Tried voice.app and building #hive foundations.
I signed up to voice a few days ago. It’s new and it’s shiny and promises the world for crypto social media. It promised to be a STEEM killer, which in fairness it might as that would be like cutting the throat of an injured soldier. It’s almost a kindness at this stage to do it.
It was far from impressive though !!
I was expecting magic and fairy dust from a project with millions pumped into it. $150m budget from what is reported. An app to link the masses with crypto and get new people involved. I was sadly disappointed. For starters, the first few people to interact with my posts were STEEM OG’s. People already in the system but had left for greener pastures. I know it's still in beta and limited invites but I expected more.
The voting system is strange and makes no sense at all. They tried to gamify the system and make it interesting to vote against a post but I really don’t see the point. I've already lost interest.
The first thing that they say to do is download the app but the app isn’t functional. None of its main functions work apart from browsing posts and commenting. It does seem to be getting a lot of commenting but they are mostly a few words saying great post in multiple different ways. For anything else it redirects you to the main website which works on my phone but doesn’t work on my desktop. For such a high profile project that has already been set by delays I would have expected a lot more than this from the team. I know it’s still under development but this is a very poor showing.
All of this is poor enough and I’m sure will be upgraded and improved upon over the next few months to get the app fully functioning but they will fall onto the same sword as every other crypto social media has to date.
It comes down to one simple factor. I don’t give a shit what some person in Japan is having for breakfast. Not even the slightest. The feed on voice reminds me of the old feed on STEEM back when I first joined with a total mix of spam, foreign posts, photos, blogs, introductions..... There are categories but again a mix from every country and every type of post.
There is no content discovery what so ever. There is nothing written in the app that I want to see or comment on. The same failing that others had time and time again. If you are a new users how will you get your content in front of people that should be seeing it?
We have communities here now which has massively improved my content feed on hive. I can use @dapplr or @ecency to browse on my phone and see interesting content that I actually want to. For #hive to grow that will need to be fixed even more.
The solution is in sites like @travelfeed and @leofinance that provide good quality content of a certain genre to users. Content that their audience actually want to see. Communities will work for interacting on peakd.com but tribes are even better for growth and bringing in new users for a certain type of content.
This was my comment on an earlier article on #hive where the users was giving a recap on their week to date and their struggles to get to this point in life.
I tried voice but I have zero interest in what some guy in Japan is building or having for dinner. You are much more likely to interact and enjoy content from people that you know or in your area where it is relevant to you. Since crypto is such a niche area it's unlikely that people in my area will be involved for the moment so instead we have to build connections in hive itself. For that to happen we need to find out more about people and get to know them properly. Get invested in their lives and their interests and build those bonds from the ground up. Posts like this are great as they share something more with your followers.
The same way that hive connects the users here so posts about hive tend to do very well as people are interested in it. Posts about Irish football will do well on facebook where my followers are all Irish but I can't see too many people in here clicking into it. We are building a community from nothing but it binds us together and in the long run that will stand to us. It is what made steem/hive so successful in the past was due to people knowing each other and having that bond.
I also read about @uyobong bringing in two new users today.
I successfully on-boarded and presently mentoring two tertiary institution graduates @Gabby20 and @Cherrypee and hoping that would have a a smooth journey on the Hive blockchain.
This was achieved by targeting people from a job application system that had received over 4 million applications and pays €75 per month.
It might take you a while to build up to that here but there is no reason that you cant earn €75 a month eventually by building your audience and creating good content. That is a potential group of 4m people that could be brought into #hive.
It also links back to my other point above, as I guarantee you that the retention rate would be much higher if you had 100,000 users coming from roughly the same area with similar knowledge and interest as the content they produce would have huge appeal to the other users that joined with them. Not so much to myself but it would be up to me to bring in more Irish people to my community or tribe and have relevant content to our users. All of which can be hive based.
If @uyobong did get the number of local users up to 1000 people, would it then be worth creating a Nigerian based front-end like @leofinance has done for their own users. A mobile app for that tribe?
Could they use @dapplr as a mobile app just for that community and bring in more friends and family to share content. Growth is exponential and with more users would come a higher token price. That community could place ads on the app and create it’s own revenue stream. Use it for marketing, paying developers, reward the users.
We are currently building one brick at a time but it’s important to build in the right path. To expand the community we need to grow together until we are strong enough to grow apart.
Engage, let people know more about yourself, build connections.
Then when we have strong enough foundations it will allow us to build anything that we want on them in the future. We can all build our own little house on the #hive foundations and be happy there.
