This week has been "team week" at one of my workplaces, which means we gather our department, plan the next year, adjust past goals and workshop various aspects of how we are going to approach achieving them. We have been working with a couple of departments who have complementary goals and overlaps in approach that we can both leverage and add to, which has been more fun than it sounds - but the days have been long, intense and have required a lot of mental energy. It is in this arena that I am quite comfortable I can add value to the conversation through my past experiences and often alternate views, which I think is driven by me being far less a consumer and more an observer of behaviors and the way people interact with the world in which they operate.
The focus for today was building user personas, which is essentially profiling the kinds of people who we interact with the product we sell, which is enterprise level information management solutions. It is very interesting to take a step back and the time to use our collective experience as trainers to identify personalities, build backgrounds, motivations, fears and all kinds of other data around a user, which is essentially used for target messaging, with the focus being user adoption, not sales.
While this was happening in the fore, inevitably I was spending time thinking about how this applies to Hive, a place where we often talk about users as well as the need for adoption. However, unlike a single software product, the challenge is that there is not one "experience" to consider, which makes messaging and building narrative difficult if looking for a singular approach, the "one ring" slogan or story that brings all users under the Hive umbrella, or at least piques the curiosity enough to have a look.
What this means is what I and probably several others have said many times already, it will be up to the decentralized experiences to handle the adoption of their individual product, as they are independent entities with a diverse range of uses, users and personalities.
However, we all reside at the infrastructure blockchain level of Hive also, which is part of the problem when it comes to the social conflict experienced on the blockchain over the years. There are a lot of highly different personalities, coming from diverse backgrounds and cultures, in different stages of their life - but the community has still been small enough for all extremes to interact relatively closely.
What I think has to happen is that the applications and interfaces will start profiling more in order to better target their user group, which means effectively excluding those who do not fit. This doesn't mean that those who do not fit can't use the "products" involved, it just means that the onus will be on the user to make changes to fit the profile.
One simple example of this that comes to mind is the way LEO has moved into DeFi, which requires all users who want to take part to have some resource availability, meaning LEO tokens and Ethereum. This hurdle is a barrier of entry which narrows the potential users and when it was applied at the blockchain level with the need for Resource Credits to be able to post enough, it was met with high resistance. But, LEO do not need to bend to the will of the masses, they need to cater to their user group.
Interestingly, pretty much 8 dollars is all one would currently need to spend on HIVE to powerup in order to never have resource credit issues, for as long as the blockchain operates - at least under current conditions. But, this hurdle is or was apparently too high for many to secure their position on a blockchain for the future, which then begs the question about the user personas on Hive itself.
I wonder what our own demographics look like.
In the past I have mentioned that it seems that nearly without exception, the people who are able to effectively stay engaged as contributors and build over the years, seem to be older, more stable, less drama-filled than those who don't. This is not a rule, it is a generalized observation. But I wonder, if we were to look at other factors for Hive users (which is not possible), what would we find?
I thought I would ask some questions and see what the general feeling might be on some of these factors. It might be handy to imagine selecting 100 as the base, so out of 100 users;
- How many are male/female (don't get all political here - simplicity)
- How many currently hold a traditional job
- How many are struggling financially
- How many are well off
- How many are technically competent
- How many are socially capable
- How many are career professionals
- How many have mental problems
- How many are emotionally unstable
- How many are risk-takers
- How many are willing to invest
- How many think Hive can benefit them a lot
- How many love what they post
- How many enjoy engaging
- How many like being part of the community
- How many identify themselves with Hive in some way
- How many are good at what they do here
- How many value the opportunity
- How many believe Hive has a strong future
- How many are only here to milk while they can
- How many are heavily invested relative to their whole wealth
- How many are waiting to sell
Now, there are plenty more possible questions that we could ask and I don't know if you are curious to find out, but I am interested in people, and the thing I like about Hive is that here I interact in a community of people, not algorithms. This means that understanding people is important for me, but I believe it is important for all of us, if we are interested in developing a blockchain infrastructure that is capable of supporting all kinds of user types and experience groups.
One thing that I do think we need to understand is, while everyone is free to opt in and out of Hive, that "opt-in" means that we do not have to cater for every possible user, we have to cater to being able to host a wide range of applications that can cater for a wide-range of users. There is of course the level of decentralization that is needed for health and risk distribution, but it doesn't require every user to protect the infrastructure and instead, many users can enjoy the second-layer experiences without needing to get involved in governance at all.
For me as an investor on Hive, I am interested in building the infrastructure in a way that adds value to all of the applications built on it, in a way that feeds back into making the infrastructure valuable itself. As an enduser, I am looking to have a good time, build relationships and satisfy various needs, including having a space to hang my thoughts and build conversations. Each of us are different here, how different is hard to say without visibility on it, but it is apparent that market segmentation of some kind exists and therefore, should be invested into for discovery so that applications can better meet the needs of their audience through design and marketing.
What do you think about the types of users and, what kind of user are you?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]