Why is Hive not growing?
During my holidays, I took a moment to ponder several questions that were bothering me for quite some time. One was to figure out why Hive was not really growing in terms of users and also in terms of price.
I have to say that I don't really have data other than the statistical posts that @dalz and @arcange are sharing. From these posts, I deduce that hive is not really growing in terms of number of users or transactions. On the contrary in terms of active users, I have the impression that we are at the level that preceded the boom linked to Splinterlands in 2021.
source: https://peakd.com/hive-133987/@arcange/hive-statistics-202506-en
What are the reasons for the lack of growth?
During the past years, there were quite a lot of efforts that went into promoting Hive through different projects financed by the DHF or by value plan. It seems that all these efforts were not really successful. I was wondering what we were doing wrong?
What is the unique selling proposition of Hive?
A unique selling proposition (USP) is a concise statement that highlights what makes a product or service distinct and better than the competition. It's a core element of a company's marketing strategy, conveying a specific benefit that resonates with customers and compels them to choose that particular offering. Essentially, it answers the question: "Why should I buy from you instead of someone else?"
source: Gemini
When trying to market a product or service, the first step is to try to figure out what is the USP of this product or service. On this basis the target public can then be selected and according marketing measures can be figured out.
To answer this question, I realized that the answer is not that straight forward. What is the thing that makes Hive great? I had several potential answers:
Earn money online
Hive is one of the only places that allows you to earn money online. However, in respect to the effort given, the income is probably not high enough for most people in developed countries. It is maybe just enough for people living in countries with little average income. For them Hive as a way to earn money online is appealing. However, for these people the income is too important to leave most of it on the platform. The earnings are often taken out to cover living expenses. By promoting this aspect of hive, we attract a population that probably won't bring new money to the blockchain, they will rather withdraw what they earn and the influx of new people will be compensated by the sell pressure on the token. Therefore, I don't believe that this should be the USP of Hive.
A blockchain to build anything
Hive is a great place to build and develop apps. It's actually quite easy to interact with the blockchain but there are unfortunately still no smart contracts. The other negative aspect is that the documentation for developers is probably not the best maintained one. Then there is a very important point that seems to me a problem for any developer and it's the difficulty to create accounts for people outside of hive. There are some solutions but even me as a long time hivian don't know which ones work and what they require to create accounts. If you plan to build an app or a game, you don't want your users to have a complicated experience when they want to join the game and don't have a hive account.
That is probably also the reason why communities and apps don't manage to bring a lot of users from outside to hive. The account creation process is simply too complicated and reduces the number of people that join Hive.
Hive offers a safe place to interact and meet people from all over the world
While I believe that this is true, I think it's too weak a point for an USP. Also not everybody on Hive would agree with that. As long as we have toxic witch hunts and downvote battles to punish people who make a mistake, we don't really have this. I know that there is abuse and I know that we need to fight it. However, I believe we have to do it in an educational way. When we see some wrong behavior, in my opinion the first step is to inform the author about it and give him the chance to change his behavior before we put him on a downvote trail.
When I publish something on other platforms, I often need to tick that I accept the rules (no plagiarism, no AI, no copy paste,... ). I think it would be great if the front-ends of Hive implemented something like that, because at least it would be clear for new users what is ok and what is not.
A place to do everything from playing games, to investing, to blogging, to have a nice time with friends
Hive is the Swiss army knife of blockchains. It's great but it doesn't really allow to stand out. Hive is good at almost everything but not really perfect at all of it. Whereas I believe that it's great to have all the options on Hive, I don't think that this will allow to attract people.
I had to accept that I didn't really know what the USP of Hive is and we probably first need to figure it out together before we do more marketing. Without USP, we can't define the target public and therefore all marketing efforts will be a waste of money.
What is your opinion about that? Do you have an USP for Hive in mind that I didn't mention?
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Interesting topic, a USP for Hive in my eyes would be the ease of community building and the monetisation possibilities for that community. It's easy and inexpensive enough to start a Hive-outpost/community and create a token that is already integrated with the POB model.
Onboarding the users seems to be the hard part, I still think the hurdles of onboarding (and retaining) users are the downfall. Hive requires a lot of time and effort to be worthwhile to the average user, truly. Unless you have a substantial stack to begin with, you won't earn much, which detracts from the monetary selling point.
Ideally, we need a large community to adopt Hive as their primary platform and build upon it from there. If we could onboard some big games/franchises, with a fan base, then we can snowball easily enough. The blogging/video/image uploading, and of course, core blockchain features all come into play then.
So yeah, my USP for Hive is High value community-building potential.
