I was gathering some feedback on How to Give HIVE α Against Other Blogging Platforms because I am a stakeholder and consider HIVE to be the best platform to provide a decentralized social media for the world. There have been many competitors and outside of forks, I did not even got into them. We have a great system built for censorship resistant publishing with cryptocurrency rewards attached. Everyone begins monetized without the need for KYC or bank accounts.

The Best Feedback Came from @xplosive

>  We have to improve the user experience of being a content creator on HIVE. 

And this would start by bringing real content consumers.

The current ratio is somewhere around 90% content creators, and 10% content consumers. Ideally there should be more content consumers than content creators.

The opposite ratio is leading to what we see nowadays on Hive.

Most people are focusing on posting, and the most of the blog posts are ignored/overlooked.

>  The argument that centralized social media doesn't pay its users does not mean a lot to most users. 

And its even false too. Because Blogger (Google) pay many of its users. YouTube (also Google) too.

And the Hive blockchain is also centralised in its own way.

>  We have extremely high censorship resistance. 

Honestly speaking, not really.

It takes only one person with higher amount of Hive power to downvote someone's posts to zero, and the reputation of a user below zero, and after that (or maybe even sooner), their posts will even become automatically hidden due to low ratings.

And there are downvote trails too, where people blindly (automatically) downvote posts/comments without even actually seeing them (and they do the opposite too by doing the same with upvoting). This can quickly and easily boost the above mentioned process.

Of course they cannot delete the posts on the blockchain level, but if they reduce its visibility on the front ends, then the chances to reach actual readers and real audience is very low.

And this often reduce someone's mood to write anything.

And another thing.

I read this from someone else in the recent past. That the people are afraid to comment, because they fear that they say something wrong.

Not necessarily technically, but if the users are actually afraid to comment, then the censorship actually works. The people censor themselves in this case by their own fears, but still.

There are many things to talk about in this aspect. We could write an entire book about this.

We Need A Reader Focused Front End

The above screenshot is from the bottom of @coingecko website. You can click "See More News" to find news on a website built primarily for readers. It has articles from many websites and should not be impossible to have our own articles published if a specialized and curated front end was created. HIVE has the content creators necessary to produce high quality articles.

What Works Has Been Figured Out

What is left for us to do is figuring out the implementation + selecting the articles to feature. HIVE has many curation projects and they could come together to share the best content they have come across. There are no new innovations needed. Take a look at the following examples:

I remember @leofinance having a similar looking page a long time ago before we made Threads into the central feature. I do think it was a good choice at the time because we have finally arrived at an almost feature complete Twitter clone running on blockchain. This is not something most "SocialFi" projects can claim to do. In fact, I would say that most SocialFi projects are either a result of some grifters trying to make quick money or a result of misguided efforts.

HIVE front ends have done some amazing work compared to everyone else. That is no excuse to not do better. In this case, better means an expansion of what we do rather than an improvement. We need to replicate the exact experience billions of users have when getting their news/education.

Ads Will Pay for Operations

There are thousands of news website that manage to operate at least a few years. They have to pay for the content creators. All the systems regarding ads and monetization have been studied for decades and refined over time. When HIVEnews.io (or whatever the name is going to be) is launched, the creators could simply pay a portion of their profits to the authors.

I do not think there should be any mention of earnings from the articles. Everything should look like any traditional news website or blog with some HIVE branding. If the team has their own Token such as $LEO, there could be some limited branding of that with a link to INLEO website. When paying for the users, the payment could come in the form of staked $LEO (or any other Token).

HIVE Needs Monetized Readers

We do not have to depend on these readers and we do not need to invade their privacy. All we need to do is source the best authors and articles on HIVE and serve them to readers in a format they are familiar with and show them some ads if they are not using Brave Browser or an adblocker. This is an easy opportunity at our hand that can operate sustainably and bring outside money into HIVE without asking anyone to pay directly.

If @leofinance team has their old code, they might be able to get a head start on developing a website that can bring in recurring readers and be far more successful than LeoPedia.