When I was following the presentations at hive fest in Split, there were several things that I heard that left a deep impression in my mind. One such moment was during the presentation of @crimsonclad. She pointed out that Hive is quite an old blockchain already and of all the coins and tokens that were around when Hive was created, something like 70% have disappeared today! So, why is hive still around when so many other tokens are not?
Hive: the Swiss Army Knife
I'm not a hive maximalist and I'm active on many other chains. However, there is no other chain where I spend so much time on. The reason is pretty simple. On Hive, I can do more things than on all the other chains combined! Some chains offer nice DEFI solutions, others even offer some social network, there are places where you can play games and others were you can host NFT's. But I don't know any other chain that allows you to do all these things in one place, with one keychain extension and without needing to pay any gas fees.
Hive is blogging but also much more
I would say that the blogging aspect of hive is what stands out when looking at the blockchain but I think it's not totally correct. I believe that the blogging side of hive is actually the component that keeps all the other parts together. The critical thing is to keep the information present for people.
What do they do on other chains? They need to write all information related to a project on their websites and when they want to publish something new, they need to bring people to their site or use solutions like medium, telegram, discord, etc... It's different for hive.
During the Splinterlands presentation in Split Yabapmatt said very correctly that all communication about the game is done on Hive. I think it's only us hivians who don't really realize how powerful this is. Not only can Splinterlands write about their newest offers, they can use the blogging aspect to discuss DHO proposals, they can ask users to write about their experiences and even reward them for it. Whenever we have an idea, a suggestion or a question related to Splinterlands, we can simply write a post about it and other users can react to it and in some case even the team can share their vision.
This is true for Splinterands but also for all the other projects and apps on Hive. In my opinion, this is very powerful and this is the reason why I believe that the blogging side holds the whole chain together.
Promoting the other sides of Hive
I have witnessed very often that people were marketing hive by promoting the blogging side of the chain to bring people to join. I believe that this approach is not really successful simply because very few people are bloggers. There are however plenty of ways to earn on hive that doen't imply blogging. You can put HBD into savings, you can stake HP and delegate to a project, you can add liquidity to diesel pools or you can purchase tokens that reward you for holding them. You can even earn tokens while spending HBD using distriator. All this is possible without having anything to do with content creation or curation.
Now there is a also a soft version of content creation that is available to people. You can create small form content with threads, waves, moments or dbuzz and earn some tokens.
And let's not forget that whatever you do on hive is free of costs. You only need some RC to do all you want on the blockchain.
I believe that we need to get away from promoting the blogging side of hive and attract people with these other aspects. Splinterlands showed the way. They attracted people with their game and people discovered the blogging side by themselves.
Hive is here to stay
I hear a lot of people complaining about some aspects of hive. I agree, hive is not perfect but a lot of things are working pretty well. The last years have not been easy in the crypto world but hive is still around. It's maybe less dynamic than it once was but I rather think that the dynamism is correlated to the general market conditions and is therefore not proper to hive.
We might have lost some people on the way, but many are still around, they are active in the way they want. Some are blogging, others are commenting, others just curate and then there are others that spend their time playing games or trading on the markets. There is no typical hive user. We use the blockchain the way we want and need.
Split showed me that this blockchain gives us a common ground that links us all together. Whether we are coders, project owners, curators, content creators or simply people who like games, hive gives us a common framework that we all carry with a certain pride. So hive is not just a blockchain where we do stuff, Hive has become a part of our online DNA and that is why I'm quite confident that Hive will be around for quite a long time....
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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