Lex Fridman talking Hive again... Cultism, decentralization, ease of use.

I'm few weeks behind with my favorite podcast. Lex Fridman is one of the most humble, intelligent and vulnerable people on the Internet I know. The scientist with a heart on the right side, which is left obviously. He cares a lot for creating the better world, including new, better social media platforms, and recently he got interested in decentralization and Bitcoin. He talks one individual after another, and they are discussing what Hive creates. They are gravitating closer and closer toward exact idea we are implementing here, but they seem to be not aware of our existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSbMU5CbFM0

Owning your data, decentralized governance, freedom from censorship, removing ad-based business model, peer to peer relationships. It's all on his plate. I have a feeling that there is only one small stone needed to start an avalanche.

In the episode #231 Lex talks with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum. Alex is also a firm Bitcoin and decentralization believer. The whole podcast is really valuable, but to hear just the part about social media platforms go directly to this moment.

The key lessons for Hive from this interview are:

-Avoid cultism mindset. Yes, I get it, we have a solution, we have the answer! I can feel it too, however cultism is used very often as a tactics to lure people to scams and shady MLMs. A lot of people just lost their hope there are any answers after getting scammed so many times. Alex talks about situation in Zimbabwe, where people are afraid Bitcoin is just another Ponzi scheme. Going with Hive promotion in a very intense manner might repel potential new Hive users-owners. Personally, I saw a "crypto light", so I find it particularly hard talking about Hive without excitement.

-Make UX as pleasant and easy as possible, otherwise it won't be used by anybody but diehard freedom seekers. Tesla doesn't sell cars because they are good for environment. People buy Tesla because it's a fast and safe car. This is nothing new for Hive, we still are pioneers, but for a wider adoption we need to polish rough edges. Onboarding, signing in, internal and external interoperability, it will be a crucial factor for people when they will come to decide if they are going to stay on Hive.

-Implement right to be forgotten. This is not so important if users are pseudo anonymous, we all can decide how much data we want to share. Erasing all your shared content from the blockchain is impossible though, keep this in mind. Also "blue mark" verification is a thing of the past. It's a job of the community to legitimize users and detect personality thefts.

-Give users control over what they consume. I have a feeling, we are doing pretty well on this field, however more options to customize your feeds would be more than welcomed IMO. REward shouldn't be the only factor, and view counter and "most viewed" feed could balance visibility of some type of content.

-Incentivize great content, disincentivize terrible content. Proof of Brain in designed for this, and community is responsible for a good curation and new currency distribution. It's our job to show this incentive system really works and good content is rewarded over circle-jerking and exploits.

I have a feeling this is a matter of the following months for the world to get ready to embrace decentralized social media, environment is getting right.

Are you ready for this?