Greetings Fellow Bloggers,
In my last article I examined the current economic status of Hive as well as the positioning of the economic incentives and how they stand in opposition to the greater ambitions of Hive as a platform. Some ideas as solutions are presented. The post was well received by the community and generated enlightening discussion. That article can be read here:
https://esteem.app/hive-148441/@kushfreeman/massive-hive-issue
This article is going to examine some other solutions not mentioned or touched upon in the previous article. What this article proposes as far as an idea is how to align the economic incentives of the platform to address marketing. This platform has the potential to deploy its users to passively market to people that are not yet on Hive by utilizing its Hive users off-Hive social networks. This can be done relatively simply by enhancing the rewards system slightly to add new metrics which more accurately reward content creators for the actual consumption of their content rather than solely the subjective evaluation/reward of whomever may come into contact with said content.
Let’s start with who the consumer of content is. We need to have an understanding of whom we are marketing content to in order to effectively market this content to them. Who consumes social media content? How many people have a Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit account? What about SoundCloud or Mixcloud? What about Instagram or YouTube? It’s far more difficult to find someone who does not have at least one of these apps rather than someone with one or more, especially if that person is under the age of 40. Almost everyone uses social media in one form or another.
Social media use by Adults in the US.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/
Consumption of news over social media.
https://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/
The first link points out what for the most part should be an obvious trend with the growing ubiquity of technology. More adults are adopting the use of technology/social media as time goes on. The second link focuses around the consumption of news and social media as the vehicle for delivery of news. Although I only wish to mention it here briefly, I chose this link to further the above made point that most people use social media in one form or another. It should also be self evident the Massive advantage that Hive by virtue of design has over mainstream social media platforms especially with the rising desire to perform censorship on behalf of those platforms.
Humans associate with like humans, generally speaking, the more someone is like ourself or the more we perceive them to be like ourselves, the higher our ranking of them in our minds. This fact is most visible in political groups, people with similar ideologies agree on points of view on topics. This extends beyond the lines drawn by the box of politics. Although thisis not the most authoritative publication available on the totality of the internet on this topic, it was easy to grab off of a quick google search and shows that this is anything but an obscure concept.
How does this help marketing? By default most of us associate with like people most of the time. We interact with people who have similar interests. Certainly not every social situation we find ourselves in allows us the convenience of choosing what people we want or don’t want to associate with, but social media does cater to this preference.
First, let’s pretend you are completely unaware that something like Hive is a thing. Second, let me provide two scenarios both based on potential marketing strategies. The first situation being just the general placement of ads and the second situation being the passive strategy I’m proposing in this article. Which one would you be more willing to ask a question and or listen to?
Situation 1: You see ads plastered all over your favorite social media platform (Not Hive) talking about “Get paid to use our platform!”
Situation 2: A friend inside your social circle on social media is always posting articles from some website called Hive. Your friend is still on your favorite platform with you, but only writes articles/ creates videos/ or posts music/ or posts pictures to this Hive website and reposts to your social media platform.
With the first situation you may or may not be intrigued depending on how well the ad is designed and what its placement is. I won’t speak for you but I can provide my opinion. I would have before the crypto age disregarded such an ad as some information gathering scheme to waste my time with promises of money that never manifests.
The second situation, without your friend ever saying anything to you, begs the question “Why do you always post to that other website first?” All of us here know that answer. On top of that should you initiate the conversation by asking a question, those answers come from a friend, not from some ad. Furthermore, you seek out the information by virtue of it becoming a part of your reality, not because someone is directly attempting to entice your attention for the purpose of selling you something.
But why should Hive users post outside of the Hive platform to begin with? It’s a great way for the platform to gather attention but the user is actually penalized subtly in the form of rewards being unavailable if posting off platform. This is where an adjustment to the rewards system should be factored in. This suggests an addition to the current system. I believe that this would also be a more fair way of rewarding content creators as it places more weight via rewards on if the content is actually consumed rather than if the content is consumed and then agreed with by whomever consumed the content. A simple analogy is every product gets paid for, not only the products that are liked the most get paid for after the consumer leaves the store with the product as the system currently stands.
