Dear Hivers,
Hive has completed 100 wonderful days! 🎉
It is official. With no kings and queens, Hive’s kingdom continues to flourish.
In fact, I have been watching this like a hawk. And I am absolutely delighted to share our 100 day journey:
Every citizen in this kingdom has played a massive role. From readers to authors to developers and investors. Each one, in their own way, shaped Hive to what it is today.
To see a completely community-based platform listed on some of the top exchanges — volunteers adding extreme efforts — devs developing kickass apps — combined with major witness support — and then walking in the crypto street with our head held high is nothing short of a miracle.
What other platforms haven’t achieved in months and years… Hive did it in a couple of months.
Exactly 100 days, in fact.
It is strange when we look back and think of the first week. I remember seeing the Discord channel filled with uncertainties and doubts. The wallet issues. And how powerful people behind the woods could crush the platform.
It took courage to move things. Courage to try something new. Courage to accept the uncertainty — and immense courage to invest hours together, day in and day out… almost restlessly...
So to everyone who have been doing this fabulous work, I thank you!
Right now, this wonderful feeling also leads us to the next set of challenges. Next set of engaging problems. Next set of new issues.
So let me revisit everything as a blogger — and share my thoughts and opinions. Some of them you know. Some perhaps new. But I wish to share everything:
Coming from a middle class family, I saw blogging as a life-changing tool. I went from nothing to making a lot of money in a short amount of time. It literally changed our lives.
So as I compare blogging to Hive, I can say a couple of things that are good about Hive:
1. Fantastic Engagement
Example:
The love I have received is not even close to what I saw in blogging. It is a business there. And here it is fun.
Perhaps because everyone’s goal is the same: to see the platform thrive. What a goal to have, isn’t it?
In the world filled with individual growth, collective growth is massively fun!
Never been part of such a community.
2. Everyone’s Invited
Some believe it is difficult to onboard new users on Hive.
But I strongly believe the motivation should also come from the users. Those who are eager can stay here and reap the benefits.
Despite all these, the numbers are only growing. From 50 to 100 accounts to over 250+ accounts every single day.
3. The Magical Freedom
Because I don’t have to think of monetisation, I can write anything and everything. I can completely focus on what I love to write.
I even created 3 series:
And I have shared things I wouldn’t normally share: 100 days of lockdown.
4. These Amazing Dapps
Even though I have been in crypto for two years now, I didn’t explore decentralized apps until recently. From Splinterlands to dCity, I have used a variety of apps:
Within 100 days, most of the apps have migrated to Hive and also migrated into my heart. They are pretty freakin’ cool.
5. Vibrant Community in All Directions
So much that it gets overwhelming. I get messages, comments, and see notifications.
And then, we have separate local communities that are engaging in conversation. I don’t know what motivates everyone but I do know that everyone is motivated.
There’s so much going on that I am absolutely sucked into it. I like that.
Because I am part of the community, it is also my responsibility to share the “bad” things I have noticed. I am expecting improvements.
1. Hive.blog Needs Improvement
Few simple things:
The editor isn’t the most sophisticated. If anything, it is extremely limited.
I really can’t discover new content easily. The homepage shows trending content. Need more ways to sort content easily and quickly.
No recommendation. While this is a personal choice, relevant reading recommendation has proven to increase retention rate.
Also surprised there is no “trending” tags (like Twitter hashtags) on the homepage. We can definitely use one.
2. The Weird Curation + Community Power
I guess I will never understand this one. Three years ago, things were different. Now I find it strange that I have to post in a certain community.
Curators from one community don't vote for posts published in a different community.
Also, not sure why we do we need so many communities. Again, posting on one hides the content from the rest. Or impacts visibility.
(Until we cross-post – which is, ugh, spamming).
3. Lack of marketing
I notice a fantastic group on Twitter that continues to promote Hive. And then there is also Discord channels where we discuss marketing and promotion. But for some reason, we definitely could use marketing funds. As I spoke to @stellabelle and @roomservice, I am absolutely certain this fund is crucial.
In fact, I remember investing 3 days to write this article. It saw no traction. Basically, the plan was simple:
- Hive’s technical momentum is fantastic — it appeals to the developers
- Hive could also use a marketing fund
- This way, a specific amount of money is assigned to marketers (community members).
I would like to explain this again with some screenshots:
Phase 1: We allot a fixed number of Hive Dollars for the marketing.
Phase 2: We start a competition where groups perform marketing activities outside of Hive.
Phase 3: We use the DPoS mechanism to vote for these groups. The top winning group earns HBD from the pool. This happens every month.
