Remember when Voice was touted as the next major thing in social media? It was going to revolutionize the industry and absolutely destroy Hive in the process. Put together by Dan Larimer while also being backed by the money of Block.One, this was destined to be a major success according to many.
The company even went out and spent $30 million on Voice.com, giving Michael Saylor more money for Microstrategy.
According to an article on Crypto.news, the company will wind down operations.
So much for being the Hive killer.
In this article, we will look at what we can takeaway from this situation.
Big Money Loser
Voice was a big moneyproject.
In addition to the $30 million for the website, the company also put in $150 million. That means we are approaching a $200 million project.
Yet, as I write these words, it is all going away. Perhaps the name will have a bit of value in the future but that is all. The rest of the money is gone, a failed project.
This is no unique. It is rather common within the technology realm. One of the key takeaways should be that large pockets, especially with venture capital funding, means nothing. These entities lose money all the time. Projects fail, taking the investment with them.
Voice is simply another in a long line of technology start ups that failed.
Be Careful of "Killers"
Another lesson is to be very careful of "killers".
This not only applies to Hive but the space in general. Just think about all those projects that were touted as "Ethereum Killers". It seems that ecosystem is still going strong, at least based upon the way the market reacts to it. Vitalik is still one of the most influential people in the industry.
With Hive, we hear the same thing. Over the years, both centralized and decentralized options were suppose to kill this off. Yet, here it is, plugging along.
Naturally, this is not of the same magnitude of taking out say Facebook or Twitter. However, when it comes to decentralized social media built on blockchain, Hive is unrivaled. It also keep expanding its database each day.
Hive does have the Lindy Effect working in its favor. With each new block, the potential for the future expands. The more time that passes, the less likely there is going to be a "killer" that takes out Hive.
Again, we see the same with Ethereum. For all the EVMs that showed up, they are nothing more than cheap copies. So far, nothing in the smart contract realm is rivaling it.
False Promise Of Decentralization
Voice was suppose to revolutionize the social media world by offering a decentralized version of what was out there. The only problem was the false promise of decentralization.
In fact, it went counter to the tenets espoused by cryptocurrency advocates.
To start, it was using KYC to ensure that each person "had a voice". They wanted one person, one account. While this is a good theory, it is only possible with total intrusion into the person's identity.
This was a barrier from the start.
Also, while it might have posted the data to EOS, it was fully controlled by Block.One. Many question the decentralization of that blockchain. Dan Larimer builds some powerful technology but follow through tends not to be there.
All of this leads to the place where Voice found itself: abandoned.
Of course, with the founders commanding such a stake, it is impossible to preach about decentralization. This is evidenced by the fact the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Block.One, a move that ended with a $20 million settlement.
Decentralized entities do not get sued.
Success Takes Time And A Lot Of Work
Many know Apple as one of the largest companies in the world. It is a long standing, dominant force in the consumer electronic space.
However, it was only a couple decades ago where it was nothing more than a niche computer company. Even though it was around for 20 years, the products were high priced (something that has not changed) and did not have mainstream appeal.
That all started to change with the IPod. After that, it set off the smartphone craze with the IPhone. These two products move Apple from niche player to dominating force.
While there are overnight success stories, this path is more common. A lot of what Dan Larimer builds tends to fade away because he leaves. Block.One backed this up by, itself, abandoning EOS. Hive shows that founders remaining are not necessary for continued viability. There has to be people willing to pick up the slack.
Community is a word tossed around but there are around 10K people who are dedicated to Hive in some force. While the degree will vary, with the extremely committed being a much smaller percentage, there is still a group who took ownership for moving forward.
This is evident on both the base layer as well as the second.
Hive operates like an ecosystem with different parties tending to what they feel is important. It is not a company with its top-down hierarchy. This means that progress is not noticeable since it occurs in so many different areas. Decentralization always lags centralization in efficiency. The former, however, will always surpass the latter in innovation.
It is why I am optimistic about Hive in the end.
Voice is now going to be a footnote in crypto history. It was a centralized entity promoted as a "Hive Killer".
In the end, the centralized entity was what died while Hive keeps producing blocks.
