One of my majority critiques against Hive's tokenemics. It does not incentivise content consumption which is critical to the health of any social network (Yes, I know Hive is more than just a social dapp). The Hive creators' economy is centred around stakeholders and creators. Large stakeholders are incentivised to curate (they earn the curator's rewards), while the creator earns the author's reward, but there is nothing designated for the consumers of these contents.
Now you can argue that engagers earn author rewards from upvotes on Hive but it is not as beneficial as creating long-form content. Most quality comments are overlooked while good long-from content gets curated. So you have a scenario where most people would rather make long-form content than engage with other creators. The problem with this framework is that most people aren't good content creators and have no business creating content. Any attempt at it results in low-quality content which are not consumption-worthy and this type of content makes up 95% of the content on Hive.
Hive needs to review its rewards system. What it currently has isn't working and is not sustainable in the long run. I understand why changing the reward system can be challenging. We currently have a system that is good for creators and stakeholders, so there might be some pushback if change is proposed. However, I expected different dapp/communities to come back up with their unique tokenomics which can serve as a reference for future change. Unfortunately, these dapps follow the Hive script and to be fair to them, I don't think there is much they can do about it.
Hive needs to be centred around engagement (not stake) to thrive. One way we can encourage engagement is by rewarding engagement a lot more. Engaging with other people's content should be as lucrative as creating posts and earning authors rewards. This way those who do not have any business creating content can focus on providing meaningful feedback.
For instance, on X, one can get monetised by just being a reply to other people's posts. There is a popular account on X by the handle Dave the Reply Guy and he earned $400 just replying to content. This is enough motivation to create meaningful comments if creating content is not your forte.
HOW TO ENCOURAGE ENGAGEMENT ON HIVE
One way Hive can improve engagement on Hive is by actively curating comments on Hive. This simply means having a group of curators who search and reward decent comments the same way we curate content. There are a handful of powerful curation groups that can implement this idea and I believe it will improve engagement on hive.
Hive can also bring back the engagement league and allocate part of hive inflation to weekly/monthly top engagers, and it should be close to the amount the average person earns here for posting weekly/monthly. This would be another strong way to gamify and incentivise engagement on the blockchain.
In addition, curators can prioritize posts with engagement. The number of comments on a post will determine its earning threshold and limit. For instance, a post with one comment cannot earn more than $5. This will push creators to create better content and share it on Web 2, which brings more eyeballs to Hive.
CONCLUSION
By simply tweaking our reward system, we can improve the social experience on Hive. My ideas might not be the most sophisticated way of increasing engagement on Hive but I still believe it is a discussion worth having. The social media space is changing drastically and the hive ecosystem needs to review its reward system to better suit current trends and realities.
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