You say Web Three, I call it Web Free. It seems to me the new vision for web, that became widely knows as Web 3 is being hijacked by the same power and money hungry entities. While it makes sense to name the next iteration of the web as three, I propose numbers don't matter, let's set it free. Regardless what we call it, idea of web that is free for all to participate, free of control and manipulations by few, empowers people and provides property rights is no longer an idea. It has become a reality in Hive. Many attempted and still attempting to define what Web 3 means, how it would look like. Those who know Hive already know the answers.
Nothing wrong with competition in innovation. In fact, true Web 3 networks would welcome competition and maybe even help these efforts. Hive is such a network. It serves as an example of what Web 3 should be and can be. And also it sets basic standards of true Web Free. Let's look at some of the characteristics of Web Free through the prism of Hive.
Open & Permissionless Network
Hive is an open network and everybody from around the world is welcome to join. Whoever accepts this open invitation and decides to join Hive, they don't need to ask for permission from anybody. Because technology is new and constantly being improved, occasionally there might be a need to seek help to join. Seeking help doesn't mean asking for permission. It actually reveals another great quality of Hive, its vibrant community that is always happy to help.
To join the network, one simply needs to create an account and start participating in no time. There is a small cost of 3 Hive or use of account creation tokens to create new accounts on Hive. But at the same time there are many ways of creating accounts for free. Some apps and front-ends offer free account creation on Hive. Even if someone pays 3 Hive to create an account, it is very easy and fast to earn back more Hive in rewards.
This registration fee of 3 Hive is based on median value of parameter set by consensus witnesses. When Hive coin prices go up, 3 Hive coins might become too expensive to create a new account. In such situation, consensus witnesses most likely would lower the account registration fee to keep it almost free. Once Hive account is created, it become owner's property and only the owner has full control over the account.
Hive blockchain code is open-source and easily available for anybody to review on github and gitlab. Anybody can create their own fork of Hive or new network using the Hive open-source code. As I mentioned earlier, Hive welcomes competition in creating open networks. However, it could be more beneficial to consider contributing to this open-source network and continue improving it. Nobody has ownership of Hive blockchain network. It is truly decentralized.
Self Ownership & Property Rights
While nobody owns Hive blockchain network, everybody own their accounts. Every account is also a crypto wallet to hold Hive native coins. By having a Hive account, owners have full control over the content they produce and full control over the funds in their wallets. When using Hive account owners can present their identity to the network as they choose. Some choose to be anonymous, some don’t. It is a personal preference. It is true ownership. With this ownership comes the responsibility for the owner to secure their private keys and keep them secure.
Decentralized nature of Hive keeps all owners' funds secure and provides the best kind of property rights. Funds in owners' accounts are their property. Only they decide how to use them. Nobody can take them away from them. Hive wallet has awesome features that help all owners to keep their social and financial transaction on the blockchain separate by using dedicated private keys for those purposes.
While all social actions like posts, comments, upvotes, downvotes are all stored in the blockchain and publicly available to all, the ownership of the data belongs to the account owner. Only the account owner can publish posts, make comments, edit or delete them. When editing and deleting, once thing should be kept in mind is that original data would still be available in the blockchain, since data stored is immutable.
Platform Independent Following & Posting & Gaming
Just like any other actions, following action can only be done by the account owner and only the account owner can follow, unfollow, or mute other users/accounts. All the followers of the account automatically follow the user/account on all platforms, apps, games as long as they are within the Hive network. Hive is an open source software, and is an open network. Any Apps, platforms, games can connect the blockchain and start implementing the use of the userbase and their following.
Hive already has a large and healthy ecosystem of Apps, platforms and games. The ecosystem keeps growing and any new Apps and platforms that connect to Hive automatically inherit the userbase with their following and followers intact.
On Hive we have general blogging platforms like hive.blog, peakd.com, ecency.com, and others. Publishing content in any of these platforms will automatically display on others. This creates a competition among these platforms to deliver a better user experience. Creator's content will be available on all of the platforms. Because data is stored in the blockchain, and these front-end platforms request the data from the blockchain.
