The News

The last year in cryptocurrency has been one of ups and downs. Bitcoin hit new heights, but has dropped a bit. The HIVE price has fallen relatively, but was seeing some recovery until recently. At under 1000 Satoshis it ranks below 260th, which seems wrong give how much utility it has. Maybe it is not seen as a profitable investment, but we can still be earning it just by being social and creating content. You do not have to spend fiat to make HIVE.

From @coingecko

Looking across various services with statistics I see Hive dapps not ranking so highly on @dappradar and @stateofthedapps, but then they seem to be missing a lot of users. For instance, I know that @risingstargame has over 1000 active players, but on those sites it shows as having up to 6. This may be down to some combination of how they collect their data and what the games and other dapps log on the blockchain. Ranking higher might gain some attention.

I have mentioned the poor state of the Hive entry on Wikipedia before. It needs to have good references for a start and those ought to be on independent news sites rather than blogs by users. This item on BlockchainGaming links to some articles. The text could be improved a bit, but there is some information that could be used on Wikipedia. It still needs someone with experience to create an article that will be seen as authoritative, but without bias by the moderators. Whoever can do that could probably do a post about it and get good rewards for their service.

Followables

• Big news this week was the appearance of @elischaedouard on Hive. He is a soccer fan with hundreds of thousands of fans on Instagram and Youtube. He is still finding his way with Hive, but has promoted it to his followers with 24,000 views. It remains to be seen how many join us. @lordbutterfly brought him over and has another influencer lined up.
• @seabass-n-broc is back after some time away from Hive with a Neil Young song. I missed it before, but he got a cool new guitar recently.
• @slobberchops has a cool new site featuring his many urban exploration expeditions. It links to his Hive posts, but makes it easier to navigate them.
• @newbies-guide has put together a curated collection in peakd of articles for Hive newbies. This is really useful.
• @livinguktaiwan did a survey on what newbies should do when they join.

The Doghouse

As part of the @Hive-DR team who look out for abuse of the platform I see a lot of crap that deserves a downvote. Recenlty we have been dealing with @nathangraham and @phasewalker who appear to be the same person as they have duplicated some content and use the same generic comments all the time, such as:

Awesome post :D
Keep it up & wish you a great weekend :)

Both accounts are posting the same content multiple times to various communities.

This is considered abuse as it allows for an account to vote up the same content multiple times. The better way to do this is using the Cross-Post option that is available in peakd and Ecency. Do other dapps have it? Alternatively you could decline rewards on duplicates and link to one post that can be voted up. These accounts have not been making much, but if we do not address this now then the problem will get worse.

The End

It looks like we may have to wait a bit longer for Hive to go viral, but if some of these big influencers can bring in hundreds more users then we have a chance. A combination of activity and good content adds value to the platform. For a busy content creator the rewards may not be enough for now and they want lots of eyeballs. With just a few thousand active users Hive is not interesting to them, but if some are prepared to be pioneers and take a chance on it then growth is possible. Hive does not just have to appeal to those who get de-platformed elsewhere. It can be a thriving place to publish and consume content with everyone earning from the process.

Hive five!