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I like the concept of hive value community building potential. I think that if these communities had the necessary tools, like easy account creation, they could act as a bigger magnet for hive.
I would assume it will need investors to take a piece of the ownership of the platform, which the platform can use to incentivize more development by the best content-providers and coders in the world. Problem is, if we were to go this route, it would cut against the decentralized nature of the platform.
The general mindset from people on hive is to earn from the blockchain and not really invest into it. I think that we would need big players to actually be willing to invest outside money into it for it to be able to evolve.
I concur with your USP potential sources of HIVE, we all know its potential, but we lack marketing them (Obviously, it's easy to say and difficult to do, I admit 😌)
That's exactly the point. There is no reason to market hive if we don't really know what and who we want to attract. In my opinion a good USP is the basis for doing some good marketing.
Everyone is quitting Hive thanks to the Non stop Downvotes by Buildawhale theMarkyMark and Blocktrades. People are even going back to Steemit thanks to Themarkymark.
I agree that downvoting people don't really bring any value to a chain other than bad blood. While they say it's to protect the reward pool against scammers, I believe that we should chose another path for that, which respects users more and gives them the opportunity to correct their errors and improve. Downvote trails are synonym to say: "hey we don't want you here anymore, bugger off"...
Downvotes.
The Hive police.
The DHF.
The powers that be are VERY content with keeping it status quo, because they control the chain and make a killing from it.
Why would they want things to grow?
The greatest lie Hive ever pulled was that it was decentralized.
I agree with all the points that you mention. They all have a negative influence on the growth of the chain and things need to change if we want hive to evolve.
You can check some live data here:
https://hbdstats.com/hive.html
Thanks for the link!
I dont think the question is right Hive has grown in someways i just think it has to be about the existing energy.
Hive needs to be a positive platform with mentorship from exisiting members and a different energy.
Downvote trails are just disgusting in my opinion a bunch of mean people with nothing better to do than spread hate in the name of whatever bullshit they tell themselves to justify the behaviour.
Whatever happens for things to change there needs to be clear instruction and direction allowing for mistakes and this has to come from within each community.
I see lots of people with high energy in love with Hive then a turn around in their energy for whatever reason then they jump onboard the negative train while still being here.
A lot of genuine people just get chased of why? who knows? NOT SMART we need more people here.
Doesn't help the energy but proves maybe a self check is needed by individuals.
As an admin in the We Are Alive Tribe, a community built to support peoples personal and financial goals why people want to push against eachother rather raise eachother up is beyond me.
It doesn't have to be about the money either all the time it should be community first.
Hive potentially could free people from the slave systems we are living in if done right, sorry for anyone that doesn't realise this wakey wakey !LOL
Have a good one @achim03
!ALIVE
!BBH
I will be including this content on the @heartbeatonhive curation collection
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As a business owner, I like to put things into a marketing framework. I know that it is much easier and less expensive to keep an expensive customer than to acquire a new one. This is also true for hive. It's much easier to keep an existing user than to get new ones. The fact is that if we scare these users away, not only we lose them, we also make sure that they carry a negative message with them that they will spread.
I believe that it would be much easier to clearly show what is not allowed with each written post that would be shown as compulsory message on each front end before a post is published than to rage downvote trail wars with users that make mistakes...
Every user that quits hive because of downvotes is actually a negative marketing message out there in the world...
interesting, but also, in case of a suden book, i do not know if the network can cope with all the influx, for example a sudden x10 factor growth. there are days when is barely working.
When Splinterlands was at its peak we really had 10x more people online and things didn't work worse that they do now I believe. With more people comes more attention, more money and more willingness to make the chain run smoothly I believe :-)
Hive would have been successful 20 years ago. We're in 2025 and no one is interested in blogs. Furthermore, the hive abuse done by the many of the most powerful on the chain drives away many people.
We have even implemented short form but we are not enough to make it a nice experience. Hive has so many front-ends, games and apps that the few users are getting lost and few things have enough traction to bring value to its users...
We haven't seen much of an increase in altcoin prices yet. Only high-caps are being pumped into the market. So it will take some time, but this coin will definitely perform this time.
We will see that, hopefully...
Yet Hive is nothing like a company - it's more like an infrastructure. So if a road asked me about it's USP, I'd tell it to go and talk to the towns, cities, and other destinations that it connects.
Marketing on Hive needs to be done by Communities.
As an aside, I also believe that down voting should be only enabled for Communities. One community, one downvote. With communities free to decide how they cast their downvote. Unfortunately, in centralised Hive (Jongo's comment) that down voting problem probably can't be fixed.
