What Hive Really Is And How It Gets Confused
There is a lot of drama that arises periodically. Much if it can be tied to the simple idea that few truly can hone in on what Hive is.
Consider this question: What is Hive?
Think about that carefully. Strip away any of the fluff and what do you come up with?
Some might say it is a community. Is that accurate? While there are people gathering, are they really assembling directly on Hive? There are others that call it a protocol. This is closer although it still isn't quite there.
Misunderstanding what Hive is causes untold conflict. People have ideas about what should take place without, quite frankly, grasping what they are referring to.
In this article we will look at what Hive is to try to clarify matter.
What Is Hive?
If we bore down to its essence, Hive is a decentralized text storage system that allows anyone to write to the database.
That is it.
It is not glamorous or sexy. This is a back end that applications can access to store text data. Whatever is written to the blockchain is stored in blocks which are joined together by hash and can be searched using a block explorer (Hiveblocks in this instant).
Users do not interact with Hive. Instead, we utilize applications that developers build which send data to the blockchain. This can come in the form of base layer functions such as posting or voting. It also can include custom JSONs.
A blockchain nothing more than an alternative to the traditional server based system. With a company like Twitter, it controls both the front end which people use to access the data and the all the servers that house it.
An application on Hive operates in the same way. The data being pulled is a combination of on-chain for services such as account management and a centralized server hosting other information, such as images along with non-chain data.
What separates Hive from networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum is the fact that all text is stored without the use of smart contracts. Blockchains are, in their basic set up, financial ledgers. The database looks more like a bank. Ethereum altered things by introducing smart contracts to the base layer, a discussion outside the scope of this article.
Amazon Web Services
It is only in recent years that Amazon Web Services started marketing to the general public. For much if its existence it targeted developers. It launched in 2002 with the cloud storage going live in 2006.
Here is a question: Can you name the top 5 largest customers of AWS without looking it up?
According to this article it is:
- Samsung
- AOL (Verizon)
- BMW
- Comcast
- Siemens
Here is an even more important question?
How many of them promote AWS? Were you even aware that these companies housed most of their data on that company's servers? There are likely Comcast or AOL customers reading this who did not realize they engaged with AWS. It is likely few think of AWS when the open up Netflix.
Why do I bring this up? Because Hive is more like AWS than anything else. It is a back end storage system that must be accessed through applications. It is not the database people are interested in and they certainly do not care where it is housed.
Marketing of Hive
This is an issue of great debate over the years. To reveal some personal info, I did spend 30 years working in sales and marketing, often designing plans and strategies for the company.
That said, many say that Hive needs marketing. This brings up the first question: who are you going to market to and what are you promoting? In other words, what is unique in your offering?
Here is the major problem. The calls to market Hive are all doomed to fail because the target market is not identified. Who uses a database? Developers. Who do people want to promote Hive to? The general public.
Let's look at AWS again. Who is interested in cloud storage? IT departments. Who did AWS spend years marketing to? IT departments.
Many will take exception to this but the proof is in the pudding. Putting the Hive name on a racecar does not generate users. Did people suddenly go buy tools because Tony Stewart had Home Depot across this hood of his race car? No. That marketing was not designed to make sales. That was part of the name recognition campaign that major corporations do. It is along the lines of out of sight, out of mind.
Nobody bought a 2x4 or a hammer because the name was on Tony Stewart's car.
Hive has maybe 100 users. That is all. There are a handful of people who are directly access Hive. Everyone else is a user of an application. Even the internal exchange can only be accessed through some type of front end.
What we are dealing with is infrastructure. That is why all efforts to market Hive fall on deaf ears. People do not care.
Ultimately, people use the applications. This is what it comes down to. The user is experience is Spliterlands. PeakD. PsyberX. Leofinance. HiveBlog.
Of course, this is what needs to be marketed.
For all not technical people, what do you know about these services?
- Aruba
- Rackspace
- Cloudflare
- Equinix
- Accenture
While some of these might be familiar, do non-developers really know what they do? The answer is no. In fact, people only care when something doesn't work. Then calls are placed to the technical people to fix.
I think the point is clear. Anyone trying to promote Hive to the general public is like pushing system integration ads on a cooking show. The target audience is not there.
Marketing 101: know your customer (audience)
Hive failed because it tried to market the infrastructure to the general public. If you want to run a marketing campaign, target the developers. They are the ones who could be interested in what the infrastructure has to offer.
For the general public, it is the applications and games. That is what the users are concerned about. They could care less where the data is hosted. The majority of players on Splinterlands have no clue much of the data is posted as custom JSONs. To them, it is was all on a centralized server system, so be it. They do not care.
No Coin = No Concern
Here is the crux of the matter:
If it was not for the coin, most here would not give a hoot about Hive either. After all, who cares about a database?
