Anniversary!

The Past

Today, three years ago, I joined Steem. While Steem technically still exists, it is safe to say that the current Steem is not the Steem I signed up for three years ago and that Hive has more right to call itself the "true" Steem, despite having a different name.

It was a crazy year, not only for Hive/Steem, but for the world in general. A year that kept me quite busy (well, it actual was my work which kept me busy), so I didn't have much time to post much on Hive/Steem and this anniversary post is actual my first post here on Hive (apart from a few comments I wrote). The good thing about that, is that my Steem anniversary is now also my Hive anniversary 😅

The Present

Honestly I don't have much to say regarding Hive, since I was very passive since its inception and only read a few articles here and there. However, I am very happy that something like Hive exists, even though I'm not as active as I was when I started tree years ago. I am also very happy to see that Hive has such a big community and a lot of dedicated people working for it. The Hive community are the rebels fighting against the Empire of Steem with its Emperor Justin Sun. Even though the odds are not really in the favor of Hive, generally speaking and also when looking at the current ranking on @coingecko (Steem is #142 and Hive is #170 at the time of writing this post), it is still very impressive that the Hive not only exists but is also rather successful in its niche and being purely community-driven, without any cooperation behind it.

When I signed up, three years ago, it was a very euphoric and crazy time, not only for Steem, but for Crypto in general. It seemed like the markets know only one way: up. And until the end of January 2018 this was actually true. Needless to say that me signing up for Steem back then was also motivated by this Crypto hype 😀 But I really liked posting and kept doing so, also when the hype was over and the market was going down, of course only when time allowed it.

Now the prices of Bitcoin and Ether are close to the levels of the hype of 2017, but I think that the general sentiment of Crypto is more like it was during late 2016, before the hype train started rolling. I think that the next year will be great for Crypto and towards the end we will see a similar hype as we saw in 2017.

The Future

Unfortunately it seems that Hive can't really capitalise on the regained interest in Crypto: in November of 2017, Steem was ranked 31 on CoinMarketCap, today both coins are over 100 ranks away from that. In fact both coins are falling behind in that metric and recovery seems not very likely.

I can only speculate about the reasons, but to me it seems like the audience for social media on the Blockchain is just too small. Steem was a very promising idea, when it launched in 2016 and gained a lot of traction and new users during the hype of 2017/2018, but that hype didn't last for long and a lot of users left as quickly as they came. It also almost seems a bit like people are slowly getting tired of social media. At least for people my age: we are in the sweet position where we are too young for Facebook, maybe too old for Instagram and for sure too old for TikTok (I didn't mention Twitter, because there is hardly anything social about it). Facebook may be the best example for it: when I joined 6 years ago (yeah, I was late to the party, but that was on purpose), almost everything was either posted on Facebook or at least organised over Facebook, nowadays my feed is mostly populated by the same people posting some stuff.

Facebook is probably not a good comparison for Hive, since Steem was originally more modelled after Reddit, and even on that front it seems like bad news for Hive, since Reddit is experimenting with bringing some of its (currently centralised) reward tokes to Ethereum. If this is going to happen, Hive's value proposition of rewarding authors for their contributions isn't so unique anymore. Then Hive should focus on its censorship resistance. In case this happens, and Hive is attracting people who need censorship resistance (aka controversial figures), it has some room for growth, that would lead to bad press, although bad press is better than no press and maybe some more growth, due to Hive getting press.

Regarding my future on Hive: I try to post more often, but looking at the amount of work, I have in the near to mid future, it doesn't seem like I can do that frequently.