Does Short-Form Content Have A Future On Hive?
This is a question that makes us think about the direction of Hive going forward.
There was an announcement post that I saw this morning put up by the team behind @quello. This is a new question and answer application similar to Quora. Users simply post a question they have which allows the community to provide answers. Yahoo also has a similar service.
It is essentially the epitome of using the hive-mind on the Internet.
This is not the first attempt at a project of this nature to take place on Hive/Steem. Of course, projects can fail for many reasons, thus we cannot simply conclude that the previous failure was due to being short-form content.
It does go without saying that the quality aspect of the content does not equate to what one would expect from blogging. Naturally, they are two different services, catering to different audiences.
One of the advantages to something like this is the number of people who utilize it. Quora has a strong Alexa ranking at #251. It also boasts over 300 million monthly active users.
That is obviously a huge market to target. Even Yahoo Answers still boasts millions of users a month.
We saw a similar question arise with the introduction of @dbuzz. This is an application that was modeled after Twitter. That is a platform that boasts roughly 330 million users globally. Of course, to really compete in that arena requires a mobile application since more than 80% of all tweets are done that way.
Dbuzz initially wanted to cross post Tweets to the Hive blockchain. After some resistance, the model was altered, abandoning that idea. Now, I presume, Dbuzz is going to operate similar to Twitter, where people can send out short-form (also called microblogging) content.
From the numbers, we can see there is obviously a market for it. The question is whether there is a place on Hive for applications such as these?
If we go back to our roots, we saw the first application was Steemit. In reading what went into the formation of Steem, one of the ideas was to model Reddit. It is interesting to think about this since Reddit is basically a link posting site. Few write posts on there. Instead, most post a link to an outside article and conversations stem from there.
This is obviously not what took place on Steem (and now Hive). Essentially, this is still a blogging platform, similar to Wordpress or Medium. The idea of posting a link is vigorously attacking and flamed as sh*t posting. Thus, we know this is nothing like Reddit.
Which brings us back to the short-form posts: where do they fit in, if at all?
Obviously, at the core of all this is the reward pool. Few care what is posted on Reddit as long as it fits into the community that it is going in. Upvotes move content to the front yet do little financially. There are now a couple sub-reddits that are being tokenized so we will see how that alters things.
That said, the Proof of Brain model present on Hive determines the payouts for posts. Short-form content is rarely going to match long-form in quality. Thus, is the reward pool is focusing upon quality, which was the intention from the start, then we see a clash taking place.
Dbuzz also ran into problems with the auto-voters. Many people use those for curation, giving a daily vote to authors they follow and trust. Many post on Hive at a certain level and seek to maintain it. Others do not adhere to that same belief system, thus putting up what could be considered to be sub-standard.
The challenge here is if an author suddenly starts "buzzing", this could affect the auto votes. The platform did address this in their re-engineering of the system so we will see if a satisfactory conclusion was reached.
Obviously, most everyone on HIve wants to see it grow and succeed. Is that possible if we do not go after the true social media markets? The reality is most of what is posted on the Internet is pretty dopey. Good thing it is virtual because it would be a waste of space if on paper. Nevertheless, this is the interest of people. YouTube hit a homerun with cat videos. Facebook is known for a lot of things, quality content is not one of them.
Personally, I felt for a long time that the solution occurs when the different applications are tokenized and users focus more on the application token as compared to the HIVE currency. For instance, imagine the day where a strong user of 3Speak earns 10x each day in "Speak" tokens as compared to HIVE. In this situation, Hive is really an afterthought.
We saw something similar with CryptoKitties when it had its mania run on Ethereum. Many got involved in that game and were not concerned about the blockchain it was on (until the system was overloaded). The users were only interested in the Kitties they were accumulating in the game.
To me, this provides a path where both short and long-form content can coexist with reward pools. It would provide for expansion of the entire Hive ecosystem while allowing us to tap into some powerful markets.
Here is the announcement post about Quello:
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