The majority of the people involved want the coin to moon. That is their sole concern. They are not focused upon building decentralized databases. That is of no interest. Control over data falls into the same category since people run right back to Twitter and Discord, further enriching those companies. Videos talking about Web 3.0appear on YouTube, the epitome of a Web 2.0 platform all the time.
Community is a great thing but it is not the blockchain. I would say people do not gather around Hive. Instead, they gather around the values of freedom, censorship resistant, total account ownership, and building an alternative financial system. This is accessed through the games and applications that are being built tied to the infrastructure that is provided.
Hive is not sexy. However, when it comes to next generation infrastructure, it is pretty powerful. This is what needs to be promoted. It just needs to target the right people.
logo by @st8z
Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha
Awesome fracking post.
I hope everyone reads it.
!BBH
@taskmaster4450! Your Content Is Awesome so I just sent 1 $BBH (Bitcoin Backed Hive) to your account on behalf of @bradleyarrow. (10/50)
Honestly the best "marketing" for hive is going to be new applications and developers over anything else. There's till far too little in terms of front ends for Hive that are anywhere near comparable to the likes of web2 applications.
The best bet for DHF funds would be developers building NEW applications as a incubator but after a period of time that application needs to figure out how to generate revenue to keep it sustainable and not keep sucking from the DHF.
There is SO damn much money that just flies out of hive through the DHF and other aspects of hive that it should be no surprise it never holds a decent price for very long. Until that mindset is change it will always be the same story. A few at the top cash cowing it out and every day users looking at hive as an after thought to just cash in a few extra bucks of crypto.
A lot of what is funded is not bringing much value back. Infrastructure funding isnt sext but necessary. But a lot of other stuff doesnt add much value yet consumes a lot of resources.
A few of the current services definitely have the potential to take off. But yes, if we try to explain even a sliver of Hive to a non crypto person, we usually lose them within the first paragraph 😂
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
Yep. Have to try and get them interested in an app or game.
That is why Splinterlands was so successful. It promoted the game and not Hive.
Yeah, let's not overload new people 😂 It's just going to give everyone a headache!
!PIZZA !ALIVE !LOL
@taskmaster4450le! You Are Alive so I just staked 0.1 $ALIVE to your account on behalf of @wrestlingdesires. (1/10)
The tip has been paid for by the We Are Alive Tribe through the earnings on @alive.chat, feel free to swing by our daily chat any time you want, plus you can win Hive Power and Alive Power delegations and Ecency Points in our chat every day.
lolztoken.com
He had no chance against all 5 of us.
Credit: reddit
@taskmaster4450le, I sent you an $LOLZ on behalf of wrestlingdesires
(1/8)
Yep. It is overwhelming. Give people what they want, that is understandable and then feed the rest in sizes they can digest.
The only reason I found my way to Hive was through Spinterlands, otherwise I might never have even heard of it. While data storage bases aren't sexy they are essential, without them we would be back fifty years in time. Hive definitely needs to pick up more developers to see growth, very interesting post. I really wasn't fully aware of the basic function of Hive not being a tech guy.
No they arent sexy and you are a prime example of how it works. There is really no way to find Hive any other way. And if someone has promoted Hive to you, the result might have been "see ya". It is overwhelming.
Through Splinterlands you found what you desired and interested you. Then you could learn from there.
For me Hive is like a virtual home where I can shape it based on my interactions, posts and engagement with all the apps from here. Just a cozy and never ending learning space.
Well it is a place to build a biz. And while what you say is true, you are only engaging through Apps.
it all makes sense now, Hive shouldnt be the main focus but marketing its application should be. I joined Hive through leofinance, now it all make sense to me, i think we have been marketing it all wrong
I would say that is the case. Splinterlands hit upon a gold mine because it was marketed heavily and didnt promote Hive. They could have done a bit better once someone was here dropping a few other things about Hive but so be it.
https://twitter.com/TrostParadox/status/1690041004970192910
Thanks for the share.
I’ve been trying to understand Hive for years now somehow i just cant put it into words. So glad i came across your post as it completes the picture for me. The potential for hive is limitless. Imagine we can have in hige our own versions of like a marketplace, instagram, ebay, airbnb etc.
Start from the ground up....the most basic of what we are dealing with. Then move from there.
What is blockchain at its core? Then how does Hive differ from Bitcoin and ethereum. This tends to streamline the focus, thus understanding.
I'm glad we are both seeing it through as it is while others, even whilst being old-timers engage in pointless debates.
Very interesting article about the nuts and bolts of advertising as it applies to HIve. I agree that Hives marketing has been unsuccessful. Some will argue and be offended, but the Proof as they say is in the Pudding.
