One thing that amazes me about our platform is how quickly things progress in terms of development. Building on top of Hive is possible because of the brilliant people who are constantly improving the platform. Choosing a Web3 platform like Hive is definitely a smarter choice over mainstream Web2 social media platforms. So why haven’t the masses migrated to Hive yet?
From what I’ve gathered, there are a couple of thousand monthly users actively posting on the platform. While that sounds encouraging for a social platform, it’s still very small compared to mainstream platforms. We are far from the critical mass adoption that Hive is meant to have. Will it happen in the future? I believe it will because we are persistent, passionate, and dedicated to achieving the success this platform deserves.
One reason I’m optimistic is the way Hive continues to evolve. Whenever there’s an issue, creators and developers rise to the challenge, coming up with solutions without needing funding to get started. The initiative behind these developments is truly inspiring.
Now that the Comment Rewarder app is launched, we’ll have the opportunity to test a new experiment that could significantly increase engagement on the platform.
Is there an issue right now? I believe there is. Engagement on the platform has been decreasing, and it feels like users aren’t as motivated to interact as they once were. It’s clear that the consistently low price of Hive over the past few years has dampened the excitement of earning rewards for posts and comments. As the price remains low, the value of upvotes has dropped below the threshold needed to earn meaningful rewards, especially for accounts with low Hive Power (HP). For instance, a Hive account with around 1k HP can no longer generate rewards unless the voting percentage is at or near 100% (this is just a rough estimate).
This is one reason I decided to lease HP from other users, enabling me to provide small but meaningful upvotes to people who engage with my posts. Since doing so, I’ve noticed a significant increase in engagement. Before leasing a decent amount of HP, there was almost no interaction with my posts, but now I receive at least 2-5 comments per post. I believe the reward aspect plays a big role in this. Based on my observations, the platform’s reward mechanism is an effective way to motivate users to post and engage.
Speaking from personal experience, receiving rewards or tips for posting and commenting provides a sense of recognition and incentive. I believe many would agree with this. Of course, beyond rewards, Hive offers true ownership of data, decentralization, immutability, and censorship resistance. The rewards are just the icing on the cake. In the coming days, I plan to test something new to see if it can improve engagement with my posts. I intend to share a portion of my author rewards with the people who comment on or engage with my posts. I think this is a good way to incentivize those who take the time to engage. So, in addition to upvotes, commenters will also receive a share of my author rewards.
For this post, I’ve set 20% of my author rewards to be distributed to those who comment. I’m still figuring out the details of how the 
Let’s see how things unfold in the coming days or weeks.
