HIVE needs to step up its game and work to ensure that people get to know about the project and start using it. There are competitors popping up and so far all of them have been unsuccessful in maintaining their initial hype. Even Threads by Meta lost most of its active users soon after launching.

The biggest problem I see regarding the state of things is that the current form of Threads (Meta's version) has more active users than HIVE has accounts. This is a serious problem we have to address. I see many more problems such as governance apathy and DHF being underutilized.

Built It and Users Went Elsewhere

Users get excited about earnings such as this. The platform received a great deal of media attention. More details are available on CoinGecko blog. friend.tech does not seem to have any acceptable level of decentralization. It does not provide smooth and feeless experience offered by HIVE. friend.tech only works as a mobile app (and we know how privacy invasive these tend to be). Yet users are locking there because of marketing hype.

We are in a bear market and therefore we have less competition and less noise. A bull market makes people loose a few screws and puts them on steroids. Good ideas are easy to get unnoticed and become drowned by all the noise coming from shills, scammers, marketing projects etc.

A Simple Comparison to Keep in Mind

freind.tech has managed to gain 5X more visitors compared to @leofinance while having less engagement and higher bounce rate. When other front ends are added together, we may come close. But I doubt HIVE front ends receive 2.5 million monthly visitors. @peakd is a more popular website and even it is only managing 766.4K visitors:

Gaming + Blogging >Blogging

Have you tried out Splintertalk? The project even has its own NFTs that users can buy and sell. I have no interest in them and rather buy assets with more gamely utility beyond merely being able to "own it".

Those with a HIVE account can login and post to earn $SPT. I prefer to add the #spt tag when publishing on a front end that allow other tags beyond @splinterlands. If you are interested about learning more, SplinterGlossary cn be a good place to get started.

I have never seen anyone seriously push Splintertalk front end. Whatever the statistics that are show here have to be mostly organic. Now imagine there were more games doing the same thing while creating a mesh of backlinks across dozens of HIVE front ends.

Most People Post for Validation/Sharing

$5 made from a simple post matters less than 50 of their friends liking the post. At least this seems to be the case with so many people. I find it difficult to relate. I have to have permission from some Big Tech company to have my thoughts and ideas posted. On top of that I don't get paid a penny while my content is being used to make money. A small percentage of content creators do make some money (and that comes after the platform keep a large share of the income generated).

This arrangement does not please me. Somehow most people don't seem to mind as long as they have their friends there. I have more friends on blockchain that I have in real life. Anyone can find new friends on blockchain. But people have a need to be on the same platforms that are used by there peers.

Gaming Does Not Have This Problem

Games are only enhanced with social elements. @splinterlands can be enjoyed as a pure solo experience with MMO aspect restricted to Ranked Battles and some trades on the market. Then they can choose to post few things about their gameplay to earn some SPT + few other cryptocurrency such as $HIVE and $LEO which can then be used to buy more assets for Splinterlands Battles.

Take a look at me post about the 2 Legendary Cards I gained from 2 recent Chaos Legion Pack openings. These are earnings that could help me buy even more Booster Packs. Earnings is gamified:

No More Comparisons With Minimum Wage

Normies are a very odd type of people. Their anchoring effects can lead to some weird outcomes. People will gladly post on social media for hours to earn nothing. The moment money enter the picture, $HIVE is more likely to be compared with other activities that make them money rather than the damned social media of their choosing!

Grow HIVE With Games!

@leofinance have an excellent marketing plan to grow the number of authors on HIVE. Although HIVE was originally designed as a social media, there are many types of DAPPs being built on top of HIVE. Any type of activity that will lead to more demand for Resource Credits will reflect positively on $HIVE price. Games is one of the easiest ways to achieve this. Genesis League Sports and Soul Keep are good upcoming games that could bring more value to HIVE.

Mobile apps are difficult to launch with all the approval processes from Playstore + Apple. Unfortunately most of the gamers are on mobile. If there was a way to onboard more mobile gamers to try out some DAPPs, they could later be converted to authors and eventually be exposed to DeFi whether it is HIVE-Engine, $CUB or $POLYCUB

Happy Gaming! Happy Developing!