I also agree that Hive simply a database, and it is what is built on it which attracts users. I understand this and I am a serial entrepeneur of projects which accomplish goals without the user needing to understand how it works.
I have started projects on Hive which focused on the end user and provided a service which allowed them to bypass all the tech and access the defi stuff they read about. It is tough to be an innovator as a business man and even tougher when the tech you are using doesn't work consistently. Add to that the seeming indifference by whales to these projects which seek to accomplish this task of making this technology useful to common people and several projects have died on the vine.
HIve has no real future other then it's current state unless people realize that the technology is of no consequence unless people can use it to accomplish tasks or goals without needing to understand the technology which underlies it.
There is a real need to nuture and encourage projects which do this, but sadly very few seems to grasp this concept and even fewer seem to care.
That is true. It is tough but business innovation is what is required. The developers keep improving the architecture, ie the nuts and bolts, of it all. The second layer is where all the action is. That is what people need to focus their innovative efforts on.
As always, it is a pleasure to read one of your posts and the analyzes developed in these posts.
You define HIVE as:
However, it seems to me that the definition you offer of what HIVE is is at least incomplete.
HIVE It is not only a text database as you describe it, but it is also INDELIBLE and of purely personal content associated with a particular HIVE account. And perhaps it is one of the aspects that is least taken into account but which is the one with the greatest significance when it comes to understanding what exactly HIVE is. Many people are posting text to this indelible database, very personal and critical information, which they may not regret in the future.
Furthermore, when someone publishes any type of content on the blockchain, a fundamental question arises: who has the right to show said content to the rest of the world? Is it the interface or app that registers the content in HIVE or any app we develop in the future? By the current standard, all these interfaces that we have developed at HIVE are nothing more than copies, and they are all plagiarizing the content of another site. We may know who the real author is, but who has the right to publish such content. This seems stupid, but it is the main reason why it is impossible to establish a clear strategy to promote the HIVE blockchain. For real purposes, all apps such as ecency, peakd, hive.blog, etc, are nothing more than websites that copy content from other sources, without the right to do so. Perhaps, within the HIVE community, this is well seen, but for the rest of the world, that many websites publish exactly the same content, from the same author, is nothing more than plagiarism. Therefore, they are websites that should not be promoted or referenced.
I am convinced that the future of HIVE depends on us being able to understand that all apps that are developed in the future take the value of the content that HIVE users create much more seriously. The information stored in a database does not have any value per se, but what is important is how we use that information to generate wealth, promote new services or new economic structures.
And the most important thing is to understand that those who generated that content are the true owners of all that wealth that can be generated by exploiting that content. It is not the apps that should benefit in themselves, but should be the authors of that content that in some way transfer part of those possible benefits to the apps, such as commission or payment for the exploitation of that content in the new economic structures.
Of course, HIVE is very difficult to define because it is simply something totally new for which the proper markets have not yet developed. Market development is a natural stage that follows the growth of a system, and the problem is that HIVE has not yet reached its critical stage of growth. But, for HIVE to begin to grow at a rate that allows its development, it is necessary that most of the people who grow this large decentralized database are aware of the role they play in the growth and development of this new social and technological construct. . For this reason, articles like this are essential for HIVE to consolidate beyond the monetary value of a cryptocurrency.
Nobody is plagiarizing anything in the way you describe.
The data for articles, as you describe, is posted through the apps to the database on the blockchain. That is open and anyone can integrate into it. This is the difference between the Hive backed end and web 2. There are no (few) open databases with web 2.
The application is not housing the data you refer to. There could be data that is not posted to chain which are on servers controlled by the application. That is not the blockchain.
So to say that it apps are plagiarizing is simply incorrect. That is like saying a wallet on Bitcoin is plagiarizing the balances because they did not occur through that wallet.
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@wrestlingdesires(1/15) tipped @taskmaster4450le
Interesting post, 100 users? Thats not a lot. I thought there was more after all. I attracted 3 new users in a few days and made a proposal to attract 50 new users in 60 days. If that happens, and even if the proposal is not accepted, I will keep onboarding anyway at a slower paste, so when I onboard 5 people its 5% increase in users? Seems unrealistic.. :)
I wrote a post about @lasseehlers' "onboarding" scam trying to cheat the Decentralized Hive Fund out of 1000 HBD. Basically @lasseehlers wants to be paid 20 HBD for each fake sockpuppet account he creates.
https://peakd.com/hive/@holovision/call-to-action-please-do-not-support-this-dhf-proposal
It's only 1000 HBD because @lasseehlers' first attempted scam to get 60,000 HBD from the Decentralized Hive Fund failed epically. Literally nobody voted to support it because it was that horrible of a proposal and @lasseehlers deleted it out of embarrassment.