A long post about short-form content

I have been having some conversations with people lately about where Hive is headed. First of all we need some perspective.

@dragosroua wrote a post about the HIVE daily reward fund dropping in size. That is still a lot of money to give out each day.

Somehow I found this site that calculates what someone can earn through Instagram. It seems some people can make more than the Hive fund on one post! I should say that I do not use Instagram at all, so I know little about how it works.

So if you see a Hive post making $300 that is small beer to some people. A major influencer is probably not going to put in extra effort to make that and the potential audience is too small for them to be interested. Of course it could be interesting to someone who does not have enough of a following on the big platforms to qualify for any rewards. Anyone can make something on Hive if they get enough votes to cross the dust threshold (about 2c).

There has been a big spike recently in Hive accounts due to developments on @splinterlands, but only a fraction of those people will get into the social media side. A lot of the long-term Hivers will come from a blogging background and that may be the kind of content they like, but in the big wide world it is short posts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others that gets the most attention. Even videos have shrunk on platforms like TikTok, although Vine did not last. Many people want a quick hit of something that they can absorb in just a few seconds before liking and forwarding to friends.

So should Hive have a slice of that market? We have @dbuzz. but some people seem to have issues with that. I see their posts get downvoted to nothing. It may be partly about the people involved, but some also have an issue with short-form content getting big rewards. The D.Buzz app does have a default limit on rewards (1 HBD I think), but that can be overridden. If a hundred people really like a short post then does it not have some value?

There have been other attempts at similar things on the blockchain. @appics may have been at attempt at an Instagram clone. Their super cool team (matter of opinion) were at lots of events for 'the other blockchain' a few years back. They seem to have gone off with their own coin now. There have been some other Twitter-like apps that did not last. They may have been driven away by those who do not want Hive to go that way.

I have had people saying to me that they and their friends do not read or write blogs. They want short posts, videos and maybe photos. A selfie can get a lot of love elsewhere, but when Appics brought some pretty young ladies to the blockchain who posted selfies they were accused of being fake (or even robots!). It is not the content I would seek out, but there is demand for that sort of thing.

Do we really want to exclude massive sections of our potential audience? The Hive platform is agnostic to the type of content. It is basically just hosting blocks of text that can be displayed in various ways with the option to link in different media that has to be hosted somewhere. We can post whatever we like and the community gets to decide what it is worth. I do realise that people can use various means to profit from junk posts with little effort and I have been part of projects to deal with that for years. That is part of why we have downvotes. We should check for those who try to abuse the system and deal with them.

I have seen people put up a post, possibly a video, and then do a D.Buzz one to share a link to the main post. That has potential for double earning, but you can decline rewards. You have to think about how your actions are perceived, but if you have something to say then it should be possible to put it out there and potentially earn from it.

A while back there was much discussion about people removing rewards that were given be a certain rogue actor who was driven away for rampant self-votes with his high stake. Some people got caught in the cross-fire and did not get the big rewards they saw for a while. Those rewards are always just potential until payout time. One person said they deserved them due to the investment in art materials they made for the paintings they posted, but it is still up to the community to decide. You can always sell the painting to recover the cost.

Ultimately it is the big accounts that can kill off projects they do not like, but are they a representative audience? Should they restrict the type of content we can have here based on what they like?

Hive has nearly two million accounts with maybe around 13,000 using the social side. Those numbers are tiny compared to the major platforms where a mildly successful person could have more followers than we have accounts. If we want Hive to be a real success we need to be as inclusive as possible.

I have not seen any sign that big influencers have signed up to Hive and brought over thousands of loyal followers to support them. They are unlikely to for the reasons at the start of the post, but smaller scale creative people could be interested and what they want to post may not fit the classic blogging mould. I think we need them more than they need us.

Am I deluded? What do you think?