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Hive is still here despite a lack of big investment outside. If you get that then the investors expect a return. Building a social platform is no guarantee of success even if you recruit some big names as users. Obviously Google has killed a few platforms (and I'm still angry!). I'm not sure I even looked at Voice.
It is amazing that Google was never really able to successfully build a social media platform (YouTube aside of course). They tried a number of times without success.
Google+ was fun whilst it lasted. It makes me angry that they killed it and that's part of why I go with decentralised platforms now.
The idea of having verification (KYC) so that there are only single accounts, in my opinion is a good thing, even though it is intrusive on identity or goes against the Hive's ideas of freedom, we should think about the following:
What would be worse? A person with 10 fake accounts gaining resources and farming in the hive, or an intrusive process in which you are only able to receive payments if you can actually prove that you are you and do not have any other account like yours?
These are interesting questions to think about, considering that large Hive projects (I'm more familiar with games) like Splinterlands, Golem Overlord and Rising Star don't allow bots or alt accounts.
Just like the author of the week votes: what if a person has 10 accounts and all 10 vote for him if he is participating? How can we validate this or justify this?
Anyway, I am 100% aligned with Hive and I am happy that we are still here firm and strong, while the "Hive Killers" cannot maintain themselves. Hive is the future!
KYC is a great thing: until you actually try to do it.
Crypto is attempting to create sovereign self-governing systems.
If we rely on the authority of outside entities like governments to enforce KYC.
Then a lot of what we are building here becomes worthless.
KYC is just a reputation system like any other reputation system.
We just need better reputation systems to replace traditional KYC.
If it can be KYC’d, it’s centralised. Use immutable, non KYC’able algo stable coins to pay and distribute (inject) value via a stakeholder incentivised distribution model known as proof of brain
Then again @edicted and @starkerz are KYCed.
No one questions the reputations of these accounts.
The situation is weirdly nuanced, but of course we've already had such conversations.
I imagine we'll keep having them as well.
Of course, looking at it this way, KYC is really complicated, at a time when you want a network where its users are autonomous and it makes perfect sense not to have verification.
Of course, the equation is complicated, as this opens doors for those people who we know have questionable character. I believe that one day we will be able to resolve this detail in the best possible way.
Yeah I think you're right.
Cheers!
I also like the idea of KYC verification, I think it would eliminate a lot of "foul play". On the other hand, it would take away some of the anonymity of those who prefer this. Especially those who have great assets and would like to preserve their identity. But ultimately, it's a valid idea.
Without further ado, long live Hive!
I dont know the platform at all since I never signed up for it but it seems the KYC failed on there. Perhaps it was a poorly designed application, I have no idea.
I understand, I honestly had never heard of it either, but when I entered the page I saw that new registrations were stopped, so something very wrong happened.
I agree that KYC would go against the Hive ecosystem's ideas of autonomy, but the issue of alt accounts is only of concern sometimes, but that's a story for another time.
There is no reason why an application could not set up something like that up itself and be tied to Hive. Those building at that level are free to do what they want.
They do not have to give access to all to their application.
Sorry for the delay, I hadn't seen this answer.
So there is a possibility of adding additional security and that is very good. I believe there are many ideas to improve what is already good.
But why did it fail? KYC can´t be the only reason. All kind of social media, even Telegram, request a phone number, right? And they have trillion of users. Was it similarly complicated like Hive?
In my opinion, Voice never had a clear idea for which audience it is meant to be: as you mentioned, KYC doesn't scare off the general (internet) population all that much, but it was a huge no-go for the crypto-natives. For the general population, there was no reason of why to use it. It was not significantly different from Facebook or Twitter, so they had no reason to switch. As far as I know, it also did not have a reward mechanism like Hive, thus people on Hive also did not really have much incentive to go to Voice.
Launching a new Social Network is hard, launching a Web3-based Social Network is even harder, as user onboarding in Web3 is still very difficult. There have been quite a lot of experiments, but most of them failed (just check the last section of Coindesk's report on Voice: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/06/01/blockone-is-launching-a-social-media-platform-on-the-eos-blockchain/)
Just today, I read the following piece on Web3-based Social Media and found it to be very interesting: https://www.decentralised.co/p/volatility-as-a-service. I can also highly recommend this post on the topic, which is a bit lengthy, but absolutely worth reading: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
Indeed, they wanted all and got nothing. So lesson learned, a huge marketing budget is also not enough to increase user adoption if the product (or it´s key feature) is failed from start and if no clear niche is found. Thanks for the insightful links.
