In theory HIVE is decentralized, in reality a few big stake holders (most of them either early miners or former bid bot owners) control the witnesses and decide over post rewards as well as the success of the DHF proposals in this ecosystem.

Many not so huge stake holders told me they don't even dare to take part in discussions too controversial like this one in this post, due to the fear of being flagged. We should accept social media posts especially when peakd/hive.blog is a monetized blog site and not merely a nerds/witness/code sharing site. That's why there must be a board that goes against those who step out of the line. The high rewards seen in many shitposts in the trending page rather than on more interesting and substantial ones make a lot of people sceptical if this platform is really "serious".

From a content consuming point of view. Unfortunately what currently incentivizes the trend of upvotes in Hive, is basically anticipating what content and authors will receive the most weight in staked votes and trying to front-run them to get the biggest slice from the "curation" rewards. All this regardless of the "quality" of those well rewarded posts. Since many of these posts just come from popular and spoiled authors. But what basically desnaturalize the encouragement to reward worthy and true quality content within the ecosystem and obviously discourage content discovery even more.

Imagine you went to YouTube and every other video was about YouTube and how to upload/like/subscribe/whatever videos on YouTube. It wouldn't be near as big as it is today if they just did that. Hence they don't. Like Tibetan monks, spending months focused in on the finest details of sculpting the most exquisite sand mandalas, only to destroy it once finished.

The whole place here has always seemed like a private club, from a sneaky secret society to a roving party of various types of nerds that nerds think are nerds. Or, if you want a spicier analogy, a swingers club. Yeah, people already into it are there all the time but no one just wanders in off the street.

Over the years, what disturbs me the most on this platform. Since I've been spending a lot of time on this platform for many years now, is that I keep coming across the same names over and over again. Especially in the trending area. And often I don't really see the uniqueness of their content, but just a biased high stake that artificially creates these privileged positions for them on the platform.

So, the best indication of the health of Hive. Would be the day when Hive's most rewarded posts within the top 50 rewarded posts will have absolutely nothing to do with Hive, or comments about the platform. Because what this only teachs and encourages, it’s how to do minimal work for the most $. And if it’s through autovotes even better, because then people just shit post to get these easy dohla$ without even caring if people read their content or not. In conclusion, it means that our rewards are not incentivizing writing content that outsiders really want to see.

For many years this place has been no more than a petri dish for delusions of grandeur. And those who stroke the egos of the inner circle guard and/or trumpet Hive, win this crypto high school popularity contest. To piss on the wound, excessive favoritism/lopsided rewards makes authors think that they're Shakespeare with a fucking golden quill. It's clearly an outrageous insult to the intelligent and aware, but that's how it is and prolly will continues to be, and speaking up won't do shit.

But Hey!...

First of all: ¿What Is Hive? ¿What are we? ¿Are we a social media network? ¿A community platform? ¿A blogging platform? ¿A content platform? ¿Or just another simple blockchain project with hopes to succeed as many that you can find out there these days?

Ok, let's see...

1. From a content point of view, let's say Hive want to compete with and being a professional "quality" content platform like Medium. Everyone creates content there expecting it to go viral through sharing it on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or letting it be shared on many other platforms. However, no one has Medium.com as their most important news outlet of the day. And yet, everyone encounters a few Medium articles casually while simply browsing the internet. Medium has enormous value because people want to read quality content and they even pay a monthly fee to get unlimited access.

2. On other hand, let's say we want to compete and become into a "community" platform like Reddit or a "social" network like Facebook. No one creates content there to attract outside visitors. Yet, everyone wants to be on Reddit or Facebook just to share their blurbs of thoughts or art, photos, videos, memes or whatever without a second thought on who might see it. Well, they know very well who does or who will. Obviously a bunch of their followers, who in that case mostly are just friends or family.

So, how the hell Hive could aspire and pretend to compete with these other "social" platforms without accurate view counters, proper stats on visitors at each time of the day, a truly functional search engine feature for content discovery, much more influence on layout and multimedia embeds and above all, a comment section that didn't require a full-on Hive account to comment and interact with the authors and other commenters?

Consumers you know? ¡Free marketers! ¡Free advertisers! ¡Outsiders! Don't we want them to have a seamless experience by having them leaving effortlessly a comment or reply with or without a Hive account in which they would even might subscribe later to an e-mail list or something next, like you can do on Wordpress?

And well, just to finish this post right here. Let's do this with what was said by a well known and pretty popular Hive user long time ago:

Based upon my own experience, having been on Hive from the beginning and from someone coming from the freelancer world, Hive was incredible in terms of money.

I was used to put in hours of effort to deliver high quality services to my customers. I did that for years. When I suddenly stumbled upon Hive and I gave it a try, I literally hit a goldmine. I earned a months salary with less than a handful of posts. And that was obviously an amazing experience. It was easier than my work, even for a not-so-talented-writer like myself.

I quickly realized what an amazing chance I had to change my life in various ways. But I didn't give in to all the asslicking of whales. I noticed the almost sick attention the rich guys got, just because how deep their pockets were. And I wasn't trying to squeeze them for upvotes. Many of the users I brought to Hive did things differently. They relied only on the "get rich quick" method, so they tried to get recognition and earn upvotes exclusively from whales and dolphins. They ignored lesser accounts entirely and the main focus were to comment on whale-content all the time. I can also say that I have probably brought in hundreds of people in total through my various marketing campaigns and/or due to how I have been promoting Hive.

I did things differently. I tried to educate, motivate and inspire people around me. I focused on lesser accounts and I co-launched curation projects with just a fraction of the power as bigger, better, more known users had. We tried to really encourage people, we literally convinced people to stay even though there were about to leave.

We had great results and it was fun for a while. We didn't earn anything, we weren't selfish. We did our best to give others as much as possible. We believed that a stronger middle class, or that a more sturdy foundation would benefit the entire community. Nonetheless our efforts weren't noticed by the "big guys". We were too small or too unknown for that.

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