We see a lot of comparisons between Hive and mainstream social media. Gotta get that mainstream adoption, amirite? The problem with this is that these two models are so different that they can't be compared.
Trying to compare Web 2.0 apps to Web 3.0 dapps is a complete fool's errand. It's kind of like comparing gold to Bitcoin; ya can't really do it.
You can try but at a certain point gold is a physical asset and Bitcoin is digital. The disconnect is so large that the analogy only exists to help the noobs "get it". For those who already know better this only serves to confuse the issue.
Think about it
What goes in to gold? It's on the ground; it's in the earth; you pick it up; you mine it; it's gold. There is nothing to it. Now look at Bitcoin. Borderless; open source; cryptography; wallets; nodes; Internet; servers; code; developers; volume; throughput; scaling.
The point is that you and I will NEVER fully understand Bitcoin... ever. We will never understand how the cryptography works or how the nodes interact or how miners actually work or this or that. The technicalities are boundless and there are only a handful of people in the entire world that will dedicate their lives to understanding it fully. To compare THAT to gold... is just ridiculous.
Calling something 2.0 means you upgraded it. Implying that Gold 2.0 is an upgrade on gold is just like implying that Hive is an upgrade for centralized social media... hm... no... they don't even exist in the same reality... just like Bitcoin and gold don't.
A lot of people out there have expressed concerns that Hive is doomed because normally the first application on the scene is too primitive and floundering to adequately capture the market share. The comparison given is MySpace to Facebook. Facebook was able to swoop in and corner the market even though it didn't have first move advantage. Is Hive doomed to be the next MySpace?
@edicted/ridiculous-myspace-comparison
Is Steem doomed to be the next MySpace because the first product is rarely the one that corners the market?
Well would you look at that. We're already "not Steem" aren't we? Funny how that works. People ask what the next Bitcoin is. The answer is Bitcoin. What's the next Ethereum? The answer is Ethereum. These networks are self-updating and evolving constantly. The only reason we are even Hive is due to a devastating attack.
Centralized social media business model
How did Facebook do it? They onboarded a ton of users for free without ads until the platform hit critical mass. Once that happened they monetized the site with targeted smart-ads and studied the logistics of their users in order to turn a profit.
The point is centralized social media works by turning people into batteries like the Matrix. If you have a billion users it doesn't matter if you can only generate $1 per user per year. That's a billion dollars a year; not too shabby.
This is how centralized social media works. You get a tiny bit of value from each user on average and that makes running the entire system more than worth it. This is NOT how crypto works in the least bit.
Crypto is about building community and value and recycling that value within the community. It's about letting the users claim provable ownership over the network itself so that everyone has a financial incentive to generate more value for everyone.
In this context it becomes quite obvious that we do not need hundreds of millions of users to be successful. Nor do we have the ability to scale that high even if that many people wanted to join in the first place.
How much value can a Hive user generate? Far more than the pathetic $1-$10 a year that centralized social media companies are targeting. It's quite difficult to imagine how crazy things could get around here, but I've seen a vision of the future, and many Hive users will work here full time and have no other job.
And I'm not talking about blogging or vlogging or anything like that. I'm talking about real work and competitive compensation and the end of wage slavery and the resurrection of work-ethic. This network hasn't even come close to scratching the surface as to tapping in to this gigantic pool of labor. Even now (shit ass 2020 & COVID) shows us that working from home and being your own boss is in demand at all time highs.
Real decentralized dapps will be created with real use cases and real ownership and real development. Mark my words: there isn't a single decentralized platform with decentralized development in the entire world. The logistics for decentralized development are complex and do not exist. There are zero templates and zero working prototypes. Every dev team in the world is pathetically small and centralized, crypto included.
Imagine a million devs working on a single project. That's when things get bonkers.
The closest thing we are going to get in the near-future comes with this wave of corporate adoption. At some point a big tech company will acquire enough stake to make it worth developing the Bitcoin ecosystem for free, benefitting not only themselves, but the entire network. That's how synergy works, and crypto is the queen-mother of synergy.
Why do we think blocktrades has 14 devs working on Hive? Shits and giggles? Who in the world is paying for that?!!? Do you know how much devs cost? In my very own California's Silicon Valley base-pay is $80000 a year, MINIMUM. Top-tier highly-experienced devs can negotiate salaries of half a million dollars a year, easily. Blockchain devs are even more rare and expensive.
So again, who is paying for all that? Hive is. Just the idea of Hive is paying for it. The idea that we are all building here and this place is MASSIVELY undervalued. It's an investment in ourselves. Blocktrades has a metric shit-ton of stake, so the team can essentially work for free and pay themselves with the value they generate. Mind blowing.
If any of this remotely sounds like anything a corporation could do in their wildest dreams... You are wrong. End of story.
Conclusion
This is the beginning. We are standing on square one. There is nothing to compare Hive to. Bitcoin is not gold 2.0. There are no Ethereum killers. The vulture capitalists can take their cutthroat dog-eat-dog competitive projections that they put onto this space and shove it.
What we are building here is something that most people do not understand because it is so far removed from anything that has ever existed. The emergent open-source cooperative economy is coming. Are you ready?