_{I stole your picture, hope you don't mind}

See the original post here.

For all the lazy people, I'll do my best to create a quick synopsis of what @therealwolf is proposing here, but it's fairly detailed so it's best to read his original post as this will almost certainly not do it justice.

• Major bullet point is that it's about re-designing the rewards system to introduce staking rewards on HIVE.
• Author/Curation Rewards aren't working on scale
• While we mostly fixed vote buying, auto-voting still screws up the algorithm leading to a handful of users getting the most rewards.
• Manual/Honest curation is a good idea, but doesn't work.
• We should be a top 20 crypto.
• Need to ask: Why should developers integrate/build on Hive? and Why should individuals buy HIVE and potentially even hodl it?
• Between 2016 and 2020 Steem shifted from a Socal app blockchain to a Community blockchain.
• HMT's won't save us.
• Developers should want to build on hive to leverage it as an easy form of storing and retrieving data.
• If Hive is going to adapt to its use-cases, then we need to have better tooling, API & marketing for custom_json.
• A better way to inventivise HODLing HIVE is higher staking rewards.
• Current reward system could be offered via SMT
• For HIVE instead of distributing HIVE from a reward pool, you can direct part of your inflation to someone you want to support.
• At this point it goes into detail about the proposal so if you made it this far, just read the original post. Mine will make no sense if you don't anyway, well maybe it will. Do whatever you want I guess.

So my major bulletpoint is that while I agree with some of the problems stated. I disagree about the solution proposed. I also disagree with the idea that a social blockchain fundamentally doesn't work. I'll explain why.

To simplify what @therealwolf is getting at, I think it goes something like..."We've tried this social media/application stuff for years and it hasn't worked, let's try something different. Here's my idea for something different"

What's the REAL problem?

If you've read a lot of my posts in the past you can probably guess where I'm going to go with this. The problem is not and has never been that creating social applications on Steem/Hive doesn't work. We already know that social applications can be and are profitable. They're extremely profitable, and not just the ones that sell their users data. Patreon and Kickstarter could also be built here and these platforms don't work via ads or data mining. There's also donation platforms which would be ridiculously simple to integrate here that I've heard many say wouldn't work, in direct opposition to the reality that there are several that are successful and DO work.
We've had apps that were modelled after those applications built here, but they haven't really gone anywhere. So why would the fact that one is built on a blockchain make a difference?

It's because of the UX.

All the centralized social applications are easy and pleasant/addictive to use. That's what we have to compete with. I think the big takeaway from the last four years is that financial rewards are not valuable enough to make up for a poor user experience.

In the peak of the bull market Steem was basically giving away free money...lots of it. When tons of posts were in the mid 3 figures, with a few hitting 4 figures and every now and then some even hitting 5 FIGURES!!! Yea, people will put up with a shitty UX for that much money, but not with what we have now.

As you can see from the centralized platforms, if you have a good user experience, you don't have to pay people anything to use an application. They use it because it's fun/addictive.

Now that still doesn't really address how we make profitable businesses here, but I think in the short and medium term that's fairly simple. GROWTH. If we build even one killer app on Hive, the size of our active community(Being generous...10kish?) can easily grow by a factor of 10 in no time. 100k active users is nothing in the social application world, but it would make a huge difference here. What would 1 million active users do for the price? I said this is short and medium term because let's say we get a million active users. The price would obviously be MUCH higher than it is now, but how do we grow in value from there? We don't actually sell anything here and that would be a ton more value leaving the system if we had that many more users, but I think if we had consistent growth it would be years and years before this became an issue, because you have to throw speculation into the mix and all the other market variables that would affect things, but if we had a killer app that was popular, I think those other forces would have a positive impact on price.

So how do we get there?

We need to dramatically improve the user experience here on HIVE. I'm sort of convinced that the best way to do that is with a hybrid onchain/offchain database solution. After learning more and more about OpenSeed, I think this is the way to take what we have and make it something that can compete with modern day social applications. Let me paint a quick picture for those that have no idea what I'm talking about.

Lite Accounts(one of many things that become possible)

With an opensource distributed offchain database, we could create offchain accounts instantly, we could also allow posting from these accounts, but to receive rewards you'd have to "upgrade" your account.

While still having access to offchain and onchain posting, we could easily have features like chat and DM's, or short form, low value type posts(tweets) that wouldn't be eligible for rewards, but would increase engagement massively. Imagine a system where at the end of your post you could click a checkbox whether you wanted that post to be onchain or offchain. With the onchain checkbox being greyed out when you only have a lite account, but you still being able to get up and running in minutes. I could even imagine a system where all lite account posts earn rewards via a single account that tracks the rewards they've earned, then transfers those rewards to them once they create a blockchain level account.

The reason I disagree so strongly about the idea that "social apps on the blockchain don't work"
is because what I've just mentioned here is only scratching the surface. We haven't done anything yet. You can't call what we've done here a serious attempt yet. That sounds harsh and I definitely appreciate all our developers and get that you're all doing this work without a ton of financial rewards, but it is what it is.

There are no training wheels in business. We have to compete with the competition, period. I think we can do this, but we have to correctly identify the problems and dedicate our collective energy and resources to the right areas.

As someone who has worked as a UX artist, I could write a book full of features that I would be willing to bet my entire stake would dramatically increase the value here, and I can just about promise you that if you asked anyone that knows anything about UX design they'd say the same thing. They'd have to learn a fair amount about how this system works, but after they did, the path forward wouldn't be rocket science.

I hope there can be more brainstorming like this for Hive to increase engagement and get the ideas flowing on how to make all this better, oh wait!

There's a Community for that! :D

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!