With this being my first 'Hive' post after the JS takeover and subsequent drama I will keep it more personalized. While my primary intent for the near term is to continue development on and raise awareness for a new Hive application, this post is around my thoughts of what has transpired and framing around things to come.
Hostile Takeover 🙀
I am sure this has been talked about plenty amongst first time posters coming from the previous network, so I will just keep it brief.
I was not following the JS drama as it occurred. In fact as of fall 2019 I stepped away from nearly all things crypto to double down on software contracting (building iOS applications). This month has allowed me to come up for a breath of air and as such I have been playing catchup to get a feel for what happened in the takeover, the sequence of events, and general curiosity of the whole situation.
All the detail and chaos aside, from everything that I have seen I just have to say how proud and impressed I am by the response of this community! From all the different types of developers supporting it, to the witnesses, to the army of content creators and curators, bravo!
This fully demonstrates the true power of the people and why these crypto based ideologies and initiatives are not to be taken lightly. Even though there were several centralized factors on the part of Steemit Inc., and yes DPOS as a technology as well, the decentralization of the community combined with its extreme collaboration and talent fully out maneuvered those short comings! I find this... well... badass! So great work team 😁
Old Model
While I was not a heavy content creator on the previous network, I was always enthralled by the technology, community and economics of it all. I did plenty of prowling amongst the various facets of the network and was much more of commenter and curator than blogger, which is just as valid in an ecosystem such as this. In observing this behavior in myself and others, and as a software engineer and app developer by profession, I started to put together a simple concept for a new app with emphasis on curation and collaboration.
Without getting too preachy (will save for another post 😉) there was always an overemphasis on content and much less on engagement. While the two are without a doubt correlated, they became highly conflated in this author centric reward based economy. This also created an artificial barrier to entry for new content as well, and did nothing to address BS/spam posts.
If one thing has been discovered in the decade of social media, is that interesting, substantial, and even 'original' content is completely subjective. We have easily fallen into the 'content trap' by putting so much emphasis on the underlying content as we attempt to police, judge or otherwise dictate what is 'good' content.
By switching the focus from content to engagement I think we can find an equilibrium.
Greener Pastures
With the 'Steemit' liability now out of the picture, and network changes like HF 21 enabling 50/50 reward split, we have started to move in a more community driven direction. However there is still a lack of applications designed to better compliment this model. And that is what I seek to address. Starting with a simple idea and moving forward from there.
I feel this type of behavior is crucial to creating collaborative and engaging social interactions, and is where the real value lies in ecosystems such as this (both social and economic).
Like all great communities, and ecosystems in general, entities need to be dynamic with varying skillsets, behaviors. As such my contribution will be to build!
From death comes reconstitution, and with collapse comes opportunity - so let's create some great Hive apps!
Stay tuned for more and I'll see you around the 'block' 🙂