Evaluating trust
We all know the crypto world is currently showing many similarities with the wild west of old. There's many scams, phishing attempts and rug pulls all over the space. DYOR "do your own research" is a term often used to make sure someone actually reads a whitepaper every once in a while and does a bit of researching a project before diving in head first. Doing this helps to prevent (to a certain extent) naively jumping into the next fad project and getting that rug pulled from under you. While doing a bit of browsing and looking up new projects myself, I stumbled upon something that I think could help Hive and all of it's tribes and projects a lot..
Trust, it's something that has to be earned, but how do you judge if something new is trustworthy when browsing online? Surely the website of any shop, project or platform will tell you they're the most honest and transparent party you'll ever deal with. And of course all the influencers, affiliates and marketing efforts will tell you just the same! Personally I like to get a more objective opinion and often search for reviews for anything I'm not familiar with. Often times this leads me to this website: Trustpilot.
Now this is not to say Trustpilot is guaranteed to deliver 100% transparent, objective and honest reviews, it'd be naïve to assume any platform could achieve that. But I often take the score as a ballpark indication and read some of the reviews to see what others think and especially how issues are dealt with. No bad reviews at all? Seems shady.. Do the reviews seem legit or just copy pasted by some marketing intern? Do the good reviews also give feedback on bad aspects? These all help to give me an indication what I'm dealing with.
Hive and its tribes and projects on Trustpilot
Now I'm not even sure anymore how I ended up on Trustpilot today, but when I did I thought to myself: let's look up Splinterlands. With all the tens of thousands of daily players there's gotta be a handful of reviews right? Right..?
No joke, that's a total of 3 reviews including my 5 star review from today.. there's another 5 star review from last month (which is pure luck, I think many new players aren't too happy with the current rewards and expensive cards and are desperate to see the new reward cards and chest rates next week!) and a mediocre 3 star review earlier in the year. That's all there is.. 3 reviews.. it has a score of 3.8 which is of course great. But nobody in their right mind will value something based on 3 reviews. Ok let's see about Hive then, surely that must have more reviews.
Well, indeed it does, it has exactly double the amount of reviews! But a lower score.. It has two 1 star reviews with complaints of lost password and hive being "Copy of steemit" urging to use publish0x instead. So then I went ahead and searched the other front-ends and I found Leofinance, Peakd and Ecency, results as follows:
Very few reviews again for Leofinance and Peakd, in a sense this is also the case for Ecency but it does clearly take the top spot for amount of reviews and score and I found out why too! Before starting on this post I did a quick search on Peakd to see if I wasn't the 100th to try the same thing, what I found was some old articles (2019 old, steem era) talking about Trustpilot in general and some posts on other products in relation to Trustpilot. But there was one article at the top by the 
In this post they explain some members in the discord mentioned it might be a good idea to get Ecency on Trustpilot and how they went ahead and got it listed. It also included a friendly request to leave a review if you used the service as it helps to show others what it is and if it can be trusted. Result, a whooping 4 more reviews in the weeks shortly after the post. Nonetheless it does indeed now have the highest score of the tribes/projects I mentioned above and also the most reviews (it didn't include mine in the screenshot, so 8 now \o/ ) which kind of shows that it helps to post about it.
The profile for Ecency also clearly shows they actively claimed it this April, same goes for Peakd where as the others are still unclaimed and non-verified.
It won't hurt to try
So there's that, whether you think it will actually help or not I'll leave up to you. If not, feel free to disregard it all together or tell me in the comments why you think it's useless. If you do think it could help someone decide on the legitimacy of Hive and all it offers, go ahead and leave an honest review on there, I'll include the links to the mentioned Trustpilot pages below. Don't be shy to include anything you don't like about it too. The more authentic the reviews the better it is to form a solid idea what we're doing on here. If you really like the idea and think it could help growing the project consider a re-blog.
Hive: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/hive.blog
Splinterlands: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/splinterlands.com
Leofinance: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/leofinance.io
Peakd: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/peakd.com
Ecency: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.ecency.com?languages=all
If anything I think it helps to show it's not some dead project and even if it won't make a difference of night and day, I'm sure it won't hurt either and it literally takes minutes, thanks for reading!
Image source: all images are snippets taken from trustpilot.com