So how is this achieved? What would have to change, or be added, as suggested above? Something similar to a Facebook Pixel or Google Adsense tracker could be imbedded into Hive posts. These trackers would log essentially the same metrics as the FB or Google variants, what IPs clicked the post, how long did they view the post, basic traffic metrics.
Simple algorithms could be set up to translate this traffic into rewards, for example: Let’s say you posted a 3 min video with a brief description of the video. When you initially publish your post here on Hive the algorithm assesses that 3 min 10 seconds is the perfect content consumption time. Then all your reposts on other social media sites log the metrics of all off platform interaction with your post(s) as one continuous log. Every time someone clicks on your post, reads the reasonably assessed 10 seconds to read the brief caption and then watches your entire 3 min video provides a maximum reward per interaction. Interactions that take longer max out at the assessed time. Multiple interactions from the same computer on the same post do not provide extra rewards. Time less than the assessed time reduces the potential of the reward, half the prescribed time only provides 50% of the maximum reward. Strange behaviors outside the typical and most commonly logged human behavior of click consume and go can simply not provide rewards for behaviors shown/known to be associated with abuse. Exact specifics of how the metrics recorded, calculated, and rewarded can be left out of publication to further prevent abuse.
This covers how rewards will be distributed but where will the rewards come from? The same rewards distribution pool currently used by Hive. But how? Right now most users have their rewards placed on a 50/50 setting between HBD/HP. Another option could be provided here that allows the metrics trackers to award rewards. Lets say it’s a 33/33/33 split with the third distribution of 33 being made of 16.665 HBD and 16.665 HP while the other two distributions remain the same being one HBD and one of HP. Selecting this option can essentially add a hidden embedded button to all that user’s posts after the user selects the metrics rewards option. Only the metrics trackers would be able to press this hidden button to distribute metrics rewards.
So if such a concept were added to Hive what would it do? This new incentive works for the concept of marketing by incentivizing users to share their posts in their other social media networks still allowing them to receive rewards. This nerfs the difficult aspect of being new on Hive and trying to earn rewards. As a result other people who would never otherwise be made aware of the existence of Hive can discover what it is by being able to interact with the posts on the social media networks that they currently are active on. They will be incentivized to join Hive and share their posts with their friends in their existing networks by the monetary incentive.
Users will be incentivized to join Hive and post on Hive rather than just in their social networks in two ways. First, if they want to receive any rewards at all they must first post their content on Hive before sharing in their other networks. Second, if they want to enjoy the potential at maximizing their rewards, they will need to engage users on Hive and not just repost their content from Hive in their other social networks.
There is something interesting about this article you have just finished reading. I had originally posted an article very similar to this one in the HiveDevs community. The intent of this post was to generate discussion and to ascertain the viability of the implementation of such an idea from a technical point of view. This was the response from that community.
The post was effectively censored before it gained any traction. Now, to be objective, there are many scenarios that could have happened as I do not know why the post was censored. I did not receive any communication prior to or after this removal of visibility from the feed as to why it happened. Did this community uniformly decide that this post was so egregious that it needed to be removed? Or, did one admin arbitrarily decide for the entire community that this post was unworthy of attention on behalf of all individuals who had yet to see it? As the author of the piece I don’t understand why a suggestion at an improvement of the community would be hidden from the community. Suggesting an idea to the community is one thing, actually implementing an idea is quite another.
Lastly, before the sea of replies comes back and tells me that censorship is impossible in the Hive, that’s not quite accurate. What is censorship? The suppression or prohibition of content/ideas. When you want to share an idea with a very specific group of people and someone decides to make that content invisible to that specific group of people that is suppression/prohibition by omission.
This is what censorship looks like.
It doesn’t claim to be something different.
But don’t take my word for it. View the post yourself.
@peak.answers/all-about-muting
-Kush Freeman