I've been on Hive for 6 and a half years.
I'm one of the OGs, as they like to be called, which is not be confused with ninja members or genesis users, those came way before me. Those early, really early users like @pharesim, @acidyo and others experienced an incredibly different ecosystem than what we have right now, they actually saw it come to life and grow from a half assed blogging editor to the 100 dApps that Hive has now.
One of the foundations of this ecosystem, or at least the blogging side of this ecosystem was, has been, is, and odds are, it will be, is that Quality Content should get rewarded.
It's a simple premise, but an effective one.
And thus, curation guilds lead by @donkeypong, @kevinwong, @papa-pepper, @instructor2121 and a ton more were born. Most of these curation guilds empowered by their own massive stakes, some backers with even more massive stakes, or simply boosted by a @steemit inc (aka Stinc, or stink for the homies) delegation.
These curation guilds relied on Trails. Delegations were a thing back then, but Curation rewards were too precious to give away, so big users would just follow the vote of these guilds to give them more influence in the reward pool allocation.
It worked, Steem was thriving at first.
But adoption never came. We never went mainstream.
Building a social ecosystem under an erroneous premise?
Now, the title of this post is partly true, and partly just clickbait so that maybe it generates some conversations and dialogue, hopefully.
Have we encouraged content creation on Hive based on erroneous premises?
One of the main Paradigms - perhaps the only one - of curation practices on Hive is that Quality Content should be rewarded, and content of low quality should get low rewards.
If we simplify this, we get this:
Quality = Rewards.
Some Quality content does get rewarded, but not all of it. I'm not here to discuss what gets curated, I want to discuss why it gets curated.
The Quality paradigm is great, don't misunderstand me.
But it doesn't work alone, it never has and it never will.
The main driver for the ninjas and genesis curation guilds to reward quality content was, and to my understanding it still is, that *Quality content will drive adoption and retention because potential users who come to Hive will see amazingly written, superbly formatted, and outstandingly visually supported content, and they will want to stay.
This, in Theory, works wonders. This premise is completely true, these curation guilds were correct at assessing under what foundations they should encourage content creation on Hive.
But what they (we) failed to realize, is that the Curation of Quality content is only half of the equation.
We need traffic
As I mentioned above, and I want to be repetitive, this premise was indeed true, correct and with the best intentions in mind, intentions and ideals that come from being part of something revolutionary that could change how social media works(ed).
It just was not enough. It is still not enough.
One side of the coin is rewarding Quality Content so that potential users see the value in creating and consuming content on Hive.
The other side of the same coin is Actually bringing those potential users, otherwise what's the whole point of rewarding Quality content?
Reward pool distribution, Reward pool abuse, plagiarism policing, the new guy in town called AI content creation and limitations... all of these are important, as long as we are indeed growing, bringing people to the platform, and sharing the table with new hivers. Otherwise, we are failing to see the burning forest because we are too worried about a tree with plague.
Sure, if not dealt with, the tree with plague will infect all the forest eventually, but if we don't deal with the shrinking forest, who cares about the plague because there will be no forest, right?
Expanding the Curation Paradigms
Curating Quality content is valuable, but what if these curation guilds like @ocd, @curangel, @appreciator, @leo.voter, and more, focused in also curating content that drives traffic to Hive?
It's not enough to compose great publications, we also need to share them outside and reach out to content consumers and creators. #posh incentivizes this to a degree, and it was working wonders before X changed their API's rules.
But even then, even if a user shares a post on Instagram, is it really driving traffic to the ecosystem? Is it helping us grow?
Who cares if I, on a daily basis, write a 3,000 word post with self made images, talking about the new shift in institutional investment patterns if only people who are already on Hive will read it?
I mean, I would hope that it gets some votes and all of that of course, but let's compare this post with a One picture post with two paragraphs that the creator shares on Twitter and it goes viral, bringing 10 new Hive users.
Odds are, no curation guild in the history of Hive will actively touch the second post (ok, maybe a couple of them would, but for the wrong reasons). The first one will probably get curated by one, or maybe even two guilds, especially if I am a newbie.
But the second one is helping Hive one hundred times more than the first one, because it is actually pushing adoption and growth towards Hive.
And yet, there hasn't been a single curation guild - and I am guilty of this as I was an important part of OCD for around 3 years - has focused in curating content that drives traffic, no matter the quality of the content.
Quality is subjective, and if a shitty post by my standards shouldn't get curated and yet it brought 3 new users, well then perhaps I should think about expanding my standards.
The best part is that google analytics allows curation guilds to review and track what posts or authors are bringing traffic to the platform, and we could reward them for that.
We wouldn't need to get rid of that first paradigm, the one that encourages us to reward quality content.
But perhaps, it shouldn't be the only curation paradigm we take into account when allocating the reward pool.
Or maybe I am delusional and writing pure horseshit.
But either way, why don't you give me your opinion in the comment section? I would appreciate the dialogue.