In the realm of social media, having a unique name and online presence is incredibly important, but it seems that Hive has dropped the ball on a number of occasions in this regard. From Hive as a service provided by British Gas, and now the relatively new Hive Social (https://www.hivesocial.app/) it seems that the hive blockchain has serious SEO competition. If you duckduckgo, or Brave search, 'Hive Social', Hive Social App is the very first result. Our own blockchain platform? No where to be seen. It's just blown up in the media so will be experiencing a glow up in search results, but it's shocking to see how much buzz this new twitter competitor has drummed up.
The landing page of their website is fantastic. It's alluring, tells you exactly what the app is, evokes the sleek tech scene imagery we've come to see from twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In five minutes from seeing the Hive Social app being plugged on twitter by someone I follow, I understood the app and could download and get started immediately. Compare that with the current new user experience for some on the Hive blockchain. If you load up Hive.blog, you'll have no clue as to what the overall goal of the project is, how to properly interact with it, how best to use it, what it's for. OK, so I've hit Sign Up and am met with payment options to create an account?! I better read the about page and see what the heck this website even is, so I click on the link to hive.io.
I'm met with this:
What the hell does that mean for a user? Absolutely jack shit, that's what.
Compare this with Hive.social and its landing page.
Quick and to the point: you will use our app to socialise. It is a Social Media Platform.
My confidence in Hive has been relatively low as of late, with the platform struggling to gain any real traction over the last near 18 months I've been involved in it. If we can't even compete in the name space of the project, what hope is there for future prospects of the Hive blockchain?
Obviously crypto heads can find out about Hive (I found out about it from the buzz around Steem in the 2017 bull run), but for normies? Zero chance without word of mouth from us first adopters.
Projects like Splinterlands powered by Hive are important divergent factors that strengthen the overall scene without needing Hive to be the be all end all social media platform, but I do fear that the decentralised nature of front ends just fractures the user base and mires the entire user experience in confusion. Someone wants to use twitter? Go to twitter.com.
Facebook? Facebook.com
Youtube? Youtube.com
But Hive? Do you go to Ecency.com? Peakd.com? Hive.blog? Leofinance.io? Hivesocial.app?????
Hive suffers from a severe identity crisis, and I fear future adoption will be greatly hampered as a result. With a relatively obtuse onboarding process compounding the problem of reaching the general population, will this be the nail in Hive's coffin?