Over the last week, I think I have been about as unproductive as I have been on Hive for the last three years and it is a strange feeling. I feel lazy and disconnected from what is going on here and I assume that is what a lot of people might feel a lot of the time, especially those who just post and run for reward and spend their time elsewhere.
Have you noticed how I and most people have maintained consistency in their timeline with Hive? We talk about it as if Hive has always been here, even though it is barely three months old. This is great and should be a warning for the future, a blockchain community can not only migrate over to a fork seamlessly, they can backdate their own perception of history and maintain timeline consistency. It is quite an interesting concept and while the consistency remains, so too does the immutable history of what is available. I wonder how many time "Steem" is mentioned on this blockchain and, I wonder how long it will take before it is surpassed by "Hive".
While I hope that Hive is going to be one of the few lasting projects that pull through toward mass adoption of crypto and blockchain, there are definitely no guarantees in this and it is going to require more than market pumps to get there. Hopefully some of the applications will get funded by the DAO, though that is up to the larger stakeholders - exchange listings and wallets are great, but we also need demand for what Hive offers and gateways are only one side of that.
What I definitely think needs to happen is better communication about what is going on in the backend, something that Stinc was heavily criticized for not doing well. There is only a small group of people who seem to know much about things like the backend development and the upcoming hardfork 24, and most of the community are nearly completely blind. This is a big issue in many ways but one of the largest is from a community awareness perspective as when there is communication about important updates like Hardforks, it generates spin off material, a mass of commentary, discussion and speculation on what will happen - this is the kind of hype that gets people invested in the community itself.
Communication is key for a healthy community to function and it is also what brings people into the loop who might not have taken an interest earlier. Without the various lines of communication, members drift away from each other as the Hive blockchain is the common thread that ties all of us together. It doesn't matter who you are or what reason you are here for, if you are interested in having some kind of greater value from Hive in the future, you should be learning about how things work and joiining the discussions - but without content to discuss, there is no forum to talk about it, especially for the ordinary user who spends their days posting and commenting on the blockchain.
There is no Stinc here now, which means there is no central point of "contact" and "information" which means, it has to be community sourced and more importantly, community spread. Information has to be pushed out to all the many arms and legs of the blockchain so that when important things happen, people aren't taken by surprise because they failed to read an obscure technical post from someone they don't know to follow.
While people don't like Hive content, for investment to happen and people to deepen their understanding, it is necessary to have and it needs to be as decentralized as the community itself is - lots of sources pushing it out to their followers, so while there may be overlap, the coverage is good and relatively consistent. Information spread is important and valuable for the development and retention of any community to remain a community. When people feel they are in the dark, they will gravitate like moths to whatever light there may be - those lights should be on the blockchain - those lights should brighten the entire city.
Anyway, I don't want to get too deep into this now, but hopefully the communication level picks up and there is more open discussion that the community itself can participate in and learn about what is happening andd where we are headed. I am glad that over the last few days, @blocktrades has added more clarity in what they are dealing with, but I think that there should be a far greater spread of information leaking out, if only to give the community something to discuss amongst ourselves.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]