Yesterday was a pretty significant day for Hive, other than the HPUD part.
LeoAds Smart Contract Was Turned On
As announced quite some time ago, the smart contract for LeoAds was turned on yesterday, on time.
We don't have a post about it, as Khal mentions in the thread above, but it doesn't really matter. We won't probably notice anything different that would impact our user experience or our revenue for a while, at least until the first payment is made. That will obviously be a much more impactful day for the users than the one when the smart contract was turned on, regardless of how high or low the payments will be. I don't know what will come next, the first payment from LeoAds or the user interface integration, probably in the wallet section, for LeoAds revenue. If I were to guess, the first payment will come first, even though I don't know what is the rhythm of these payments.
We will probably see a full dashboard for LeoAds later on, that will include statistical information, like views per post and potential payout.
That will represent the beginning of a change of focus from maximizing short-term reward pool rewards to increasing the overall views on your posts without a limiting timeframe (evergreen content).
Second Hive Town Hall Impressions
That was one of the topics of the second town hall... Shifting attention from the reward pool rewards to the number of views a post brings. And I believe that's an important aspect, which I approached as well in more than one of my posts.
Of course, before we do that, we need front ends that measure views on posts, so that authors and readers can have an idea how many views a post has. As I talked about in my post above, that's not as easy as a metric based on rewards because a post can be viewed on different front ends, and there isn't a way to aggregate those view counts. So far, as far as I know, only PeakD has a system of tracking views on posts, and INLEO will implement their own (for posts, they already track views on threads) to be able to distribute LeoAds revenue based on that.
But each of them have their own count, and if other interfaces implement their own views count, they will have their own count as well...
Does it make sense to have such a metric measured in a unitary way and stored at the blockchain level? That's a question for another town hall, I guess...
Another serious question that was brought up by @r0nd0n was regarding the reward pool and whether it is better to sunset it or continue with it.
It's not a new discussion, and the consensus was that this needs further talks, but my impression is that most speakers think it's a bad idea even if they don't outright say that, and I think so too.
In my opinion, it's not about rewarding content creators and curators. That can - more or less easily - be moved at a second layer. It is about governance representation and protecting our relatively well distributed governance token (compared to other cryptocurrencies). Once that becomes a buy-only option, or additionally earnable via limited options like witness rewards, the distribution will automatically tend to consolidate toward those with means to buy.
There were many important dapp owners or developers present during the town hall, a way to exchange opinions, share updates with the Hive community and also, being on Spaces, a way to show others what's going on on Hive, but only if they are interested to watch the Town Hall Space live or recorded, without pushing it to them (hopefully).
We should never underestimate the value of these town halls for internal consumption too, not only for the outside. We might say Hive is small, but it has grown large enough that people may use one or maybe at most a few communities and ignore the rest. The town hall is a way to learn more about the broader ecosystem, get excited about and maybe try something else they haven't tried before. Plus a way to coordinate, see what's needed and who is building what, and maybe where's a niche that needs to be covered.
Another impression I had was that 3h is kind of long. Both for the listeners and for the speakers. Maybe it's the wrong impression, but the town hall seemed more energetic to me in the first part when speakers were fresher. Maybe something like 2h max would be better in the future, plus builders won't be kept from their work as much. I don't know if guys want to borrow something from the old town hall format, but Aggroed had a recommended time limit there for each speaker, which I believe made them condense their message better, knowing there is a time limit.
Overall, great initiative to revive the town halls! I always loved them and I will continue to find gems in them (like @dbuzz's plan to bring internet to a 5,000 pupils school and onboard many of them probably via their front end to Hive and educate them).
Want to check out my collection of posts? (work in progress!)
It's a good way to pick what interests you.