It's been a while since I've done a proper rant screaming about the UX here. Longs story short, I still think it's the biggest issue and barrier to people using Hive. SURPRISE!

Something that needs to be said though is that we have indeed made HUGE strides in improving the UX. Here's a few big steps forward.

• You can now create a Hive account easily and for free using https://hiveonboard.com/
• You can create a link to create an account for a user or multiple users using https://hiveinvite.com/# With this you can onboard groups of people and automate the process of giving them a delegation to help them get started.
• You can buy Hive with a debit card using https://www.sequoir.com/ After going through KYC though.
  
• Tips are live on PeakD and integrated into the exciting new Hive account@dapplr app.
• Communities are a big step forward in the huge problem of Content Discovery and organization.
• Crossposting is live on PeakD and hive.blog
• You can very easily swap Hive and HBD for other crypto using https://swap-app.app/
• You can get tons of info about your, or any account on Hive with https://hivestats.io/
• Some other bells and whistles.

That's quite a lot of stuff and if there's anything in that list that you didn't know that actually leads me into the first issue.

There's no way to know any of this stuff unless you're SUPER plugged in. (Most users aren't)

This goes for any new dapp or service that anyone builds. It might be super useful, but it's useless if people can't find it.

This is one of those issues with a decentralized platform that I feel like we just haven't solved yet. I really don't think the solution needs to be complicated, the problem is it would take the C word...Cooperationnnnnnn.

Off the top of my head I think a simple solution would be to simply make a "Whitelisted" Community(A Mod would have to manually mute all posts from people who post in the community that aren't whitelisted), Something like "Hive Resources" then the key that actually would make it have the desired effect and where the cooperation comes in, is that instead of this Community just being in the rankings with all the other communities, there is a link at the top of frontends that takes you straight to this Community.

The people who are whitelisted in the Community are people who've created Dapps or services. They create one post per dapp or service, and continually update that post with new updates so that the Community stays easily navigatable.

This leads into another issue we have here.

There are ZERO tools for content organization.

In the above example of the Whitelisted Community for Hive Resources what would be MUCH more useful is if this Community could be organized into relevant Collections/Playlists/Groups whatever you want to call it.

• Frontends
• Exchanges
• Data and Analytics
• Utilities
• Etc.

You get the idea. As we grow and more and more people build useful dapps and services this would allow for people to find the content they're looking for faster.

Filters by tags would be a great addition, but I think what would be more powerful is what I described in the post below where a user or community owner can tag posts to be added to certain collections, then those collections have their own links or tabs where they're grouped.

Specifically in my case, I'd like to have a "Featured" Page for OnChainArt that has all the best contributions all across time. I've talked about this before but we aren't properly leveraging all the content on Hive. The way we deal with content, it seems like the content here is sub-par sometimes, but that's not the case. The reality is there is a ton of amazing content here on Hive, but there are no tools that allow me as a Community owner to organize and drive traffic to the best content.

The best content becomes undiscoverable in a matter of days and the only tool I have to push eyeballs in the right direction is pinning, which is better than before, but still not really enough. We're catering too much, actually exclusively to the people in the system, playing the "game" of Hive, and not at all to someone just browsing for interesting relevant content.

As a curator, you're interested in the most recent content. This may also be the case if you're an active community member that maybe views the community daily or multiple times a day. These two users are the ones that have tools to address their needs, in the "New" and "Trending" pages. The user that is not being serviced and the one I think we'd be most wise to cater to is the casual observer. Someone who is not already on Hive, someone who landed here for whatever reason. The content that we show them is the bait for them to want to come back, to want to get involved, to want to share something they saw here, etc. This is my new most wanted feature. This is my new "Tips" :) I'll be the best friend of whoever can make strides on this front.

This is something in general that all users and especially Communities need to make Hive a competitive platform for people to be able to create and manage communities as well as for the end user experience. I made a post a while back talking about this more here.

With something like this, a user can organize their content better for their followers and Communities could do the same.

Aright, I'm just repeating myself now, moving on...

Analytics

Again, from the user perspective as well as the Community owner perspective, we need analytics. The more the better. I don't think I've ever heard anyone on any platform complain about too much data being thrown at them because it's all useful data that you can then base action items on. Some things I'd love to know as a Community owner:

• Who's Posted the most
• Who's Earned the most
• Who are the top curators by number of votes
• Who are the top curators by stake
• Who's commented the most
• Who's posts got the most views(from where?)
• Who's posts got the most comments
• What's the traffic on the Community landing page(where is it coming from)
• What are the Community earnings over time (days, weeks, months, all time)

I'm sure I'd think of more if I thought about it longer, but these are the tools we need to really leverage our competitive advantage to say Reddit.

Stop and think, what advantages do we currently have over Reddit?

• Better censorship resistance and immutability (which tbh it seems the masses don't highly value)
• Financial Incentives (which again, the masses tend not to value because crypto is too hard for them)

What benefit does Reddit have over us?

• More features/tools
• Easier (Big deal and we can't really win here as crypto will always be harder than centralized legacy platforms)
• Everyone is already there (This is the biggest deal)

The first two things here are the only ones we can attack directly, and the third can only be affected indirectly. It is MUCH easier to create something brand new and acquire users than it is to get users to leave a similar product and use your instead. That's the challenge in front of us and I cannot see us winning this without not only catching up to these legacy platforms, but innovating on our own. Most of the people on these platforms are relatively comfortable. They might complain about this or that, but when they get banned, they BEEEEEG for their account back. They ask their followers to help them beg. We've all seen it. We need to offer people serious alternatives.

There is no silver bullet that exists where "...if we just do blank, everyone will come here" We have to keep polishing, and keep polishing, and keep polishing and keep improving and keep improving.

Alright, I've rambled on enough. This is what happens when I go for too long without posting. I have idea vomit. What are your most wanted features for Hive or for frontends?

P.S. Someone please add tips and different view modes to hive.blog. Please?