In the past, I have complained about the lack of authors. I really wanted to see a lot of authors here.
Like Medium.
But I missed one thing: Hive is not another Medium. In fact, after trying out Medium, I am convinced: Hive.blog shouldn’t be Medium.
Hive should be as it is — a purely social blockchain platform with a mix of long and short-form content. From photos to art to videos. It really humanizes the entire experience. And then there’s blockchain that has variety of purposes.
Among the 12 purposes, the most important one I believe is to make the Internet better again.
And finally, one more thing:
In Hinduism, there is a concept of cleanliness. If you stay clean, the world is clean.
In fact, it applies to Hive. If we grow, the entire ecosystem grows. Such individual growth should always lead to collective growth.
Therefore, whatever we do, a collective growth mindset is incredible important for a platform like this where there are no owners, no CEOs, and no corporate leaders.
It is simply us — and we must operate with our full potential.
We have to be invested for the future.
And with this, I really hope and wish we enjoy this journey with a smile. I hope and wish we continue winning the next 100 days and more to come.
Let's make some serious impact together...
And celebrate with a smile! 🙏😍 🎉
Cheers,
Sid
If you liked this article? Feel free to comment and upvote and reblog.
why don't you use peakd.com?
I actually do. I almost always use @Peakd to share my content. Even wrote lot of articles around Peakd. They got me in the testing team too.
Wrote about Hive.blog because it is ranked in the top 10 dapps list. There's a lot of traction. Improvement will only help. :)
true
Thanks for all the information, its very good
I have only been on HIVE for 22 days now but have found all the positives that you talk about.
I do not use hive.blog but use peakd all the time for my posting and engagement, I love peak d
YES! @Peakd has been rocking.
Glad to know you have been here for 22 days. Good times! Following you as I want you to stick around for 100 days! :D
I love your posts.
I use some of your info and illustrations as a selling argument for onboarding
Wow! I am so delighted to hear that. Thanks a lot.
Congrats. I know I know I am saying too many times and in too many posts. But, you present information in an impressive way. Top quality.😀
The truth is, I really want to hear this again and again. I am absolutely delighted to see you and your lovely comments. Been busy lately, so leaving comments the next day. But thank you. Makes me smile. And you better make your dollar once again!
as usual, completely brilliant.
Hahah! You are crazy. And I love that.
Some top quality post here!
Great job!
p.s. Are you sharing these on twitter?
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Verry vibrant and easy to read! I can learn a lot from this post. I'll read this many times. 😊
Haha! Such a lovely compliment. Thank you!
First of all I would like to show my gratefullness being able to bump to this article (so happy and inspired). I am active with steemit for almost 3 years and left.
And after 2 years I came back with this new platform, I don't know much about it so I would like to thank you for those informations, glad that theres no ugly in it😊
But here we go with the bad😊, honestly this is one of the things I was puzzled when I started again, it made me asked why there are lots of communities, seems we are not united as one.
Because of this we lost the chance to be curated by everyone especially those powerful one because they belong or maintained a separate community.
Lastly I'm happy when you stressed this out:
I also want to write those that I love to write, basically anything under the sun. Although honestly unlike you I am thinking of the money thing☺, I really want to save for me to increase my HP so I could upvote with a considerable amount to contents. It's a bit sad to see the value of your upvotes that doesn't even reach .01 for a 100% upvote.
THANK YOU!
So heart-warming to read this. Thank you for sharing. And yes, increase your HP and let's work together.
Good times are coming!
I will do my best to increase my HP in any way possible, I am planning to buy few hbd to be exchanged to hp delegations, hopefully my resources will allow me to do it soon.
Thank you!
The cross-community sharing needs to be addressed for sure. It's still a work in progress, I hope.
I see. I don't know if it is taken up as a problem — and a new solution is in the works.
I think marketing should be the focus now. Especially now with more creators getting banned on Youtube and other platforms. This isn't new but there has to be something that may pull more creators here. Not to mention, reddit is dying too. So there's really an opportunity for hive to replace it as long the signup process is easy for mass use.
Sign up has been questioned for a long time now. Marketing has been on my mind. I know we are content creators but I see the gap. And to start marketing Hive as a competition will be pretty damn fun!
Yeah, the sign up process needs to be fixed when the marketing campaign is launched. That way potential users are not creep out by difficult signing up process.
I remember that 100 Days of Steem. 😂
I don't know what happens there, but I'm sure this 100 days of Hive is so much better. Wait. It's even silly to compare.
