Within moments of browsing Hive, you can find about 100 articles giving tips and tricks on how we can all be Hive millionaires if we follow the template: "MaKe QuAlItY pOsTs AnD eNgAgE wItH yOuR aUdIeNcE."
While I'm all for amassing a pile of magic monopoly money, this is flawed logic. Optimal strategies aren't optimal if everyone does them. When everyone follows the template, it leads us to some boring, homogenous, disenchanted love-fest where we await the next dopamine rush for receiving an upvote from a pseudonymous agent of our echo chamber. There are many individualistic definitions and routes to success.
Even if you disagree, let's face it, the template is vague. While engagement is quantifiable, I doubt you can get a definition we all agree on for "quality." It's not just a lot of words. It's also not very few words. It doesn't require a specific subject. The level of rigor doesn't matter. Or does it? Most would find solace in saying, "It's subjective." I hate those people. We could take some big ugly poll and extrapolate something from the intersubjectivity of the masses. But, honestly, it's not a productive conversation. We easily know quality when we see it, but it takes work to communicate what that word means on a macro level.
"Kryptik, why even bring this up?"
Well, I'm trying to answer a bigger question: "wEn MoOn?"
In my mind, most arguments for the platform's success are impinged on, "How do we get more eyes on this thing?" At the macro level, Hive is playing an attention game. This game doesn't care if you're Web2 or Web3. It doesn't care that Hive is arguably a better technology (even if it is incredibly unintuitive to most). All it cares about is that you have the general masses staring at your version of the garbage fire that is most of life. Two general strategies for accumulating these masses emerge: numbers or quality.
Again, there is that dirty word that we can't define or completely agree on. But even if we did, I usually prefer memes over publications laden with integrity. Quality doesn't equal attention. I'm sorry if I have to be the one to break the news to you; No matter how much you want it to exist, we do not live in a utopian meritocracy. People want to see the ever-increasing populations of the Kardashians and Baldwins. They want bitter partisan fights over politics. They want their memes (represent). Quality isn't a sustainable strategy because it only appeals to fractured groups of individuals that define it within their niche. While appealing to a niche is a plausible strategy at an individual level, it hardly leads to the paradigm shift that would bring Hive to a large enough critical mass to change how the general public approaches social media. To enter into the long arc of the Web3 story, we need to first beat Web2 at its game.
Numbers it is.
We can all get out there and post daily. The Infinite Monkey Theorem states: that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will eventually write Shakespeare. So we can get to the mythical quality thing with purely brute-force content creation. The problem: we need the resources to do this. The current macro social networking game is a triadic market comprised of content creators, consumers, and advertisers. While some technologically savvy entrepreneurs have utilized our ecosystem, the big boys can only be bothered by the complexities of having 17 sets of private keys and purchasing tokens once the value proposition makes it worth doing so. So we are left with a paradoxical problem: we can't get more people because we need more people. The insane number of mindless babble on social media is impossible for a small system like ours to keep up with. This problem gets exponentially more extensive with the increased prevalence of AI content creation. Now not only do we have to keep up with a much larger population of content creators but also language models that never sleep.
Good luck, little buddy.
Our only chance is brilliant SEO and onboarding, where the convergence of multiple streams of traffic lands on our faces. Unfortunately, while some may be heading toward this goal, many more are drifting into the disillusioned land of a focus on "quality," whatever that means. The grassroots approach can't keep up with the rate of attrition. In the early days, grifters dressed as influencers got a lot of attention from voters of the platform. They brought limited value and almost no exclusivity. Unfortunately, this left a bad taste in the mouths of many. Is it time we consider attracting beacons of influence from across the internet? While some would say no, it seems to be the strategy for some of the major Web2 players. Feasibility is a cost-benefit analysis away. Would you all consider opening up the Hive fund for something like this?
Let me know what you all think.