In addition to these platforms, there are community or interest-based Apps and platforms like leofinance.io, stemgeeks.net, neoxian.city, ctptalk.com, sportstalksocial.com, proofofbrain.io, vybrainium.com, and others. These platforms may not display all the posts from an account, but rather focus on the posts relevant to the community and topics the community is interested in. However, all posts published on these platforms will still be available on platforms that display all posts. All data is stored on the same Hive blockchain.
There are games on Hive like Spliterlands, Dcity, Brewmaster, Rabona, and others. Video sharing Apps like 3Speak, and streaming platforms like Vimm.tv, microblogging apps like d.buzz. There are also services like dblog.org that help content creators to create personal blog website while still being connected to Hive ecosystem. New games and apps keep being built and connected to the Hive blockchain. Another new game that will be arriving soon is Ragnarok. This game and other projects offer aidrops, and claim drops to the Hive owners. That is another great benefit of being a Hive owner.
Decentralized Content Moderation
Hive has a unique way of appreciating content. Authors get monetary rewards for their posts and comments from Hive blockchain based on the result of upvotes and downvotes. Posts and comments have 7-day window for network participants to evaluate and cast their upvotes or downvotes. At the same time those who upvote also receive some upvotes. In the simplest terms 50% of the rewards go the author, and the other 50% distributed to those who upvoted based on their upvote weight and hive power (stake in the network). There is some gamification in place like those who discover under-rewarded posts first and upvote earlier than other may get higher rewards. There are author rewards and curation rewards. Crowd wisdom and stakes decide which posts get rewarded how much.
At the same time, since participants of the network have skin in the game, they would prefer the blockchain resources/rewards used for the benefit of the network and its growth. Any abusive behavior, plagiarism, illegal content, etc can be downvoted and deprived of the potential rewards. Some front-end Apps/platforms may also choose to make posts with negative rewards to be hidden. Even in those instances, there is a button that would make those posts visible if the user chose to see.
Usually higher reward posts move higher in trending page. All of these upvotes and downvotes rely on the participation of the users in a decentralized fashion. There are no central companies or entities that can unanimously decide on rewards distribution.
Decentralized Development & Governance
All contribution to Hive blockchain are voluntary. There are blockchain developers who tirelessly continue improving the core code and when a hardfork candidate is ready, witnesses test and review the code to decide wether they would run the new code. Based on their decisions, stakeholders can choose to vote or unvote the witnesses. It is amazing to see how this decentralized system works.
Hive also has a Decentralized Fund with significant amount of funds available for various projects and efforts to contribute Hive ecosystem. There are some core blockchain developers who get paid by this DHF to support their work, there are some apps, tools and projects that get paid by this fund to continue the development. Even marketing efforts can be funded by DHF if there are good proposals for the community to decide on, and community decides by their stake based votes. Decentralization in action.
There are many more projects, apps and communities that don't seek such funding, but come up with creative economic models and build layer 2 economies. This also creates more opportunities for Hive owners to participate and grow their crypto equities.
Transparency, Immutability & Exportability
All data stored on Hive blockchain is immutable. Once content is published and broadcasted to the blockchain, it will stay there forever. There are feature on social side of Hive like editing or deleting posts. This would change or remove the content from the front-end apps. However, original data still remains on the blockchain.
It is a public blockchain and transactions are transparent. Except for encrypted memos and maybe encrypted content that can is stored as custom_json transaction. One of the cool features of the Hive wallet is one owner transacting with another owner can send them encrypted memo, that only people transacting with each other see. For example if I sell something to someone, I would be able to send an invoice that they only see the order details.
It is easy to export data stored on Hive blockchain. There are various tools available depending on which programming language one is familiar with. There are ways to write scripts to export data using python or javascript. There are also services like HiveSQL that provide ability for owners to make data queries with SQL and retrieve any data they need. HiveSQL is a great example of a very useful tool/service that is funded by Decentralized Hive Fund.
There also ways to get Hive post or owner profile data by simply adding .json at the end of the url. Try it yourself. Go to hive.blog, visit any post or an owner profile and add .json at the end of the url and hit enter. This may not work with other front-end apps. It does work with hive.blog.
There are other features of Hive that can be listed as standards for the Web Free networks to learn from. I may add more in the future. What do you think? What other Hive's features can serve as a basic standard for Web Free efforts?