Haha! Oh yes. 100 days here has been fabulous. I got to connect with you! That's fantastic! 😁
Cheers! I am excited for Hive and the future. I love to write long, wordy posts; and I like to read short posts here on Hive. I am excited for the future. We are attracting a lot of great artists, writers, journalist. It is very exciting times to be so early and to be able to witness this place grow! I can see it now ;) Hive is such a wonderful place now AND I am excited for the future.
I left a nice comment and it wasn't published. Oh well. Super-glad to see us content creators doing our thing. 100% marketing funds will add extreme fun.
Hope you are enjoying your time! :)
Lovely post! I must tell you I enjoy the engagement part here, the comments, the feedback. It feels very genuine and it makes the author feel motivated to put content here. Thank you for sharing this!
You are the TOP commentator. And you are such a motivation. Teach us something!
Aww thank you, I appreciate your nice words😊
Time flies and it looks like Hive was launched yesterday.
Strange how life works. Every event seems like it was just yesterday!
Has it really been 100 days -- has it really been ONLY 100 days? Wow... what a ride it has been, and a bright spot in the middle of these dark days!
The energy in your comments! Haha. Fabulous. YES! Only 100. Imagine one year more and we look back. Excited++
With good things there always comes some bad things. But hope it will get improvised soon.
And congrats for completion of 100 days on hive.
YES YES!
Good times are here. Thanks for all the support! <3
Very descriptive and vivid. 100 days not bad. Keep going
Thank you! Not only mine but also Hive's 100 days. We are in this together! :)
I pushed a tweet to celebrate 100 days! #posh
thanks for the mention as well.
I think your plan is so good, that you need to keep repeating it until people wake up.
True. Repetition is the key. Guess I am covering as much as possible from different angles. Good times!
Wow, it's been three months already, eh? It's truly breathtaking to see the amount of progress that we've made in such a short time, and all of it done as a collective community, with strong support and passion for each other. The engagement and traction is truly amazing to see.
No doubt, there's certainly room for improvement. I can agree to a lot of your negatives there, and I hope they might get addressed soon. I do support the idea of a marketing fund, just to bring to word out across, as far and wide as possible. The idea of a competition is a neat one, to have fellow Hivers compete and see how creative they can get with spreading the good word on Hive.
Being able to have retention and post discovery, as you say, is also a needed improvement. Exploring new posts could be made easier with improved search functions, and better tagging. Those 2 certainly need work on, and I can draw to Reddit as an example of how to have so many different sub-Reddits - in our case, Communities - but still be able to explore and enjoy from each one, big or small.
Still, in any case Hive's growth so far has been fantastic to see, as a community and an idea. I'm excited to see what's coming in the next 100 days, and then far beyond that :-D
Edit: I went ahead and read that old post on how you made money through blogging, and truly, it's inspirational and well-written. Cheers!
Very nice wrap-up!
I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical as I have never (in 20+ years of being affiliated with content creation venues and online communities) been part of a project where the "splinter group" was able to gain significant traction compared to the original. Typically, divisions are inspired by unhappy people (as was the case here) but the vast majority are too indifferent to move with them. And then there's the old "first mover advantage" to overcome... after 3 years, Steem was pretty firmly "rooted," — to wit, Steem did not just "roll over and die" when Hive was created... even with so many people wishing they did.
I'm very much with you on the marketing and publicity angle. We need to do better. We saw a little of the "true nature" of Hive's core some weeks back when Justine was asking to be paid for marketing and PR efforts and it created a huge uproar, while most people are OK with developers getting funding. Inner politics aside (I used to work in the IT industry, NOT as a developer) most developers know next to nothing about how to cater to and market to NON-developers.
I'm glad people like @nathanmars and @stellabelle are out there pounding the pavements... we just need their efforts x100!
Your plan for the marketing side of things is a good idea however it can also cost money to whoever is doing it. For example if we wanted to place an ad on CMC, that will cost $3k alone and then we would be left with nothing after that.
The structure you have would only incentivise people on Twitter/Other social media's etc to talk about it (Which is good don't get me wrong) but this is already being done.
Not bashing the idea just a thought.
This is exactly the plan. The fund was, as stated, an example. Say it cost $3k but the upside is the winning prize: $10k per group. So spending $3k hoping to get $10k always works.
Plus, people do have connections. They can get this done cheaper. It doesn't matter if they do. The entire ecosystem wins.
Having done this for 10 months, I have spent my own money on building websites and getting listed on aggregator sites. We also created bots through a developer.
Then, I had other members building blogs, writing on Medium / Publish0x and reaching out to media portals for stories.
The upside is HUGE.