In part 1 of this story I talked a lot about my experience and my overall feeling towards Steem and Hive from the very beginning of my journey until todays date. I mentioned the plague and the dark shadow that greed casts over us in different ways and I briefly talked about how- and why I have done some of the things I have done throughout the years. - I also mentioned what a great leader is.
I do realize that the LeoFinance challenge is not about Steem or Hive, but I felt like giving you a better picture of things, which is why I decided to share this in parts. Each part will function as a piece to the puzzle, so having all parts will make it easy for most of you to lay the entire puzzle.
In The Real Story - Part 1, I wrote this:
'It's actually rather funny, the people who are most vocal about being long-term holders are often the ones who are most focused on short term gains. They want more tokens, regardless of the value. Quantity is the focus because they are crossing their fingers hoping for a miracle...'
I don't mean to offend anyone with things I say, but a big problem we've had, and still have according to me, is that we have a great deal of leaders but not so many great leaders.
People listens to- and responds to wealth, and that is a double-edged sword on Hive.
Authors who are constantly on trending are:
- Earning more than others.
- Generating more engagement.
- Building a larger following.
- Increasing their influence.
So, newcomers or lesser accounts doesn't only have to put in a lot of time, effort and hard work to get recognition and establish themselves, they also need to compete against the most well-known authors for content consumers. They also need a bunch of luck and they need to produce stunning eye-catching content to ever have a chance of getting attention from bigger fish.
This obviously means that early adopters have a great opportunity of establishing themselves before the masses arrive, but with so many obstacles to overcome, most people give up long before they establish themselves, which affects the entire platform negatively as the goal is to have more active users.
Success on Hive involves a lot of things, but things aren't supposed to be easy. Hive is not a charity. You have to dig deep and make an effort. But having these same trending authors doesn't only affect distribution, it also affect the overall leadership on Hive.
Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group... But we still have leaders and like I told you above, people responds to- and listens to wealth, so wealthy accounts are also the ones who decides things.
Decentralisation becomes useless when there are no qualified and competent personnel, which is why it's important to spread the tokens far and wide instead of making only a handful users wealthy and powerful. This basically means that having the same authors on trending can be really bad for us as our leadership is being affected for each token these users accumulate.
On the other hand, we also need to create well-known authors on Hive, as they are seen as something similar to "celebrities", and celebrities are important for growth and results.
- This is why it's like a double-edged sword.
The community doesn't only vote on content, they also vote on users. The more votes a user gets, the more rewards they will make, but that's not all there is to it.. Those users will also have more influence.
So voting for good users are of utmost importance, but as people often seek rewards for themselves they vote for content they know will be rewarded greatly, as that will affect their own returns more compared to voting for new content that generates less votes and $.
That is one of the biggest mistakes with- or should I say consequences to how the rewards works on Hive. People often compete over curation rewards instead of voting for content they actually like, because the intentions are to grow their own accounts as much as possible.
They seek returns for themselves before anything else, or in other words, they are steered by greed. We have seen this behaviour ever since Steem and we continue to see the same on Hive.
This is one of the reasons for people to give up and leave. They lose interest, not only for the lack of rewards, but because they quickly realize that it's almost impossible for them to change things.
- So why should they waste time?
LeoFinance is different though, because of the 50/50 rewards. People can vote on whatever content they want, at whatever time they want, and they still make the same. A vote is split equally between the author and the curator, so a vote worth 1 LEO gives the curator 0.5 LEO and the author 0.5 LEO as well.
It's easy to understand and it does not benefit tech-savvy people or whatever more than the average, regular user, which is vital for growth. People want to interact and share content easily, without having to learn dozens of other things they don't care about.
That is part of why LeoFinance is getting a lot of attention, and that same part is one of the reasons for LeoFinance to attract new people going forward as well. LeoFinance keeps things simple, while being complex and implementing innovative things that we have never seen before.
A recipe includes different ingredients and LeoFinance has several of them while Hive (Steem) have only flour and sugar at this point. LeoFinance is already baking cupcakes but we are going for more than that.
- We will soon be an entire bakery.
In my next part, I will talk about LeoFinance and why I am passionate about this project more than anything else, and why I am more intrigued and thrilled than I've been since the early days of Steem.