But USP promoting can start immediately for Communities. Or even for Hive Groups, which is my term for an unofficial group of Hiveans collected around a tag.
Let's just market #liotes.
!BBH
P.S. I just spotted A great USP for Hive from @meno
I agree with you. Hive is an infrastructure more than a product or service. Therefore it's difficult to find a way to promote it directly and we should even stop these efforts to promote hive funded by dhf or value plan. As long as there is not a clear USP, there is not target public and therefore no reason to market.
I totally agree that the marketing has to come from the apps and the communities. But we would need to have the necessary tools to be independent, like an easy account creation tool funded with account creation tokens from the community or the app accounts. As long as such a tool is not in place, we need to fall back on the account creation instances that we have no control of.
In a way it sounds stupid if you promote your community and then you need to send them to a totally different website to create their account first...
Yes, I saw that when I thought about trying to onboard my Web2 visitors. I haven't given up on that yet. But I do keep getting sidetracked.
One approach that I thought of was "account leasing". Whereby I create some accounts. Then if someone wants one, I give them a Hive Keychain password. And if they forget it, I can send a new one. Obviously, there's an issue of trust here. But I can't see how that's any different to the way people are used to on Web2.
They have the option to change their Hive keys whenever they want. And I would make it clear from the start that they always have that option. But once they use it the training wheels are off and they are on their own.
My thinking about that is based on the idea of starting the relationship on Web2 and easing towards an active Hive account. But I believe that Inleo is making their light account scheme available. So I will look at that first.
In fact, I'm going to make it my mission to get this moving or abandoned by the end of August.
Then, of course, the USP for Hive becomes easier - it's the place where online communities thrive.
I agree with the USP's that you mention. I think the marketting is kind of lacking despite all the funding happening the DHF. I just don't think the money being spent there is contributing as much to getting new users or retaining current users.
I think that you can't do any quality marketing as long as you don't know what you want to promote and to whom you want to promote it. It's like throwing things out there and hoping that something will stick. It's nothing else than a waste of resources.
Hive is a truly exceptional blockchain, and for a whole host of reasons, but there are two main issues which limit its growth (I wrote about this in a post recently) are one, we need a comprehensive onboarding and inboarding (after onboarding) process and education framework. The second limiting factor is the rampant abusive downvotes, which I've seen drive many really amazing people away, usually to Blurt (which supports everyone, especially newcomers, very well indeed. Unless those two issues are resolved, I don't see Hive reaching its full potential. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
I totally agree with both of your points. I also see them as major issues to make hive evolve. The onboarding would require easy account creation, basic education of how hive works and how to behave. Then we would need the hive police, not to downvote people but to educate them and give them tips how to do things better and how to correct their mistakes. Everybody who makes a mistake can learn and they will feel good when they are helped on the way.
Think there are several factors that leads to Hive losing more people than it can attract and retain.
People dont feel like this place is a fair game for everone, some accounts with the largest stakes decides what is allowed to earn or not on the platform.
Politics of Hive. The climate for discussion about governance or other topics isn't always super friendly and if you piss off the wrong accounts you are doomed.
Its not really a attention based economy, rather there are other incentives that drives people to vote content.
Will be looking in the comments to see what other people think. Hive is still very unqiue in the crypto space and should be a bigger deal imo.
The hive culture is still very much influenced by the big accounts that have been around for a very long time. I believe we need a different culture where we look at new users in a more human way and where we improve things for the many and not for the selected few...
Yeah I agree. And if I look at it as a outside person, I can see why the larger stakeholder wanna keep status quo. Its always the same when it comes to people, just look in politics. Most politicians dont actually wanna improve anything, rather just maintain the powerstructure that got them there they are today.
But anyways, I hope can see a culture change or even better maybe a change of incentives from the base layer. Dont know how, but it should be incentiviced to welcome new people, projects and large stakeholder.
I don't really know about the growth thing.
But I know that hive is the only cool place to earn money no matter how little it is.
That's true :-)
The problem with Hive is that it is too centralized and censored.
This seems a bit the general acceptance here in the comment section :-)
That's the million-dollar question. There are probably more reasons than we can imagine. I think this USP is fine, but maybe we need to shift our focus to a different perspective. Are we really selling something, or are we just bragging about how great it is here?
If you want to do marketing for the chain, then you need to take a marketing perspective where you try to define what aspects of hive you want to promote and then to what group of people you want to do it. Otherwise it's as you say just bragging about how great it is here and to be honest when a lot of people do that, it kind of sounds strange to others :-)