sell a blockchain because it can do a lot of stuff. We sell a blockchain through it's aspects that make it stand out from the crowd.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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