Exactly, Google tried the same with Google+ and it also failed.
I dont know the application so I cant answer that directly.
One thing I will say, it is an application and not an ecosystem like Hive. It is similar to 3Speak or Leofinance as opposed to Hive itself.
The "KYC" on Telegram and Facebook etc. are trivial compared to what Voice was initially attempting to do. It's easy to have multiple accounts on most platforms, Voice initially was trying to genuinely restrict people from being able to have more than one account with a comprehensive attempt at identity verification (which could never scale).
Haven’t even heard of voice. The problem is they were banking their success on Hive’s failure. Well they were wrong. They can’t market themselves as decentralized when fact of the matter is that they are not and people would see through it.
I dont know if they were banking on it. They did believe they were going to take over thought.
Maybe it died when Larimer left (was pushed out).
Well, I didn't sense it was ever going to go anywhere... there was something about the whole project that "felt intuitively wrong."
In a sense, this is just a variation of something one of my favorite YouTubers — Adam Something — often says: "When you get engineers and very rich people together, you usually end up with absolute fncking crap that has no business existing!"
More often than not "investors" destroy great ideas, rather than facilitating them.
=^..^=
Well your intuition was right on that one. It didnt go anywhere....other into the trash bin.
How many competitors to HIVE does that make now? I've lost count as they came and went.
Damn, $200 million!? Must be nice to blow that kind of money, lose and move on to the next project. Failing upwards.
Nothing like a $4 billion ICO.
That goes a long way. A $20 million fine is a great trade-off.
Hopefully the work done on HIVE will prove it.
That is what I am doing. As are others.
We keep building.
Goes to show ya that 90% of projects fail and only a few end up being successful. There are things you can do to help increase those success chances but they are learned through many failures and few successes.
That is true. Technology is a risky field. Most projects are money pits and end up yielding nothing.
VC firms look to hit it big on 1 out of 10.
A beautiful article!
I've only been in the crypto world for a short time because it's been a little over 4 years but the most important lesson I've learned is that the level of decentralization of a project + the community that supports it are perhaps the two most important elements in a blockchain project and that's why Hive is the best place to be.
!discovery 20
@tipu curate
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There are many pieces that go into this and a lot is being done on the fly.
As shown by the conversation above, we see people with differing views still wanting to try things.
Yes, I remember voice. Having been an EOS ambassador I saw most everyone I knew close to EOS signing up for voice. I chose not to.
It doesnt seem like many outside that did. I honestly havent heard about it since the initial news.
No. We're just in a different world so to speak to various degrees. Still too different to bridge the others over from the other outer web2 world. We'll get closer and merge someday.
https://leofinance.io/threads/uyobong/re-uyobong-qx8wnasv
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In addition to VOice which was a flop, I believe that EOS is also a flop. The more time passes, the more capitalization it loses. I predicted some time ago that EOS would drop out of the top 50 most capitalized coins when it was still in the top 10... Today it is out of the top 50
Yeah, EOS made a lot of promises, but never really delivered on those. They did however manage to release the software on time, which is a feat. But they never managed to attract a large user base.
I agree, I believe that EOS will not have a great future. !BEER
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Yeah, guess it lost its voice...
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KYC is great, people need to be abreast with it
I remember when Cardano was being touted as the ETH killer. How'd that work out?
About KYC: When a website asks for KYC I get suspicious that they are collecting data to steal crypto from exchanges or money from the bank...
It's very funny these projects that claim to be decentralized, but don't have a decentralized protocol, API... Voice was death when they opened under the name of B1.
Voice was never touted to be the "Hive Killer", since Hive was still called Steem, when it was first announced. They tried to compete directly with Facebook or Twitter, but failed.
During the NFT heyday, they changed it to be an NFT marketplace. It's never a good sign, when a project radically changes, only to chase the newest trend. At the latest, when that happened, it was clear that Voice doesn't have any future.