With all the buzz around proposals, I figured it's time to put to paper a post I've had planned for quite some time. Everything said here is just the opinion of an insignificant stakeholder, but hopefully people will appreciate the logic behind my rationale.
Note: The intent of this post is not to outline any specific people or proposals to support, but to discuss ideas which will hopefully make those decisions easier and more effective.
Putting things into Perspective
The Problem
Hive is a young chain, even if you consider it 4 years old when taking into account the chain it forked from. There has been a plethora of dapps and projects which have attracted many divergent interests which make up our community, but the painfully obvious truth is we have a major retention problem.
The retention problem for new users can be summed up as:
- Misleading marketing
- Confusing and frustrating user experience (UX)
- Lack of engagement
This list could go on much longer, but I feel this is the core of the problem plaguing retention on Hive. Misleading marketing is setting expectations which are unreasonable and turning people away when their experience doesn't match them, the UX has made some great strides with things like Keychain, and front ends like peakd.com, but is still overwhelming to all but the most interested parties, and the lack of engagement can't really be solved until those first two problems are addressed, but it's a big enough problem that I felt it must be included here.
The Vision
Solving these problems requires an understanding of where Hive is going as a community and as a blockchain. We must have a vision of what we want this to be in order to address the issues in an effective way. Being a decentralized platform makes this complicated, since everyone has their own ideas of how best to proceed. While many specifics can be debated, an overall view of things to come can be ascertained by understanding how SMT's will play a role in our future.
The blogging platform we currently have been using is a proof of concept. It is one dapp out of many possible that uses the PoB reward mechanism to allocate a portion of inflation. While this has been good for initial distribution of the token, it's not sustainable in the long term without sinks that put back into the system equal to or more than is taken out. It also has certain downfalls, mainly about how rewards are distributed in this one-size-fits-all model with no real consensus on what is "good content".
SMTs will allow for this proof of concept to become more decentralized, allowing for different communities to use different metrics best suited for their own needs. Inflation, reward curves, curation/author percentage, and many many other factors can be uniquely tailored to fit each distinct need, while competing in the marketplace of ideas as to which ones best suit the values of their users. It will allow for token creators to provide sinks which can put back into the system to make up for inflation, and give the tokens real lasting value instead of relying mostly on speculators to drive the price action.
Goals
Defining our goals isn't easy, and this list isn't exhaustive, but it should be a good starting point:
- Maintain infrastructure to allow for stable use of the chain
- Create and improve libraries and documentation for ease of development
- Strengthen and add core features to appeal to a wider audience
- Make the Hive token more accessible to the general masses
How do we get there?
The DHF is our biggest tool as stakeholders, but we need to start prioritizing things in order to accomplish our goals. The goals above may seem a bit at odds with the problems laid out at the beginning, but we truly need further development to satisfy the prerequisites needed to fix them.
Maintaining the infrastructure should be a no brainer. And this includes supporting more nodes if things aren't stable enough or quick enough to satisfy the base user experience and also development to make nodes cheaper and faster to run. No matter how good the code is, no matter how happy the people are with the platform, if it's not stable and reliable, nobody will want to stick around for long.
Libraries and documentation are crucial for lowering the barrier to entry for dapp developers. I'm not a dev myself, but I've worked with quite a few, and from everything I've been told, many libraries need work, and documentation is abysmal. This makes it hard to attract people to develop the next greatest thing in our ecosystem. Remember, for every successful app out there, you will have thousands of failures. This is a pure numbers game, and our goal should be towards making Hive the easiest blockchain to develop on to give us the biggest chance for mainstream reach.
Core development should also be a no brainer. If you look on the Hive gitlab issues page, you can see there's no shortage of things to code, fix, and tweak. Approx 10% of the DHF budget is currently going towards this, and at this point in the game, with all the attention we're getting, it should be closer to 50%, at least in the short term. We need to not only roll out features like SMTs in a timely fashion, we need to make sure they're thoroughly tested by professionals to avoid bad UX and bad PR. We need to keep the momentum going, and hard fork deployments are a fickle mistress.
Making the token more available to the general masses can encompass a number of things; exchange listings, tools which make experience easier, and dapps that make it more accessible. There is some overlap with libraries and documentation that will make these easier, and together they can really help our ecosystem thrive. We want Hive to be available in as many places and to as many people as possible. Once grandma can get hive and use the blockchain easily, we have accomplished this goal.
In Conclusion
Doing all of this will empower the community owners, the users, and investors to market this token more effectively. In doing so, they'll increase the network size, the value, and the engagement. Once we're closer to these goals (we'll prob never truly be perfectly there), then we can start funding tools for power users, or throwing parties for ourselves, or even marketing campaigns. But for now, we must resist the urge to vote on niche things we want, and vote for things that will benefit the most amount of people.
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading my post. I feel there's so much more I could write about everything here, but it's too long as it is, and I really want people to actually read it to get this discussion started. I feel we're at a crucial point in our development as a platform, and if we do things right, then the moon is the limit.
Also, I want to hear your thoughts about this. Am I way off base? Did I leave something crucial out? Does this make sense to you? Tell me in the comments below.