World first, character second.
I approach life a lot like a game. Many of my quotes can be stemmed from one way or another from games. Football, chess, poker, Everquest, all these games taught me a lot about the human condition. What I love most about games is the fact you play them, you enjoy them, even in loss games can teach you valuable lessons. So, it just seemed natural to approach my life and everything I do as if I was controlling a character in a vast MMORPG.
I believe we are all one conciseness experiencing the world in a vast amount of ways. I try not to put my own life on a pedestal, there will be other games, and if you can't find a way to enjoy this one, you might be caught in a never ending loop of fear and doubt. You cannot genuinely enjoy something you are too afraid to break.
In our new digital world it feels like too much time is spent trying to appease each user where the focus should be making a better world. We can look at Hive as its own world, filled with everything that brings a world to life.
Games nowadays you have flashy graphics, crazy combo moves, and all the glitz and glamour of a flashy game. The characters are really cool! However, once you play the game for a while you realize it lacks depth, you get to the end game and it gets repetitive. This is what you see in most modern-day MMORPG these days, that is why this is considered the great MMORPG drought.
This can be seen when Blizzard released classic WoW, and how popular that game became overnight, despite its poor graphics and outdated fighting mechanics. That is because "back in the day" games were built world first, characters second. My old school Everquest players can vouch for this and that is why that 20-year-old + game today just launched "classic servers" to bring back the original game feel, and yes it is its most popular game for the EQ franchise at the moment, and the graphics are terrible (from 1999.)
World first matters, when approaching Hive and how we are building 3speak, we have that same vision in mind. Good games keep the players coming back for more, they buidl strong relationships and guilds form to conquer greater challenges then they could on their own. Life is a lot like a game I like to think, and I approach it as so.
When someone joins Hive, there should be that "quest" for them to pursue, something to pull them deeper into the community. Things like, "new player looking for guild" is commonly shouted in new areas of games, and new players quickly find their guild to show them the ropes. Guilds help new players understand the ropes, meet, and make new friends, and help get their first piece of armor; guilds are communities.
Hive is literally a blank canvas. It can be easy to sit back and say: "well I am sure someone will do it." That is a contagious attitude that spreads, and so likewise with proactive measures. I feel Hive has been very proactive lately, we should use this momentum to keep pushing forward.
When someone has a introduce yourself post, just dropping a vote with a "welcome to hive" is great and all but what does the player do after that?
Where are the breadcrumbs that help guide the player to have a good user experience?
Games do not tailor to individual players; the game makes something new and amazing the player has never experienced before and the player shapes to the game. Think of Twitter, a simple word cap changed how people communicate in an excessively big way. Make a great game, and people will play it.
Communities are the first step but as we have seen, the community with the most Hive Power backing it is usually the community everyone wants to post to. Which is just the free market speaking, we do not fix the free market we fix the game. SMT's will certainly help in this regard, people want to feel their time and effort has a chance at being rewarded with something perceived as valuable. There is nothing wrong with that, video games drop "gold" and "weapons/armor" that are worth real-life money also, and that is the draw.
Rewards are not a bad thing, quite the opposite. Anything that exploited is done so because it has value. The goal is to maximize value while minimizing exploitation. This is done all the time in games via "nerfs" to balance out the game. We had our own nerf to Author rewards to balance our game and the results were quite pleasing.
SMT's will unlock Pandora's box I believe for communities, but it is still up to us, HP hodlers, to allocate our rewards in a manner that helps several varieties of communities. If we simply have a few communities dominating rewards it will turn those communities into buffet style where you have the old trending model with random content discovery.
Id likes to see communities with stricter guidelines and more niche related content. Leofinance is a good example of this. Too many great examples to name but Leo popped in my headfirst.
I urge developers and would even finance/vote DAO proposals of people looking to "gamify" Hive in a way that makes it easy for front ends to bring their sites to life with feature-rich toolboxes. "Points" will be massive, log in and earn 10 points (like Partiko points) - but also point systems within communities to determine rankings, prestige, overachievers, etc.
Hive is an amazing world filled with countless adventures and good comrades. Now, let us fill this amazing world with epic quests, missions, places to explore, and treasures to unlock. Crypto brings abundance via attention.
We do not realize how much our attention is worth until we all collective focus on something. Our attention alone will bring worldwide abundance in the likes we have never seen. Web 2 divides us, fracturing our communities via siloed, closed source, centralized databases. Web 3 frees us from these shackles and gives us the power to create a digital world that we actually want to live in, but most importantly, we control as a community.
It really is layer zero vs centralization of power. Rampant power is what corrupts, abuse of power is what brings imbalance. We now have our own power, but this power is decentralized and can only be harvested, like the sun. The sun is powerful, but no one controls it, yet everyone benefits from it. This is how I view decentralized blockchains in a tiny way, how they bring us value, and no one controls them.
