Before we start, let's clear some things up:
- Hive is not going to get adopted organically.
- Being active in Web2 is key to reach our target audience.
- The BullRun is definitely going to forget about the Hive token if we don't do something now.
This isn't 2017 where users flocked towards Steem Hive when the bull market began and our reward pool did an 8x in a matter of months.
Hive is no longer the only Blockchain that has social media integrated, and we are definitely not the popular one, no matter the Tech and how much of a robust ecosystem we have.
The market gives two craps about our couple dozens dapps that have real use cases, good tokenomics, years in the space, loyal - but tiny - user base, and it completely doesn't care about how decentralized our Layer one is.
We are dinosaurs.
FriendTech, StarsArena and all the other 17 SocialFi platforms that have more monthly active users than Hive have made sure to make this fact clear.
These platforms have been around for around 10% of the time that the Hive Blockchain has been around, and 3% of what the OG Hive community has existed for, and these platforms already dwarf our user base in an almost hilarious fashion.
And we deserve it.
We are writing our Epitaph on a daily basis, and we've been doing it for years.
We can't help it, we have a completely decentralized social media ecosystem built on top of a fee-less, transparent, and powerful Layer one. Writing our own Epitaph without even knowing it was meant to happen, and there's little we will do about it.
This robust swiss knife of Social dapps built on top of Hive has rendered us blind on how much we can exploit web2 to grow the Hive userbase, to a point where those who understand that web2 is a tool for us to get adoption, don't even know how to leverage it to promote Hive.
Because we are spoiled - We have Medium on chain, so why should we use Medium?
We are appeases - We have Reddit communities, so why would we bother in engaging in relevant conversations on Reddit?
We have it easy - We can monetize microblogging, so there's no point in using X.
We are damaged - We own our videos and cannot get censored, so nobody cares about doing Youtube videos.
We are narcissistic - We have the best ecosystem there is out there, so we jump into a high horse where we look down on every web2 platform, and even talk down on their users.
The problem is, we want these users
I have seen it happening several times in front of my eyes.
Almost every single time a Hive users engages with someone in web2, the Hivers are full of themselves, the interactions from the Hiver are condescending, and the end result is that we end up alienating people instead of bringing them to our ecosystem.
And I get it.
We live and breathe real web3, so whenever someone brings in fake web3 or web2.5 we want to jump in a tell them how their take is entirely wrong and how better we have it here.
But man, do we suck at onboarding.
We have immutable digital identities as our main value proposition against web2, and we have content tokenization as a bonus on top of our blockchain database.
But we need to know how to sell this.
The first step is to use web2
Yes, we need to stop depending on web2 to achieve adoption of web3.
100%, centralized web2 sucks and I hate I need to use it to bring new users to Hive.
Hive users should know better about how cancerous web2 practices are.
But we are not there yet.
We are not in a position of openly shitting on web2 and their user base.
We have 10k monthly active users across all the Hive social platforms.
That's nothing.
We are dust.
Fringe basket weaving Romanian communities make the Hive user base look like an unpopular kid's birthday party.
Get off that High Horse
Yes, I get it.
We hate web2.
I am probably one of the biggest haters of web2 here on Hive. I'm pretty radical and it sometimes shows in the X spaces I attend as a speaker, where I end up looking like a conspiranoic schizo that is constantly waiting for the next apocalypsis.
But most of the times I can control myself.
After all I am acting as a self-appointed Hive and inLeo ambassador.
I have to behave.
I have to use web2 if I want to bring in users to the Hive ecosystem.
And I understand that there's no point in having the best technology, an awesome community and the most decentralized Layer1 in the space, if we don't tell people about it.
Either we spread the word, or we will die
Again, get off that High Horse.
There's no point in saying Oh I don't user X, that shit is centralized, I only X Hive platform with a shrinking user base, because eventually, if we don't spread that X Hive platform - whatever's your go-to Hive platform - we will never get really adopted.
Virtue signaling between each other inside the Hive ecosystem about how bad other protocols are, how centralized other Blockchains are, how scammy some tokenomics look, is just stupid.
Get out there.
Be vocal in web2 about Hive.
Be articulated when you explain web2 NFT users how much better Hive is.
Be eloquent when you write a long form post on Medium on how Digital Identities are important and how Hive solves this.
But man, get out there
We hate web2.
But...
We need web2.
Let's stop writing our own Epitaph and start leveraging web2 to grow web3.
Or we risk looking like this, frens.
